This year (2023)
Previous years: 2022; 2021;
2020; 2019;
2018; 2017;
2016; 2015;
2014; 2013;
2012; 2011;
2010; 2009;
2008; 2007;
2006; 2005
David Mitchell:
The
Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
Abir
Mukherjee:
A
Rising Man
A Necessary Evil
Ovidia
Yu:
The
Mimosa Tree Mystery
The
Frangipani Tree Mystery
The
Betel Nut Tree Mystery
The
Paper Bark Tree Mystery
James Nestor:
Breath
J.L. Heilbron:
Galileo
David Grann:
The
Lost City of Z
Diana Setterfield:
The
Thirteenth Tale
Shion Miura:
The
Easy Life in Kamusari
Stacy Schiff:
Vera
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage
Vladimir Nabokov:
Pale
Fire
Mikhail Lermontov:
A
Hero of our Time
Vladimir Nabokov:
The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Namrata Patel:
The
Candid Life of Meena Dave
Alba de Céspedes:
Forbidden
Notebook
Banine:
Parisian
Days
Edward Chisholm:
A
Waiter in Paris
Derek Wilson:
The
Mayflower Pilgrims
Paul Strathern:
The
Other Renaissance
Elizabeth Kostova:
The
Historian
Banine:
Days
in the Caucasus
Jim Beaver:
Life's
That Way
Olivier Todd:
Albert
Camus: A Life
Albert Camus:
The
Plague
John Pomfret:
From
Warsaw with Love
John Derbyshire:
Prime
Obsession
Claire Tomalin:
Mrs
Jordan's Profession
Vincent Bevins:
The
Jakarta Method
Claire Tomalin:
Jane
Austen: A Life
Scott W. Atlas, M.D.:
A
Plague Upon Our House
Barbara Savage:
Miles
from Nowhere
Anthony Kaldellis:
A
Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities
Masha Gessen:
Perfect
Rigour
Claire Tomalin:
The
Young H.G. Wells
Roger Bannister:
The
First Four Minutes
Dr. Ben Cave:
What
We Fear Most
Ian McEwan:
Lessons
John Galsworthy:
Five
Tales
Joseph Conrad and F. M.
Hueffer:
Romance
Arthur Bryant:
Unfinished
Victory
Bobbi Gibb:
Wind
in the Fire
Rob Dunn:
Never
Out of Season
Sebastian Barry:
Old
God's Time
When the Portuguese arrived in Japan at the end of
the 16th century, besides commerce, they brought numbers of Catholic priests
whose mission it was to convert the natives to Christianity and so to "save"
them.
Soon the Japanese became aware of these subversive
intentions, got rid of those who had become "saved", and eventually cut off
all contact with the Portuguese. A canal was dug across a small peninsula in
Nagasaki Harbor, creating a small island which was named Dejima. It measured only 120 by 75 meters and it was
connected to the mainland by a bridge. After 1641 only Dutch traders were
allowed to use Dejima, and except for special purposes - paying yearly
homage to the Shogun in Edo - they were not allowed to set foot on Japanese
soil. The bridge was guarded night and day. The Dutch traders were not
allowed to learn the Japanese language. Instead there were official Japanese
translators. Everything on the island was under strict Japanese control.
Dutch ships came perhaps once each year, sailing up from Batavia, hopefully
not to be lost in a Typhoon or taken by pirates or enemy ships. Before
setting foot on Dejima the Dutch traders or officials were required to
surrender all books or objects having anything to do with Christianity, to
be stored away by Japanese officials until the time they left. All Christian
ceremony was strictly banned on the island.
The book is a novel set against this background. The
author also wrote Cloud Atlas, a book I read a few years ago and
which was made into a movie staring Tom Hanks. As we could thus expect, the
story involves unpleasant characters doing unpleasant things. I suppose
David Mitchell has studied the history of Dejima to such an extent that much
of the detail must be true to life. After all, imagine what it must have
been like confined in such a small space for years at a time, uncertain
about the fate of the next possible Dutch ship that might arrive in a year
or two.
The protagonist is Jacob De Zoet, a book keeper who has
been sent by the Dutch East India Company to investigate possible corruption
on the island. It turns out that the most corrupt person is his own
supervisor. And then we have a story about the abbot of a monastery up on a
mountain near Nagasaki containing monks and "sisters" who have been saved
from prostitution, or something. They are impregnated by the monks, and the
resulting babies are sacrificed in some sort of ritual aimed at prolonging
the life of the abbot, or perhaps also some of the chosen monks. We are not
told whether the monastery was devoted to Buddhism, Shintoism, or some other
religion. Surely all of this is rather far-fetched. Could the author be
telling us about some strange aspects of ancient Japanese culture? In the
midst of all of this an English frigate cruises into Nagasaki Harbor and
takes a few pot shots at Dejima, blowing up the buildings before sailing
away. Judging from the Cloud Atlas, such stories must be a typical device of
the author. In the end we have an unfulfilled, distant love story of De Zoet
and Ogawa Uzaemon, an angelic Japanese woman.
This is a murder mystery taking place in India in
the early 1920s. But who could write such a book? An English person would be
accused of romanticizing English colonialism, the "Raj", and an Indian
person would become lost in transcendental philosophical thoughts on the
mysteries of India.
As his name implies, the author is of Indian descent, yet
he grew up in Scotland and lives in England. And so he can write stories
about the India of those days as he sees it, unburdened by all of this
politically correct baggage. The protagonist is Captain Sam Wyndham, an
Englishman who has spent four years in France in the Great War, in the
trenches, but also in military intelligence under Lord Taggert who is now
Commissioner of Police in Calcutta. Wyndham was a policeman before and after
the war with Scotland Yard, and so Taggert has asked him to come to India to
take up a position with the Indian Imperial Police. Wyndham's sidekick is
Sargent Banerjee, whose forename is Surendranath, something which the
British find to be unpronounceable, and so he has been called
"Surrender-not" ever since he joined the imperial police. Surrender-not is
of the Brahman caste and his family lives in a huge palace-like mansion
somewhere in Calcutta. But they have disowned him, owing to his connections
with the British. The author has written a whole series of novels based on
these characters, and this is the first in the series.
A highly placed British civil servant is found stabbed to
death outside a brothel in Black Town, the slum to the north of Calcutta,
separated from White Town where the mansions and palaces of the British and
the wealthy Indian population live. Was it a gang of terrorists whose aim
was to achieve independence for India? Wyndham's assistant, Digby, has an
informer who leads him to Sen, a terrorist who has been on the run for
years. But Sen tells Wyndham that he has become a disciple of Gandhi. He now
rejects violence and seeks independence through peaceful means. He is
quickly whisked away by Military Intelligence to be hanged a day or two
later, satisfying the general opinion of White Town. Nevertheless Wyndham
and Banerjee investigate further, eventually coming to the truth of the
matter in the highest places.
Taking a look at the map of India as it was in 1920, we see that at least a
third of it was made up of princely states, or kingdoms, some of which were
larger than England itself. We are told that at the time of Independence in
1947, there were 565 of them. The story in this book concerns Sambalpore, an
imaginary and extremely rich princely state with extensive diamond mines.
Our intrepid pair, Captain Sam Wyndham and Sargent Banerjee, are riding in a
Rolls Royce with the Crown Prince of Sambalpore in Calcutta. Suddenly a man
in traditional Indian clothing with his face covered with ash and whatever
else it is jumps in front of the car and shoots the Crown Prince with a
revolver. Wyndham is able to follow him and the assassin points the gun at
his own head, pulls the trigger and commits suicide.
And so Wyndham and Banerjee travel to Sambalpore to find
out who was responsible. As a friend of the Crown Prince in his days as a
schoolboy in England, Banerjee is invited to attend the funeral. And Wyndham
takes a holiday to accompany him. After all, they cannot violate the
sovereignty of Sambalpore by conducting their own investigation.
Nevertheless, the Maharaja does ask them to do all they can to find the
murderers. The British Ambassador has cabled the Viceroy, and has been
instructed to tell Wyndham and Banerjee to leave Sambalpore immediately and
report back to Calcutta. They ignore this and so we have a story of palace
intrigues, a harem 120 strong producing well over two hundred progeny of the
Maharaja, besides his three official Maharanis and only two official sons.
Was it that other prince who was behind the murder? What of the young
English woman who was scandalously in love with the Crown Prince? Was it the
head eunuch? Was it the Prime Minister cooking the books on diamond sales?
We ride about the place in all those Rolls Royces, and especially in a Mercedes Simplex, following the investigation.
The author is a native of Singapore and is writing
about Singapore. The story begins with the narrator, Su Lin, together with
everybody else in her house and also all the neighbors being forced at
gunpoint out into a field to stand for hours, waiting for something horrible
to happen. It is 1943 or so and the Japanese Gestapo, or kenpeitai, are rounding people up to transport them to
their torture chambers. Su Lin's uncle is taken away. A hooded informer with
loose clothes and a small slit for the eyes to remain anonymous, points at
random people. Suddenly Su Lin recognizes the way the figure is walking and
calls out who it is, saying that the woman informer is only pointing at
people for personal reasons of revenge. Rather than being shot or slammed in
the face with a rifle butt, the commanding officer of the kenpeitai, Hideki
Tagawa, steps out from behind a truck and takes Su Lin aside, speaking to
her. It seems he knows her, and he takes her to the main headquarters of the
Japanese Occupation of Singapore where she agrees to work for them as a
translator. One of the neighbors, a man of Arab descent living in an
expansive mansion, has been murdered. Su Lin comes from the neighborhood.
Her family is an important and powerful Chinese clan, the Chens, controlling
much of the business of the island, and she speaks Japanese, English, Malay,
and some sort of Chinese dialect as well, fluently. It is agreed that Su
Lin's uncle will be freed if she is able to find out who the murderer was.
As we get into the story it seems that the Japanese would
like to take on the role of the English who had been driven from Sngapore.
The Japanese are no longer mindlessly killing people, throwing them into
concentration camps. Now they would like to pacify the population, establish
reliable systems of government.
The plot of the story is derived from the real-life Operation Jaywick. A group of 14 commandos took a
small Japanese
fishing boat and sailed from Western Australia to Singapore, disguised
as Japanese fishermen. In the night they attached magnetic explosive mines
to the hulls of seven small ships. They were cargo and tanker ships. No
warships. Three were sunk, but one of those was salvaged; the other four
ships only had relatively minor damage. The commandos then sailed back to
Australia to be greeted as heroes. Things were not so happy in Singapore.
The Japanese could not believe that such an attack could be mounted from so
far away. It must have been "terrorists" in the local population. Hundreds
of people were rounded up and horribly tortured and killed. Extremes of
suffering for such minor, even meaningless results.
The story of the book changes these details. Most of the
ships have become warships. The one exception is a cargo ship containing
some sort of treasure being transported to the Japanese motherland, and the
murdered Arabian had something to do with stealing it. In the end it turns
out that the supreme Japanese commander on the island was behind everything.
But more than this, Hideki Tagawa asserts that Su Lin is
his cousin. Her mother (both her parents are long since dead) was Tagawa's
long lost sister. Su Lin hates him and she hates the Japanese. Surely this
is just an absurd story he has made up to manipulate her. But he shows her a
photo taken when he was a child and his sister was a young woman. She
recognizes him in the photo and sees herself in the image of the sister.
Was the picture "photo-shopped" using whatever means they
had in those days for cutting and pasting photographic film? If so, who was
the model in the photo looking so like Su Lin? On the other hand, although
this book was advertised in amazon as the "Su Lin Series Book 1", it seems
that it is not really the first book of the series. In fact the first book
is "The Frangipani Tree Mystery" which is supposed to be the "Crown Colony
Book 1" of the author. I have now read that book and it is clear that it
gives much of the background to the present story. But one thing does remain
a mystery. In the Crown Colony Book 1 it is mentioned in passing something
about Su Lin's various aunts on her mother's side. It is certainly not said
that they are all Japanese women. Also it is not implied that they are the
Japanese prostitutes which are mentioned in the Betel Nut Tree Mystery
(Crown Colony Book 2). No. It is implied that they are part of the Chinese
community. I suspect that this is an unintended mystery, and if it were to
be pointed out to the author she would tell us that it of no importance.
The
Frangipani Tree Mystery
This is the first book in the series. It is 1936
and Su Lin has finished school, having passed an exam to obtain the General
Cambridge Certificate. Su Lin's family expect her to marry and become a part
of the Chen clan, having children, cooking, cleaning. But she wants other
things. Perhaps to become a reporter or at least a secretary. The sister of
the Governor, Miss Vanessa Palin, is more or less in charge of the school.
She also believes that women can do more than simply sit at home and so she
arranges a possible job for Su Lin as a housekeeper for Chief Inspector Le
Froy, the head of the police in Singapore, possibly leading to further
opportunities. But suddenly the interview with Le Froy is interrupted with
the news that Charity Byrne, a young woman who had been brought over from
Ireland to look after the mentally retarded daughter of the Governor, has
fallen from a balcony of the Governor's mansion, killing herself. Le Froy
drives quickly to the scene together with Su Lin. It is soon established
that the body of Charity has a knife wound in its side.
Unusually for a "native", Su Lin is allowed to enter the
inner rooms of the mansion along with Le Froy. She wanders out and finds the
daughter who has retreated somewhere into the forest, establishes a rapport
with the retarded young woman and ends up living in the house for weeks,
looking after her. And so she is able to observe things from the inside. The
seemingly idle, useless Governor's son. The always correct Miss Vanessa. The
Governor's wife who has grown fat, angry with everything, especially the
"black" natives and the tropics in general, and the Governor himself who
does more than simply admire attractive young women.
All of this leads to an explosive end which Su Lin
survives to become the valued assistant of Chief Inspector Le Froy.
The
Betel Nut Tree Mystery
King Edward VIII abdicated from the throne of England at
the end of 1936 in order to marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.
Something which was considered a scandal. The story of this book imagines a
more or less analogous business taking place in Singapore. We have the son
of an aristocratic English family arriving with his American divorcee
fiancee, together with her small son and a further retinue of various
characters. The prospective groom laughs and plays practical jokes,
inconveniencing other people. Suddenly he is found dead in the hotel. And so
we are introduced to a strange collection of unpleasant people. The fiancee
is extremely, offensively egocentric. There is the best friend of the
murdered man who is perhaps in love with the fiancee. And then the best
friend of Su Lin falls in love with that best friend. Eventually he also
dies. The father-in-law of the prospective bride seems to be only concerned
with his grandson. But is it really his grandson? Some of the scenes in the
hotel resemble a slap-stick comedy. I began to wonder why I am reading this,
but I did read through to the end. It was a diversion.
The
Paper Bark Tree Mystery
It is now one or two years later. The Japanese have
invaded China and are reported to be committing atrocities. Yet the English
administration of Singapore forbids any criticism of Japan for fear of
offending the Japanese. Le Froy has been trying to keep track of suspicious
Japanese activities in Malaya, but he has been disciplined for doing this.
He has lost his position. Various administrators have been brought in from
India. They are only concerned with putting down the Indian "terrorists" who
are seeking Indian independence. All Indians in Singapore are considered
potential terrorists and are arrested, or at least brought in for
questioning. The person who has replaced Le Froy has fired Su Lin, saying
that no natives are to be trusted. But then he is found one morning murdered
in the "shack" where the police records are kept...
Why am I reading this stuff?
Reading a novel transports us out of ourselves into an
imaginary story, a dream, showing us what life might be like in a different
world. This might be pure diversion, especially if it's a nice story. Or we
might think of problems with life which we hadn't thought about before. And
then we might find real life to be not so pleasant and hope for a story
which brings us out of this real world.
And so I'm not really in the mood for a story which is
depressing or just plain frivolous and silly.
The German Foreign Minister - that seemingly immature,
thoughtless woman, Annalena Baerbock - has announced to the world in the
forum of the European Parliament that Germany is at war with Russia. German
battle tanks are to be rolling through Ukraine again in the direction of
Stalingrad (or Volgograd) as if we are in a time-warp of 80 years; it is
January 1943 and the Wehrmacht is on the move, led on by a modern-day
goddess of victory, Germania, saving the Earth, if not from carbon dioxide,
at least from the scourge of Slavic hoards. No thought is given to how this
war has been provoked over the last 15 or 20 years; about the deceptions of
that woman before her, Mrs. Merkel, pretending to guarantee the Minsk
agreements. And so hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are being sacrificed
for nothing. The newspapers, television, radio in Germany are saturated with
a single, unified clamor for more war, more weapons, aircraft, rockets,
longer range. Blow those Russians to smithereens!
As more and more longer range rockets are thrown into the
fight we can imagine what will happen as the salvos increase. How are the
Russians to distinguish a salvo of "conventional" rockets from a salvo of
atomic bombs in a massive "first strike"? After all, various elements in
Washington have been openly fantasizing about how wonderful such a thing
would be. There are hundreds of American atomic bombs stationed in Germany.
Heaven knows how many are in Poland and the Baltic countries. The Russians
would only have 2 or 3 minutes to decide whether or not to quickly launch
their counter-strike before it would be hit by the incoming atomic bombs.
There is no time. The launch decision will be decided automatically by
computer remote control. Life has become an absurd theater of horror. Will
we survive this madness?
Breath, by
James Nestor
After all those thoughts this book is a breath of
fresh air. What can we say about breathing? We all do it. Otherwise we
wouldn't be alive. It's trivial. As far as medicine is concerned (according
to the book, and I can well believe it is true) it doesn't matter how you
breathe: through the nose, the mouth, through a tube, it's all the same.
Just draw air into the lungs and blow it out. Nothing could be simpler.
But how can some people hold their breath for 10 minutes,
or free dive in the ocean for minutes at a time? The book doesn't tell us
how they do this. But it does tell us about the one very basic thing which
many people no longer do. Namely:
SHUT YOUR MOUTH
Beginning in 1830, the painter George Catlin traveled among the Indians - or Native
Americans - living with different tribes throughout the Americas. He admired
their perfect physiques, the symmetry of their faces and their general
physical health. And everywhere he was told that this was due to breathing
through the nose, not the mouth. Breathing through the mouth leads to
congestion throughout the head and all sorts of different consequences which
are explained in the book.
Some time ago I did look at a video of someone giving a
talk about the Buteyko
method which also emphasized the importance of breathing through the
nose. But it also involved stopping breathing for as many seconds as
possible, holding the breath until it became uncomfortable. Something about
carbon dioxide. The instructor said that mouth breathing causes crooked
teeth, asthma, colds, and all sorts of other things. But the remedy with all
that breath holding seemed so unpleasant. I've now made it to 75 years old
and I'm still Ok with breathing the way I always have, so why bother?
James Nestor gives a much broader view of all of this.
Not breathing properly through the nose might have much to do with it, but
crooked teeth also result from soft, mushy, overly processed food and no
chewing. Perhaps processed sugar not only ruins the teeth but distorts much
else of the body's metabolism. As the facial bones degenerate, becoming
smaller and thinner, the eyes sag, become baggy. The jaw recedes.
We are then told of the mechanism the body has for
distributing oxygen throughout the system. It is regulated by carbon
dioxide. This is the Bohr
effect. If there is not enough carbon dioxide in the blood then the
amount of oxygen being transported to the cells of the body decreases.
Therefore we should breath slowly through the nose allowing the carbon
dioxide in the blood to reach a healthy level. The example of athletes being
tested on an ergometer - an exercise machine - is described. In the first
test they breathed "normally", gasping for breath through the mouth as well
as the nose. Then the test was repeated with only nose breathing and they
were astonished to find that they then performed better.
I found this difficult to believe. I usually jog about 5
or 6 kilometers, which I run a couple of times each week. In the middle is a
little hill and I'm always totally out of breath after climbing it. I have
to walk for a few minutes to get my breath back, breathing heavily, before
continuing to run. And so, inspired by the book, I decided to see how far I
could get by only breathing through the nose. It is winter here, cold, wet,
so the eyes water, going through the nasolacrimal duct to the nose, restricting nose
breathing even more than is otherwise the case. I had expected to have to
gasp for breath after only a hundred meters or so, like trying to hold my
breath for a minute or more. But no! I was probably jogging a little slower
than usual, and my lungs were missing that cold hit which the air when
quickly inhaled through the mouth provides. There was even a minor feeling
of suffocation from the increased carbon dioxide and the effort of inhaling
through the nose. Yet I could keep on going without stopping, and I even
jogged up the hill more easily that usual. I was able to complete the whole
workout without once opening my mouth. Afterwards the muscles felt less
tired than usual. So there you are! I have decided to become like an
American Indian and keep my mouth closed.
The book also tells us to often breath deeply. It has
been found that the size of the lungs is decisive for health. The larger the
lungs, the more healthy you are and the longer you live. And so I thought to
bring out my favorite flute and just enjoy breathing into it, playing
through a few of the pieces I used to play before taking up the viol in
retirement. But in order not to interrupt the flow of the music it seems
impossible to avoid quickly inhaling through the mouth as well as the nose.
Oh well... Nothing is perfect. People say that there is an analogy between
the flute and bowed stringed instruments. The breath flowing over the far
edge of the embouchure hole is like the bow being drawn across the string,
and then the lungs and the spaces in the nose and the sinuses are like the
resonant body of the viol.
The second half of the book is titled "Breathing+". All
those things about Buddhist monks and their extreme endurance. The
techniques of Wim
Hof. This involves the opposite of the breathing technique which was
described in the first part of the book. Hyperventilating. Subjecting the
body into a directed stress. The traditional technique of the peoples of the
Himalayas is known as Tummo. There is a YouTube video of a young man who is a teacher of
Tummo. I can imagine that he might be an American Indian. An ideal young
man. A wonderfully proportioned face and body, in harmony with himself and
the world. A model of good breathing.
Galileo, by
J.L. Heilbon
Galileo's father was Vincenzo Galilei, a lute virtuoso and philosopher of
music of the renaissance. Of course the lute was the most important
instrument in the music of those days. Galileo, the son, often accompanied
his father on the lute, and so he became himself a well-known virtuoso. In
those days musicians were subjected to the whims of the local prince or
duke, or catholic bishop. Money was withheld and only obtained after a
certain amount of begging, leaving the musician and his family half
destitute. And thus Vincenzo decided that Galileo should become a medical
doctor. After all, doctors can always be expected to become rich. But
Galileo didn't like medicine. As a way out he slid into mathematics. This is
also often a formula for poverty, but Galileo combined this with literature,
theology, astrology, of course music and so forth, becoming a renaissance
man and a professor of all those things, but especially mathematics, at the
University of Pisa at the age of 25.
Galileo wrote numbers of books on various subjects, and
lots of letters to various people, expounding on all his ideas. And then
there are the archives of the Vatican which in those days was concerning
itself with the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition, producing
further reams of paper in the style of the East German STASI on everybody in
Italy, including Galileo. As a result the biographer has much to draw from
in his description of the hero. One possibility would be to ignore all of
that boring detail and instead tell a good story, bringing in the juicy
details which the life of Galileo certainly could provide, given a
sufficient amount of literary fantasy. Our author, J.L. Heilbon, decided
instead to fill his biography with long verbatim quotes (in translation)
from all of those sources, providing us with a book containing much tedious
detail and little fantasy. There are pages and pages of schoolbook geometry,
giving us diagrams of the circles, lines, triangles and squares which
Galileo published, together with lots of sentences in the style of: let ABC
be a triangle and CF be a line bisecting AB, etc., etc... I don't know how
to reproduce such texts in the HTML language. Perhaps it would be possible
to integrate a TeX file into these writings here, but I don't know how to do
that. When reading the book I skipped over much of the text, feeling sorry
for the students of those days at the University of Pisa who had to master
such things. But while skipping through these things I did stop at a certain
point and tried to verify what was being quoted.
Apparently, if I understood what was being said, it seems
that Galileo asserted that a pendulum of fixed length always swings with a
given fixed period, regardless of the amplitude of the swing. But as
everybody knows, that is false! Therefore I wondered where Galileo's mistake
lay. Again there were pages of text filled with elementary geometric
assertions. And I was struck by the Figure 4.6, reproduced in the book. Now
it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. But in mathematics, one
can also say that a picture is a thousand times more likely to produce a
mistake. Despite this I would have liked to include the Figure here.
However, after spending 4 or 5 minutes looking at the LibreOffice Draw
software on my computer, and thus realizing that I would have to spend 4 or
5 hours in order to work out how to make such a drawing, I have instead
decided to describe the drawing with words.
Let ACF be a right angled triangle. Let AC and AF be the
sides adjacent to the right angle so that the remaining side, AF is the
hypotenuse. Let us assume that the length of AC is some number r, and it is
less than the length of CF. Let K be a circle with radius r and center-point
C. The hypotenuse AF intersects the circle K in some point D between A and
F. Then the text preceding this Figure asserts that "if you remember your
Euclid, you know that AD·AF=2AC²". I assume this must be a direct quotation
from something of Galileo. At first it almost seems plausible. After all,
AD<r and AF>r, so perhaps it is some kind of obscure generalization of
the Pythagorean Theorem. Remembering that in this kind of geometry, products
are represented by geometrical areas, I started drawing quadrangles,
triangles, looking for similar triangles and all that. Did Euclid really
prove such a theorem? After wasting a half hour and three or four pieces of
paper on this fruitless exercise I decided to do the thing properly and
think of simple trigonometry, immediately seeing that the assertion is
false.
But there were some interesting things in the book. For
example we have Archimedes and his "eureka" moment. I had always wondered
how Archimedes could so precisely measure the volume of water displaced by
the crown in the story. As described in the book, and also in a long-winded article of the Wikipedia, Archimedes, and
also Galileo, needed only to take a piece of gold of the same weight as the
crown as measured on a balance in the laboratory. Then both the crown and
the gold piece are submerged in water. If the crown contains lots of silver
- which has a lower specific weight than gold - then the crown will have
more volume than the gold piece. Therefore it will be more buoyant in water
and the balance will tilt toward the gold piece, proving that the crown is
not made of pure gold.
And then we have the story that Galileo stood on top of
the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two objects of different weights,
showing that they descended at the same speed and thus showing that
Aristotle was wrong. But this is not at all what the true story was.
Aristotle was the required text to be taught at universities. Yet it was
generally recognized to be false, and what was worse, it contradicted much
of the teachings of the Bible. Thus Saint Thomas Aquinas, back in the 13th century,
provided us with an official interpretation of Aristotle, making it
more acceptable for Christianity and - more or less - for physics. At the
time of Galileo, lots of people were dropping all sorts of weights from
buildings and interpreting the way they were falling in one way or another.
This was the Great Problem of Motion. For example it was asserted that if we
have a piece of wood and a piece of iron of the same weight, then the wood
will fall more quickly than the iron. The experiment is difficult to
perform. Perhaps the wood slips out of the hand faster than the iron, or
not. The reason given for the assertion that wood falls more quickly is that
wood contains more air than iron (remembering that everything is composed of
the four elements: air, water, earth and fire). And compressed air in the
wood is heavier than normal air, so it falls faster... or something. Maybe
it was also thought that iron contains more fire which tends to rise, thus
slowing the rate of descent (although that possible argument was not quoted
in the text). All of this produced heated arguments and counter arguments.
Lots of bad feelings. Galileo was always quick to take offense. And then
there were all sorts of similar arguments about other natural phenomena. I
began to skip lightly through through the book, gliding over this nonsense.
Some things were reasonable, others, such as Galileo's theory of tides, not
so.
Of course Galileo was a big fan of the Copernican world
view. Copernicus
lived a hundred years before Galileo, so it was not as if this was a
startling new idea. In fact the official view of the Roman Catholic Church
was that all of these theories about astronomy had nothing really to do with
the church. After all, Aristotle had asserted that the heavenly objects are
perfect spheres and the fixed stars are fixed on a rigid metal sphere, and
all that, which is obviously nonsense. It was all interpreted away by Saint
Thomas as being of no significance for theology, and therefore the church
had no particular position on the question. Copernicus' book was widely
circulated and debated throughout Italy for a century before Galileo came
along.
The problem was that Galileo had become famous by
developing the telescope which had been first constructed in Holland, and he
looked through it at night. He saw that the moon had mountains; he
discovered four small moons of Jupiter; he discovered, or at least
described, sunspots. All of these things were considered to be sensational.
Galileo was a very devoted catholic and he was good
friends with the Pope Paul V who, unfortunately, died in 1621. The
successor, Gregory XV didn't last long, and then came Urban VIII in 1623. A
very touchy person. Quick to anger, as was the now famous Galileo himself.
Urban developed a hatred for Galileo for some obscure reason. And unlike
these days where those princes of religion with their outlandish costumes
and elaborate ceremonies are not taken seriously, back in the days of the
Inquisition the popes could have people burned at the stake at the drop of a
hat, or an imagined affront. Thus the story that after signing his
confession, Galileo was supposed to have murmured "and yet it moves", is
certainly not true. Tycho Brahe's model with the Earth at the center of the
Universe, the Sun and the Moon orbiting the Earth, and everything else
orbiting the Sun, is of course completely equivalent to Copernicus' model
through a trivial change of frame of reference. And Urban VIII declared
Brahe's model to be acceptable, so the controversy was about nothing. The
whole business resulted in a retreat from science in Italy for at least a
hundred years, during which time progress was made in the northerly lands of
Europe which had rejected the Catholic Church and all of its abuses.
This book caught my eye owing to its title. "Z" is
the symbol of the Russian war in Ukraine. But it has nothing at all to do
with that mess. Instead it is concerned with Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, the British explorer,
and his quest for the lost land of El Dorado which he decided to think about as the "Lost
City of Z" for some reason. In 1925 he disappeared into the Amazon jungle
together with his son and his son's friend, never to be seen again.
Looking at the Wikipedia page of the author, we see a flabby middle-aged man, the
antithesis of the intrepid explorer. Yet he traveled to Brazil, to Dead
Horse Camp and beyond, the last known position of Fawcett, in order to
research this book. For David Grann the excursion was infinitely more
comfortable than it had been for Fawcett and his companions. The jungle has
been done away with, replaced with vast open fields of soybeans. He tells us
that his car and driver had to negotiate the mud and rut holes in the roads
leading to Dead Horse Camp. And then there was the problem of getting to the
Indian village which was rumored to be the place where Fawcett was killed
all those years ago. This was more complicated. It was in a part of the
jungle which still existed and was a protected area. The Indian tribes were
left alone and outsiders were only allowed in under very special
circumstances. David Grann was able to obtain a guide who was familiar with
the local people and who acted as translator. They traveled for hours along
the Upper Xingu river in a boat with outboard motor, finally stopping to
walk a few hundred meters inland to the village of the Kalapalos Indians.
The local chief told him that Fawcett and his two
companions were not killed by their tribe, but rather by the neighbors who
were much more brutal. Be that as it may, the author met up with Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist of the
University of Florida who studies the Kalapalos people and has himself
become a member of the tribe. He has identified vast structures, mounds in
the earth, indicative of large interconnected settlements: the Kuhikugu archeological site. This might have been the
civilization glimpsed by early Spanish explorers, the legendary El Dorado.
Fawcett's "Z". The inhabitants must have been wiped out by the diseases
brought by the Europeans, degenerating into small, brutal tribes, killing
all intruders, in particular the Spanish. Since there is a lack of stones in
the Amazon, their cities were made of wood and earthworks. The former
disappearing into the jungle growth and the later gradually subsiding. All
of this is the subject of Heckenberger's research.
But the main part of the book is a biography of Percy
Fawcett and his world of the Amazon in the early 1900s. A man of extreme
physical fitness and determination. Unlike today, an expedition was totally
on its own. Dark clouds of mosquitoes biting everything; worms which
penetrated under the skin, growing there, spreading throughout the body;
poisonous snakes; brutal cannibalistic Indians; hunger and thirst. It was a
paradox that the jungle was full of dangerous life, but almost none of it
was suitable for eating - at least for the explorers who were not familiar
with the ways of the Indians. Most of the people who tried to explore the
Amazon never returned.
We are left with the vision of a vast, forgotten
civilization. The City of Z.
This is a retelling, or paraphrasing, of Jane
Eyre, that classical 19th century romance for lonely girls, brought
into a more or less modern setting. We have the orphaned heroine. The
decrepit, ancient English mansion consumed by fire, consuming an insane
female. The disfigurement of the beloved. In the original, Mr. Rochester is
blinded but also freed of poor old Bertha. (I much preferred Jean Rhys' Wide
Sargasso Sea, showing how the sensitive Antoinette is converted by the
evil Mr. Rochester into the tragic figure of Bertha.) Diana Setterfield's
Adeline is evil from birth, leaving her complacent twin sister Emmeline to
be disfigured by fire, and to be loved by the destitute half sister, Vida
Winter, the version of Jane Eyre for the present story.
These fires, killings of unwanted rivals, is long in the
past. Vida Winter is now an old woman in her 80s, in the process of dying.
She is England's greatest living novelist, having written a book a year,
each volume selling millions, being translated into countless foreign
languages and being sold in their millions as well. She must be as rich as
J.K. Rowling, or even very much richer. She lives in a huge house somewhere
in the English countryside, surrounded by huge gardens, servants. The
not-quite-twin, the disfigured, mentally disturbed Emmeline, lives in a
secret wing of the house, lovingly attended to by the housekeeper.
But all of this is just a framework for telling us the
real story which is about the mystical relationship of twins with one
another. The book starts off by telling us about Margaret Lea, living in an
antiquarian bookshop in Cambridge (if I remember rightly) with her father,
reading sought-after and rare editions of Jane Eyre and also some of
the novels of Wilkie Collins, and so on. We are told that she was the
dominant half of a Siamese twin; at birth the other half was cut away,
leaving Margaret alive but with the feeling of guilt, loneliness, longing
for her murdered other half. She goes on and on about this. Where is her
other half? Is she waiting in the other world, beyond death? How is
life possible alone? Everything is depression. Her mother has fallen into a
deep, lasting depression, rejecting Margaret, mooning after the lost other
half. Only her father tries to be a bit sensible. And then when the story
gets going it is also all about the twins Adeline and Emmeline. How they
long for each other and how they suffer from separation. I began to wonder
what it is that the author has about twins. Does she have a twin obsession?
Almost all the rest of us do not have a twin, and even most twins are not
identical twins. It is normal not to be a twin.
Margaret receives a letter from Vida Winter, asking her
to write her biography. And so the story begins, immersing us into the world
of both Jane Eyre and of twins, further than we had really wanted to
go.
A Japanese novel about forestry. The narrator,
Yuki, has just finished school in the big city of Yokohama, not doing well.
And so he is suddenly confronted with the fact that his parents and school
teachers have gotten him a job working in the mountain forests at an obscure
place called Kamusari, without asking him. He goes there, is placed under
the tutelage of Yoki, lives in Yoki's house together with his wife Miho, and
gets to know all the other people in the village as well. Gradually he
learns all about how forestry is done in Japan. He becomes strong and learns
to love life in the forest, becoming accepted as a member of the village. He
falls in love with the school teacher, Nao, who, unfortunately, at least at
first, rejects him. Nao is secretly in love with Seiichi, the owner of all
the forestry land, but who also goes out every day to work in the forest
along with everybody else. Seiichi is married and is a very honorable person
so that Nao's secret love is in vain. Towards the end, Nao does consent to
go for the occasional walk with Yuki, so there is hope. The book is written
in a simple, almost juvenile style, as if it is a book for children. This
may be the style of the translator; perhaps it does not reflect the style of
the original.
We learn lots about how forestry is done in Japan. The
workers continually walk around the mountain, cutting down "weeds" with
scythes, climbing up the trees with ropes to cut off lower branches in order
to have the trees growing straight with few knots in the wood. All of this
labor must make the final lumber which is the product of the whole business
extremely expensive. We are told that wood which is imported into Japan is
much cheaper, but this domestic wood is considered to be of a more pure
quality. Of course the whole thing is not a "forest", rather it is a tree
plantation, or farm. There is a sacred mountain where nature is left to
itself. Yuki is overwhelmed by all the life and growth in this real forest.
At the end of the book the men of the village march up to near the top of
the sacred mountain to chop down a gigantic, thousand year old tree. Then
they climb on top of it and slide down the mountain, risking their lives in
a kind of wild toboggan ride. I wonder how the huge log with a diameter of 3
or 4 meters is supposed to be prevented from rolling over, crushing
everybody. Such destruction serves to honor the god of the mountain.
In Australia, south of Eden on Twofold Bay, there is a
huge logging operation. There is certainly no "weeding" or any of that. The
native bush - it's not called forest - is completely cleared away with
bulldozers in some given plot of a few hectares, and the whole thing is
shredded into wood chips to be sent to Japan to make paper. Then the land is
left to regenerate by itself for a sufficient amount of time, "weeds" and
all. Maybe these days the wood chips are just burned. Here in Germany
burning wood chips for heating houses is applauded by the voters of the
Green Party, despite the fact that it causes increased levels of pollution.
Germans make much of their forests, or "Wälder". When I
first arrived in the Spring of 1975 I was astonished at the intense green of
the forests. And yet everywhere it was said that the forests were dying.
"Waldsterben". They have been continuously dying between then and now. Fifty
years ago they were dying due to acid rain, or smog, global cooling, or
something. Now they are dying due to climate change. People are continuously
concerned about the death of the forests. And yet for some reason there is
now more forest here than there was 50 years ago. Some real forests are left
alone and are full of thick vegetation. In fact, as I understand it, in
places where people are afraid to go - for example in those countries of the
Balkans where they are continuously cutting each others throats, or around
Chernobyl - the forests are absolutely thriving. The problem in Germany is
that most of the trees are in privately owned tree plantations. And it was
thought that planting fir trees would give the most profit. Fir trees are
not really suited to this climate. The natural vegetation is oak and beech
and lots of other things. Hard wood. But that grows more slowly with lots of
curved branches. Not so good for building slanted roofs or wooden
partitions. And so the fir trees, planted in rows of mono-culture, are weak,
tending to sickness. Given a nice warm summer then the owners of the tree
plantations complain. Their trees are attacked by beetles; they fall down
together in their rows and columns if a storm wind blows. People panic. They
spray the tree plantations with pesticides from helicopters. They vote for
the Greens. And they cannot see the healthy natural forests which are
thriving next to all those unnatural tree plantations.
I found this book in a list of the 20 best
biographies. It is as much concerned with the husband, the author, as with
Véra. Both were born at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries in the
old Saint Petersburg into very wealthy families, living just a block or two
from one another but first meeting in the 1920s in exile in Berlin.
Vladimir's ancient and aristocratic family occupied a huge city mansion, and in fact when an uncle died,
Vladimir, at the age of 16, was bequeathed a magnificent country estate. But all of this was lost to
communism, leaving the family in exile with practically nothing. As a young
man Vladimir was handsome, athletic. A championship tennis player. Even as a
teenager he published books of his poetry. The family first went to England
where Vladimir entered Cambridge at Trinity College and studied zoology and
languages while the others moved to France. Later Vladimir moved to the
large emigrant Russian colony in Berlin where he existed writing books of
Russian poetry and giving tennis lessons to the other Russians in the city.
He fell in love with one beautiful young Russian aristocratic woman after
the other, becoming engaged, but ultimately rejected as the penniless poet
with no future by those families who had had the foresight to take out
enough money in time. He was proud of the fact that although he was fluent
in both English and French, he was unable, and refused to learn, German,
despite the fact that he lived in Berlin for perhaps 10 years until the
Nazis came to power.
Véra's family was Jewish; also very wealthy. And as with
the Nabokovs, almost all was lost in the emigration. Véra was fluent in
various languages, including German, and so she was working as a translator
in Berlin. When they first met Vladimir was just recovering from the
rejection of his latest marriage engagement. In his impulsive, poetic way,
he declared himself to be totally in love with Véra. She was in love with
him. They were together in tiny, uncomfortable apartments. The other Russian
aristocrats thought it a minor scandal that he was together with a Jewish
woman, but life had been overturned anyway, and they married with little
ceremony. Véra devoted herself to Vladimir. He was a genius. The
greatest Russian writer of the century, and indeed this view was shared by
others in the Berlin colony. Véra continued to earn barely enough with
translations, but she also became Vladimir's secretary, typing drafts of his
manuscripts. And so life went on.
As it became clear that life in Berlin would be
impossible, Vladimir traveled to Paris and London, trying to find publishers
for his writings, giving talks. After 10 years of marriage to Véra,
separated on one of these trips, he fell completely in love with Irina
Guadanini, another young Russian aristocratic woman... Drama. Tragedy. He
eventually returned to Véra, rejecting his new love with Irina, and she
became an embittered woman, withdrawing into herself, growing old and
isolated. We have the feeling that Vladimir simply remained with Véra for
the convenience of her devotion, her typing and her dealing with all the
practical aspects of life. For the rest of his life Vladimir pretended that
he was unable to deal with anything practical. He could not drive a car; he
could not use the telephone; he could not write letters. All of these things
were for Véra. And she devoted herself to them and to him so that he found
that he also loved her devotedly. They became inseparable.
At the last minute they escaped from Paris to the United
States where he was able to obtain a temporary position at Wellesley College, lecturing to the adoring young
female students about literature. He also gave occasional talks at Harvard
and eventually obtained a permanent position at Cornell University. Much of
the book is devoted to this phase of their lives.
To be quite frank, I often wonder why there are faculties
of literature at most universities. I enjoy reading these things for various
reasons which I've often mentioned here. It is pleasant to read stories,
usually more so than watching a movie or even talking to others, listening
to their stories. But when did the idea arise that literature should be more
than a pleasant diversion and instead become a serious academic field of
study? What is the point of such studies? Certainly before the 19th century,
novels were considered to be nothing more than trivial ways to pass the
time. Something to chat about in idle moments.
It seems that the Nabokovs wrote out in detail, perhaps
word for word, the lectures he spoke at Cornell. And then Véra came to each
of his lectures, often sitting in front of the students, being introduced as
his "assistant". She filled in details, erased the blackboard, helped him
while he pretended to be helpless. Apparently it was a popular performance
and his lectures were very well attended. Students were astonished to learn
that Véra was his wife. And I find the whole thing difficult to imagine. Who
ever heard of someones wife - or husband as the case may be - intimately
taking part in ones lectures like that? The idea seems impossible, bizarre.
And then at home Véra spent sleepless days and nights, typing up these
lectures and the other writings of Vladimir, as well as cooking for him,
looking after their son, Dimitri, keeping the house clean and tidy, driving
Vladimir to the faculty and back. Always trying to stay in the background;
only Vladimir was important. Gradually some began to suspect that Véra had
also taken over some of Vladimir's writing, an idea she always vehemently
disputed. During the holidays Véra drove the family out West to the wide
expanses of America, and Vladimir pottered about with his hobby: collecting
butterflies. Véra was staunchly anti-communist. She applauded Joseph
McCarthy and was indignant about the fact that he had fallen from grace. She
was proud and vocal about her Jewish ancestry, while Vladimir floated above
such things.
Up to this point Nabokov was just one of the many obscure
immigrant intellectuals filling posts at American universities. All of this
changed with Lolita, propelling Vladimir into instant celebrity, if
not notoriety. He continued to write. His Pnin, which I enjoyed so much, was written after Lolita.
The income from Cornell was no longer needed. Gradually they sought a place
to settle in Europe, ending up in the Montreux Palace Hotel in 1961 and living there on a
permanent basis until his death in 1977. Véra continued typing for him,
driving him about as his chauffeur, dealing with all the disputes with
publishers, taxation problems (they had taken out American citizenship, thus
creating permanent tax difficulties for themselves), all of the details of
the translations of Nabokov's various novels into countless other languages,
and so on... while Vladimir remained in his role as the helpless genius.
After Vladimir's death, Véra stayed in the Palace Hotel another 14 years
until she also passed away.
I must read a few more of Nabokov's books.
Pale Fire, by
Vladimir Nabokov
Clicking in to Amazon to download this book,
nothing happened. I wondered what the problem was. But then I noticed a text
telling me that I had already "bought" this book from them. Indeed, some
years ago, perhaps just after I had read Pnin, I must have started
reading this one, but I see that I soon gave up. This time, having read all
about the lives of Vladimir and Véra, I was determined to push on to the
end.
It starts off with a 999 line poem. I was going to write
that it is a nonsense poem written as a joke, but perhaps the professors of
literature in all the universities of the world would admonish us to take it
seriously. The story is that the poem was written by John Shade, a professor
of literature at an American university. In fact the scene seems to be that
of Cornell University. This book was written by Nabokov after he had become
rich and famous with his Lolita. He was freed of the constraints of
academic life and could make fun of his former colleagues.
After wading through these 999 lines we then have a much
longer prose exposition which is that of Charles Kinbote, a neighbor of
Shade in this imaginary Cornell and a colleague of his in its Faculty of
Literature. Shade has died after completing the poem and Kinbote is editing
it for publication, or whatever. He rambles on and on. Obscure nonsense for
page after page about an imaginary country named Zembla which has some of
the attributes of Russia, but many attributes not of Russia. How he was a
close friend of Shade, although Shade despised him. How he is secretly so
much more wonderful than the others in the Faculty. And so on. I made it
further into the book than was the case at my last attempt, but well before
the end I could not avoid the question of why I was wasting so much time on
such nonsense. And thus I stopped. But looking at the number of stars people
give the book at amazon.com, I see that I am nearly alone in this. And
therefore, once again, I realize that I am living in a completely different
world from that which all of you other people seem to occupy.
In my world I interpret this book as being the product of
an excess of egotistical exuberance on the part of the author in that phase
of his life. In the previous book we saw that whenever Vladimir or Véra were
asked about their favorite authors or books, they could honestly only think
of Vladimir. All other authors were dreadful, or at least inferior. Vladimir
was everything.
Well, it is true that he was perhaps the best in his
style: the witty satire. But there are many other styles in literature. For
example the Nabokovs made fun of Jane Austen as being a dreadful writer of
rubbish. But in her style surely any sensible person would say she was
wonderful. I enjoyed reading her books. This present book, Pale Fire,
in the style of Nabokov, is for me rubbish.
Pale Fire was mentioned often in the previous
biography of the Nabokovs, but also the classic Russian novel A Hero of
our Time was often mentioned. The Nabokovs must have had a good
opinion of the author, so I'll read that next to see what it's all about.
This was first published in Russian in 1840. There
is a translation by Vladimir, together with his son Dimitri Nabokov; it may
well be better than the one I have read, but this one was freely
downloadable from Gutenberg.org. We can read about the author here. Lermentov was a member of the Russian
aristocracy, as was the Hero of his book, Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin.
They both became officers in the Russian army after a difficult childhood.
The author, Lermentov, served in the Caucasian mountains, having been exiled
there after his taking part in a duel - which was of course illegal. And
this book is set in the Caucasus. Lermentov was killed in another duel which
he had provoked by insulting a former friend for attiring himself in native
costume. Thus the author's life and death follows the plot of his novel,
with the twist that in the novel, Pechorin coldly shoots his opponent after
complicated disputes on the conduct of the duel, disappearing into the mists
of the mountains.
Beautiful, young, wealthy, aristocratic women throw
themselves at Pechorin, princesses, countesses, provoking the envy of the
other officers and husbands. He treats them all with cold disdain. And the
author was similarly the object of desire of young, wealthy and aristocratic
women. The novel was criticized at the time of publication for its senseless
lack of morality, but this was part of the Byronic tradition of the romantic
age.
We are among the mountains in the south of Russia with
their countless, violent tribal people. There are spa resorts filled with
visitors from Saint Petersberg and Moscow, taking the waters, reminding us
of the ancient traditions of Russian society.
The narrator is the half brother of the writer
Sebastian Knight. Despite his name, Knight was a Russian, born to an
aristocratic family at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. In exile
he studies literature at Cambridge (was it Trinity College?). The half
brother, known only as "V" - he doesn't want to tell us his name or any
other personal details - lives in France, having little contact with
Sebastian. Just a letter every year or two, although Sebastian, who has
become a successful novelist, regularly sends him money. It is now 1938 or
39; Sebastian has died and V has decided to write his biography. Nabokov
wrote the book during that time, before he had moved to America. It is the
first book he wrote in English. It was published in America in 1941.
We learn about the life of Sebastian Knight. He lived
together with Clare Bishop, a woman faithfully devoted to him, typing his
manuscripts, looking after him. I'm not sure if it was said that Clare was
also Russian. Certainly neither her name nor that of Sebastian sounds
Russian. But as with Lenin and Stalin, and even Pushkin, it seems that
Russians are fond of substituting simple pseudonyms for their more complex,
many syllabled real Russian names. During a separation from Clare, Sebastian
meets and falls in love with a mysterious woman. While looking through
Sebastian's old papers, V can find nothing to tell him who this woman was,
and so he sets off on a quest to find her. Eventually he does find Nina
Leclef, living in Paris. It turns out that she is also Russian, despite her
name and her perfect French. She is a deceptive, manipulative woman.
Having just before read the biography of Vladimir and
Véra Nabokov, all of this sounds extremely familiar. Are we completely
misplaced if we think of the following obvious associations?: Vladimir =
Sebastian; Véra = Clare; Irina Guadanini = Nina. Perhaps even adding Sergey
(Valdimir's brother) = V.
The author, Vladimir Nabokov seems to be describing his
life for us: his struggles with the English language; his love for, or at
least the convenience of his life with his wife Véra; his wild infatuation
for Irina Guadanini. I wonder what Véra thought when typing up all this
stuff. Unlike this imaginary story, the real life Vladimir Nabokov stayed
with Véra and lived on for many years, writing his Lolita and all
the rest.
After finding Nina, V is filled with the guilt which
followed Sebastian's death. He dreams about Sebastian and death. He was in
Marseilles in the south of France, in the middle of an intense patch of work
for the firm where he was employed when he received a telegram, telling him
that Sebastian was in a hospital near Paris, near death. V hurries to the
station; many hours on a crowded, filthy train. A taxi drive in the
snowbound, icy night. Only to find that Sebastian had died the day before. V
is obsessed with the thought of death. He has missed it. If only he had been
with Sebastian at the moment of his death. Perhaps Sebastian would have been
able to tell him what death is. To unlock this profound mystery.
Is the presence of death, being near a dying person, the
key to unlocking the mystery? If so, then we would expect hospital doctors
to be enlightened. But my observation (for what little it is and what little
it is worth) is that medical doctors tend to be remarkably unenlightened.
What is the point of being obsessed with death? A diversion from the more
important things of life.
Meena Dave is a woman of Indian descent, early 30s,
a photographer, traveling about the world, her photographs published in
newspapers, magazines. She is an orphan who had been lovingly brought up by
a white American couple who tragically died when their house blew up in a
gas explosion when Meena was 16, after which she was put in an orphanage for
a few years. She learns that she has been granted a legacy in the will of
somebody she doesn't know, thinking it must be something trivial. It turns
out to be an apartment in an extremely luxurious house in the historical
inner city of Boston, worth almost three million dollars. Her first thought
is to sell it and continue with her life of continuous travel, free of
commitments, attachments. She is told what the house is. It is called the
Engineer House. It was started a hundred years ago with a group of Indian
students who were studying at MIT, becoming a kind of fraternity. Most of
the students returned to India to help build the country after independence.
But a few stayed on, having families, agreeing on specific legal conditions
regarding the ownership of the house and the 5 or 6 apartments it contained.
Apartments could not be sold to outsiders. The ownership of an apartment
passed on to the eldest child of an occupant when that eldest child reached
the age of 25. But what had Meena to do with that?
She learns that the previous owner of the apartment was a
woman who had died childless. All of the other people in the house are of
pure Indian descent. They seem to have lots of money. Everything is clean,
perfect. They do everything together, keeping their Indian traditions,
cooking Indian food. While the front door is kept locked, the doors to the
apartments remain unlocked and the people move freely between the
apartments, often not bothering to knock. It is a perfect little Indian
village, not spoiled by all the dirt, squalor, bickering, of a real Indian
village in India.
Meena decides to keep the apartment and try living in it.
Across the corridor is a wonderful, handsome, young man who would be the
perfect partner for Meena. There are three older women in their 50s who
gradually initiate Meena into all the wonderful things of Indian culture. It
is a nice story. And there is the mystery of who Meena is; who were her
biological parents, why was she given away as a baby into adoption? What has
it to do with the Engineers House? At the end all is revealed and everybody
lives happily ever after.
But there are a number of problems with this story. To
begin with, in the real world Meena would have had to pay a million or more
in inheritance tax; impossible, given her situation. Apart from that, my
skeptical mind dwelled on a few further thoughts. In Australia, which is
also a country of immigrants, great emphasis was put on integrating new
immigrants into the life of Australia. They were discouraged from isolating
themselves into closed ghettos. Indeed, when I first moved to Germany, not
thinking that I was immigrating; I was rather taking up a kind of post
doctoral post for a year or two - which became a lifetime, I certainly
didn't try to find Australians or Americans rather than Germans or other
nationalities to be friends with. After all, if people want to immigrate to
another country then they should accept what they doing; if they want to
wallow in thoughts of the old country then they should get out, return to
that old country and get on with life.
But of course the great tragedy of all the displaced
people who are now settling in Europe, fleeing from the countless wars of
the United States, is that they can no longer return. Why aren't these
displaced people sent to the United States which is the source of their
plight, for example to the historic center of Boston, where they could live
in closed houses and streets, forming their own ghettos.
This is a novel written as a diary. It was first
published in 1950 in Italy in serial form in subsequent issues of a
magazine, corresponding to the six months of the diary, as if it were being
written by the protagonist, describing her real life from day to day. She is
Valeria Cossati, living in Rome. She is 43 years old and has two children:
Mirella, 20, is the daughter and Riccardo, 22, is the son. Both are studying
law at university. Her husband, Michele, is somewhat older than Valeria. He
works in a bank but doesn't earn enough to support the family, and so
Valeria also has a job in an office. She also does all the cooking at home,
the cleaning, looking after everything. A generation ago her family belonged
to the aristocracy, living in a villa near Venice, but they lost everything
due to mismanagement and the upheavals of the world wars. Michele does not
come from an aristocratic family; in his way he does love Valeria as does
she him.
The first days of the diary tell us how she bought the
notebook on a whim while out buying cigarettes for Michele. It is a secret.
She won't tell anyone in the family about it. After all, whenever she tries
to say anything serious, all the others laugh at her, not only the children
calling her Mama, but Michele, her husband, also calls her Mama. How could
Mama have a serious opinion about anything? The idea is absurd. And so she
desperately thinks about different hiding places for her notebook. Of course
Mirella has a diary which is in a locked drawer next to her bed, but that is
understandable; Mirella is a serious law student.
Valeria tells us about her life, her worries. The
apartment is too small. There are always problems with money. Mirella needs
new clothes but there is only enough for a few things. Riccardo also needs
more money than the small allowance he receives.
Mirella stays out late at night, alone with an older man
of 35 who, she discovers, is already married. A scandal. Valeria stays up
waiting for Mirella to return and is then angry, lecturing her about
morality. A woman should marry and devote herself to the family, the
children. But Mirella says that she does not want a life like that of
Valeria. She is ambitious. She will leave home as soon as she becomes 21.
She already has a job in a law firm and plans to move to another city, to
become a successful, well-known lawyer. Valeria is constantly worrying about
Mirella. What has she done wrong? Is Mirella living in sin? But her husband
Michele often has private, understanding personal conversations with his
daughter, which they stop when Valeria, with all her worries, comes into the
room.
Riccardo is a Mamma's child. She loves him. His law exams
are coming up, but we know that he will fail them. He has been promised a
job in Argentina, and he dreams of his future. And Valeria thinks with
horror of the emptiness if the wonderful Riccardo were to be so far away. He
has a young girlfriend, Marina, perhaps only 16 or 17. A simpleminded thing,
a school dropout, vacant eyes. Valeria can't stand her. But towards the end
of the notebook she is confronted with the pregnancy of Riccardo's
girlfriend. They must immediately marry. Riccardo, who had always scoffed at
his father and his pitiful job at the bank accepts an even more lowly
position there. One idea is that Riccardo and Marina simply go alone to
Argentina, leaving Valeria to take care of the baby. She thinks the idea
might be wonderful, having a new baby, a grandson of Riccardo, a room of her
own in Riccardo's then vacant bedroom. But Mirella pours cold water on this
vision with the obvious observation that Riccardo will certainly fail his
exams, nullifying the job offer in Argentina, so that all of them will be
left living on top of one another in the tiny apartment with the baby and
the hated Marina.
And then it turns out that Valeria's boss at the office,
the owner of the firm, is in love with her, and she with him. What a mess!
She prays in the church. She imagines that this notebook is the source of
her downfall. It is a sin, a work of the devil. And it is the end of the
book. What had started out as a fun adventure of hiding the notebook from
the family turns into a claustrophobic drama. Only Mirella is free. A
dramatic, absorbing book to read.
Banine's full name was Umm-El-Banine-Assadoulaeff,
or - according to the foreword to the book - Ummulbanu Asadullayeva.
She was born in 1905 and her childhood was in Azerbaijan's Baku, before the
Russian Revolution. The family was rich with all the oil of the Caspian Sea.
They were not an ancient Russian family. Instead they were more like the
billionaire oligarchs which all seemed to have come out of the woodwork in
Eastern Europe and Russia after communism collapsed in 1990. As a child
Banine was in love with a gardener on the family estate, but at 15 she was
forced to marry someone else in the oligarch class who she hated. Her family
escaped the Russian civil war, settling in Paris. She and her husband made
it to Turkey, and then she traveled on alone to Paris in 1923, at the age of
18, separating herself from him forever. Only many years later was she able
to obtain a divorce in a French court.
The family had not had the forethought, or luck, to have
transferred their riches into a Swiss bank account, and so they arrived with
just what they had been able to carry with them. The jewels and other
valuables kept them going for a year or two in gradually decreasing luxury,
branching off into more bohemian lifestyles. Banine was able to find a job
as a model at a well-known Parisian fashion house, displaying the collection
for rich customers and the rest of the clientele which has undoubtedly
hardly changed in the hundred years between then and now. Her photo in the Wikipedia shows a woman in the style
of the 1920s; if not a beauty at least she seems more pleasant than all of
those lifeless modern-day fashion models.
Suddenly a cousin appears, full of life, throwing money
away in an extravagant fashion. She is Gulnar, and Banine attaches herself
to the cousin. The rest of the story is that of Gulnar's affairs, only
occasionally interrupted by Banine's own modest life. It seems that Gulnar
was the mistress of Otto, a German who was unfortunately married but
passionately in love with Gulnar and who was seeking a divorce to free
himself for Gulnar. But his business involved him traveling about for months
at a time, even into Russia. Later in the story he seems to have disappeared
into a communist prison, never to be seen again. For Gulnar it is a relief,
a cause for celebration when Otto leaves, receiving vast amounts of his
money along with his farewell tears. Gulnar flirts with various aristocratic
French gentlemen. They are awkward, old men, but rich and titled, things
that Gulnar covets. Banine is given an old French doctor who has an eye
clinic in Orleans. He is rich, but without a title (apart from his medical
qualifications - which hardly count in the world of fashion). She visits him
on weekends, telling us that she likes having sex with him, but apart from
that she finds him to be a stupid, pathetic, revolting creature.
At the end of the book we are told that Gulnar meets a
young man who is the exact image of JFK (but this is back in the 1930s). He
is fabulously rich, the son of a Texas oil millionaire. She marries him and
disappears into Texas. We are not told how long that marriage lasted. I find
it difficult to imagine the extravagant, fashionable Gulnar exchanging Paris
for Dallas, or perhaps even Paris, Texas. And in the real Paris, Banine's
ophthalmologist finally tells her that he has had enough of it. We vaguely
learn that she lived on in the life of Paris, marrying and divorcing. The
book was enjoyable to read, written in a lively style, this translation
perhaps reflecting that of the French original.
Another book about Paris. Again not a novel; a true
story. The author is an Englishman who tells us that he studied Oriental and
African Studies in London. What does one do with such a qualification? Go to
the Orient and Africa? Or perhaps work in a bank in the City of London,
dealing with Orientals and Africans. We are told that he spent countless
post-graduation hours applying for jobs with no response. His French
girlfriend told him that she wanted to return to Paris, and so he decided to
go along with her, see what his prospects there might be. There followed
further weeks of sending out job applications into the vacuous internet,
camped in their tiny apartment. But at least he did enjoy spending his days
walking about in Paris, finding it to be the most wonderful place on Earth,
reading his copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.
After a couple of months of this he still had no job. The girlfriend was
offered something in a museum back in London. She left and he stayed, saying
that he wanted to prove to himself that he could exist on his own.
And so eventually he walked into a famous, luxury
restaurant (he tells us that it is "Le Bistrot de la Seine", but the
internet finds no such restaurant - clearly he has changed the name to avoid
being sued), saying that he is an experienced waiter and that he would like
a job. He soon finds out that everything is appearance. The dining room is
elegant, stylish. Only well-dressed, chic people are welcome. And the famous
eat here: politicians, television "news" presenters, movie actors, along
with tourists wanting to be a part of fashionable Paris. It is only after
finishing the book and writing this piece that I have found a photo of the author on his internet site. He is
handsome, elegant. Clearly the manager of the restaurant hired him for his
good looks, the beautiful Englishman, despite his obvious lack of experience
and inability to speak the language. His role would be to charm the tourists
with his educated English. The restaurant also maintained a collection of
"hostesses": young women with long legs in short skirts, walking about,
leading diners to their tables, doing nothing in particular, just to be
looked at and admired.
He was assigned the role of a "runner". That is to say he
didn't take orders. Rather he supported the other waiters, bringing the
plates, drinks and everything from out of the door marked "private" into the
dining room on a silver platter, stacked high, balanced overhead on the left
hand, to the tables, then gathering the used things to be brought back on
the platter. His description of his first day was terrible. He had bought a
cheap waiter's suit and black shoes which didn't fit well with the last of
his money, and he was kept going from 6 in the morning till late at night
without a pause. Yet he was determined to see it through, not to have
another failure in his life. When reading this I remembered the sinking
feeling I had when reading Down and Out in Paris and London 50 years
ago. In a book we imagine ourselves being in the situation of the
protagonist. What if life were to lead me into such a mess? At least now, at
75 with a comfortable pension, such thoughts are behind me.
We are told about what happens beyond the "private" door.
It is the "pass", where food comes up from the kitchens and is assembled
together for the tables. The waiters in the dining room are all Europeans,
with one or two elegant North Africans. Behind the door everything is
non-European. At the pass are three Tamils - Tamil Tigers. There is chaos,
shouting, infighting between the waiters, grovelling for tips. Down in the
basement is the preparatory kitchen. Only black Africans are there, working
for a pittance, illegal immigrants, hacking away at vegetables, the wet
floor covered with peelings, dirt, even rats. Loud music, shouting, chaos.
The products of all this are sent up in a service elevator. The main kitchen
is somewhere above and it is strictly prohibited for any waiter to go up to
the main kitchen. The author imagines the main kitchen being filled with
exquisite chefs of the haute cuisine: a Paul Boucuse with a high,
white chef's hat, a "toque blanche". What an awakening he receives
after a few months in the restaurant when a lonely, middle aged American
tourist orders a steak and finds it to be red inside. She asks the author to
return it to the kitchen to be further cooked. The Tamils refuse to send it
up. The other waiters ignore him. And so he climbs the forbidden stairs to
the secret inner sanctum of the restaurant. Opening the door, he is shocked
to find that it is a small, hot, loud room. The cook is a Corsican; a huge,
sweaty man brandishing a huge cleaver, shouting at the others who are all
black Africans. There are flames everywhere. The walls and everything else
are covered with thick layers of old grease. Screaming at the author to get
out, the Corsican threatens him with his knife. When he learns why he has
come, his anger knows no bounds. He grabs the throat of the author with his
free hand, choking him, pressing him against the greasy wall, takes the
piece of meat and almost throws it on the floor, then throws it to one of
the Africans working at one of the pits of fire and shouts at him to cremate
it. The author escapes, almost suffocated, returning to the quiet, elegant
dining room where the woman inspects the meat and decides that she can now
eat it. Afterward, one of the hostesses tells the author that the back of
his jacket has become greasy and dirty.
Everybody behind the door knows that the food is rubbish.
The waiters use all sorts of dirty French words to describe it. None of
them, if they had the money, would eat in a restaurant like this. The food
must cost 50 or 100 euros or more for a dinner. They all know that small,
family restaurants are infinitely better, where a dinner costs no more than
10 or 15 euros.
The author, Edward Chisholm, simply loves the city of
Paris. I find this difficult to understand. He is prepared to put up with
anything in order to stay there. He rents a tiny room in the roof of a house
which costs him almost all of his earnings from the restaurant. His body is
covered with red spots from the bites of bedbugs. He is worked to such a
state of hunger and exhaustion that he faints, falling and breaking the
bones in his hand, hitting his head on concrete into a coma. But Paris is
nothing like the romantic nonsense of Hollywood movies. The air is polluted
with toxic fumes; the tap water tastes and smells strongly of chlorine - who
knows what sorts of dead germs are floating around in it; the streets are
filled with loud, aggressively driven cars, trucks, and especially scooters
making horribly loud, sudden, wasp-like screams; most of Paris consists of
dangerous high-rise slums, the various races and ethnicities are living in a
self-imposed apartheid, free of the police who are afraid to enter these
areas.
But from his internet
page we are told that he is now living in Lausanne in Switzerland. A
much, much more pleasant place! He is making a living as a writer, and I
wish him well. His life has become more interesting and fascinating to read
about than the lives of the two young bankers of the City of London who
happened to sit at a table on the terrace of the restaurant where he was
serving drinks, celebrating their bloated bonuses. He was horrified to
recognize them as former fellow students of the School of Oriental and
African Studies. How embarrassing that he had to serve them their drinks,
expecting them to toss a few coins onto the table as a tip. At least he
could move on in life. We feel sorry for the other waiters, his friends in
the restaurant, who could only look forward to more of the same.
I was expecting this to be a book about the
Mayflower Pilgrims traveling to Massachusetts, perhaps getting seasick,
finding life in the new world to be not as simple as they had imagined. But
no. It had almost nothing to do with the Mayflower. Instead it was concerned
with a history of the Reformation in 16th century England. Prior to that,
before Gutenberg's printing press, the Bible was unavailable to normal
people. Priests could say whatever they wanted during church services. Maybe
just a load of rubbish. For example that people should give them money and
in return expect to spend less time in the unpleasant fairy-tale world of
"purgatory" after death before proceeding on to "judgement", at which they
might expect to have special treatment, depending on the amount of money
they had given. But then with the advent of printing, the idea of
translating the Bible into common language was advanced. Of course the
Church was strictly against such an idea. The Bible must remain a secret.
Whoever challenged this credo would be subjected to the most horrible
tortures the Church had to offer: burning at the stake, being broken on the
wheel, and so on. And yet all over Europe people rebelled, reading their
newly translated Bibles, asserting that Truth was to be found in their own
readings rather than in the Church.
It is astonishing how people take seriously such a long,
rambling, self-contradicting collection of varied and obscure texts as is
the Bible. Martin Luther asserted that he would only believe the evidence of
his own senses - as long as that didn't contradict the Bible, in which case
he would believe the Bible. Given such an attitude, people quarreled amongst
themselves, splitting apart into a great array of different groups with
different beliefs. But on the other hand, in England, Henry the 8th, who
felt a great religious fervor in his attempts at procreating an official
male offspring, declared that He, the King, not the Church, was the official
source of religion in England. Of course there was the drama of Bloody Mary,
and then the long reign of Elizabeth. She hated all this religious chaos and
tried to clamp down on it, forcing people to conform to her official version
of the Church (which had been cleansed of the worst abuses of the Catholic
Church). The stubborn people who believed that the Bible said something else
fled to the more tolerant Holland. There was a large community of these
English people in Amsterdam, arguing with one another. The Mayflower
Pilgrims removed themselves to Leiden where they lived in their own ghetto,
cutting themselves off from the influences of the more open-minded Dutch
people around them (we think of the sublime life and thoughts of Spinoza). Eventually they chartered a ship, the
Mayflower, to take them away from Europe. It was a small group, including
especially three children who had been rejected by their family and were
essentially slaves, as well as a further number of "indentured servants" who
also were taken along as slaves. An unpleasant and seedy little affair which
we would prefer not to think about but which history proclaims to be of
great importance.
I happen to be writing this on Easter Sunday. In Germany
it is the occasion for playing the music of Bach. His Saint Mathew Passion
is surely the deepest, most moving music in the world. Listening to a
performance on the radio in the evening a day or two ago was so moving that
I was unable to sleep. According to the church, Christ suffered in order to
"save" us. Such an egotistical idea! That the torture of someone else will
cause me, personally, to have a nice comfortable time in some sort of
imaginary afterlife. But the message of this music is not concerned with me.
It is the tragedy of people inflicting great suffering on others.
In the last few days, just before Easter, a retired
American general told Congress that his country is demonstrating the "acme
of professionalism" in getting the Ukraine to fight a war against Russia in
the interests of the United States while not sacrificing a single American
soldier. The Green Party, which we had thought was the party of peace, has
declared that war is peace. The continuing and horrible suffering of the
people of Ukraine has become their credo. Will it lead to their salvation?
This is again about that troubled period,
particularly of the 16th century. The book consists of 19 chapters, most of
which describe the main characters of the renaissance who did not live in
Italy, but rather those in the more northern part of Europe. For example
there are chapters titled: Gutenberg; Jan van Eyck; Nicholas of Cusa; Copernicus; Erasmus; Dürer; Brahe
and Kepler. I had never heard of that Cusa fellow before. Also there is a
chapter devoted to Vesalius, another character I had never heard of. And
then we have Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth of England, Frances I of France,
Martin Luther... Well, it was an interesting book. But that is enough
renaissance for now. It's better to play renaissance music than to read
about it.
This is a Dracula story. I haven't read the
original one by Bram
Stoker, but I suspect that this more modern story is very different
from that. No dark, Gothic castles with creaking iron doors in the
impenetrable mountains of Transylvania.
It is thought that Bram Stoker's inspiration for Dracula
might have been Vlad
Tepes, a ruler of Wallachia
in the 15th century. He is also known as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad's father was
known as Vlad
Dracul, or "Vlad the Dragon". The idea of impalement is horrible; Bram Stoker substituted the
slightly less horrible idea of vampirism in his novel. This seems to be something
which has fascinated people of many cultures through the ages. The present
version, as I understand it, derives from the fact that if a newly dead
person is buried in a coffin, particularly one which is waterproof, or if
the soil is dry so that the process of decomposition drags on, then the body
becomes bloated in unpleasant ways. The hair, the beard, the fingernails
keep on growing for a time. If then the corpse is dug up for some reason,
people are shocked to see that the dead seems to be still half living in
some sort of degenerate, repugnant state. How is this possible?
Perhaps the half dead soul emerges - in the darkness of
night - to seek nourishment: the life blood of living people. The vampire
lives on until it is finally killed by thrusting a silver dagger through its
heart. Also, at least according to the version in the present book, a silver
bullet shot from a pistol through the heart also suffices. And then we have
the idea that the vampire is possessed of demoniacal powers. Since the
Church is supposed to be the antithesis of the demon (in contradiction to
reality), vampires are held at bay by crosses, crucifixes, christian amulets
and so on. Also garlic is supposed to hold them off for some reason. If a
person is bitten three times by a vampire, then he or she becomes a vampire
too. I was a bit confused by the plot of the novel since the quest is to
find the undead Vlad the Impaler and either stab or shoot him with a silver
bullet, thus freeing humankind forever from the scourge of the vampires.
What about all the other vampires he has spawned?
The author is an American, but her surname shows that her
ancestors must have immigrated from Eastern Europe. Bulgaria plays a
prominent role in the present story, and I see that this is also the case in
the other two novels she has written. It is rather a long book, but a
fascinating read. I'm sure it is much more lightly written than Bram
Stoker's Victorian version must be. We have three generations of historical
researchers, jumping through the 20th century with its troubled history,
each of which falls beautifully in love. They meet university colleagues in
Istanbul, Budapest, Sofia, who are also part of the quest. It is not the
gray, cold winter of Easter Europe but the green, flowering summer. We are
led to one ancient monastery after the other, constantly looking them up in
the Wikipedia, admiring the photos and the history. The ancient struggle of
the Ottoman Turks with the Christians.
Banine's Parisian Days begins with her
euphoric entrance into Paris on a train in 1923 when she was 18 years old.
This book, which was published afterwards, ends with that scene. She tells
us about her life growing up in Baku in Azerbaijan. The family practically
swam in its oil riches. As Banine describes it, the family had adopted few
of the refinements of civilized life. There was continuous, loud shouting,
squabbles about money, sexual excesses. Her cousins, adolescent boys,
engaged in sodomy. Their sister, Gulnar, who plays such a role in Parisian
Days, is forced to remain, technically, a virgin until her marriage;
she flirts to the limit with any male who comes near and then marries as
quickly as possible in order to lose her virginity and thus be free to sleep
with as many men as possible. But the young Banine is apart from this. She
is shy, immersing herself in books, the piano. She imagines falling
passionately in love with different men while still being a child. Reading
through this became a bit tedious, even boring.
Things changed with the Russian revolution of 1917.
Suddenly bands of violent Armenians took over Baku and Banine's family
escaped in one of their cargo ships on the Caspian Sea to Iran. They were
able to return after a few months. Azerbaijan imagined that it had become an
independent country. Banine's father was a highly placed minister in the
short-lived government. Almost all of her immediate family left to live in
Paris, leaving Banine alone with her father and other relatives. But soon
the Bolsheviks arrived, imposing communism and a Soviet Republic, arresting
the father and throwing him into prison. Banine fell madly in love with a
Soviet officer, a Christian, a Russian; things hated by her Muslim family.
She was only 15 years old.
A distant relative whom she hated, 35 years old, did much
to obtain the release of the father. He was then able to obtain a passport
for the father to enable him to leave for Paris. The unspoken price was that
he would marry Banine. Her love, the Russian officer, had asked her to
marry, to come with him away from Baku. She was unable to bring herself to
do this, and thus she married the man she hated in order for the father to
escape, leaving her trapped. A bitter fate for a 15 year old girl with an
Islamic father. But in the end, at the end of the book, she is free of all
this.
The Author is a Hollywood actor - from what I gather -
typically as a western cowboy character. His wife was the actress Cecily Adams. It is said that she played a role in the
Star Trek movie Deep Space Nine as an "alien". We watch almost no
television, and of that, almost no Hollywood movies, so the names Jim Beaver
and Cecily Adams meant nothing to me. We will soon have an optical glass
fiber cable connected to the house, delivering huge numbers of bits every
second. So who knows? Perhaps we might get an ultra high definition
television in the future, absorbing 50 or 100 million bits per second, or
even more, giving a crystal clear picture to compensate for the gradually
deteriorating clarity of our aging eyes when watching these actors... Or
perhaps not.
In the autumn of 2003, Cecily Adams was diagnosed with
lung cancer. The author tells us that it was difficult to separately
telephone with all the relatives and their Hollywood friends to tell them
individually about the situation. Therefore he decided to write an e-mail
every evening and forward it to a list of 50 or more people. This went on
for a year, drawing more and more people into sharing these very emotional
e-mails. Not just relatives or close friends but more and more people who
were just curious, concerned, even amused. Who knows? A few years later, in
2009, he collected these e-mails and had them published in the present book.
Looking through Amazon for something to read other than
the usual themes to be found in all of these novels, I was struck by the
originality of the idea for this book, and so clicked on it. As you can see
from the Amazon page for the book, almost everybody gave it 5
stars. How could you give it less? How heartless it would be to criticize a
man describing day for day the process of his wife dying, how he weeps for
hours on end, cries out, tells us how she was the most perfect and wonderful
woman in the world. How he loves her. She is "Cec", and in the end he tells
us their most intimate way of calling each other "Pie". And then there is
the two year old daughter, Maddie, who had been diagnosed with autism. How
he loves her. How she is given therapy for the condition. How in the end she
miraculously recovers to become again normal. Is it voyeurism to read
something like this? Is it an embarrassment? For the author?
After all the gushing tears, the outpourings of love, the
desperation, the hopelessness, we are gradually told more and more about
what life really was like. Both the author and his wife come across as
thin-skinned, touchy people. There was shouting, arguments. Even in the last
days of her death, the husband was so angry with her on the telephone that
he slammed it down with such force that he thought he had broken his finger,
and he went to the emergency room of the hospital to have a splint attached.
(Clearly this was before the days of these horrible "smart" phones which
cannot be so dramatically slammed down.) At one stage when they were in a
temporary house and simply had the mattress on the floor, he tried as
carefully as possible to carry her to the bed, laying her down gently, and
she angrily shouted at him despite the fact that he was doing his best. He
tells us that she was always feeling sick, staying at home, being waited on,
complaining. As a child she had discovered that it was pleasant to be sick,
to have her mother come and comfort her.
...So many deeply personal things we don't really want to
know about. I found myself skimming through the last part of the book, just
to see what happens in the end, not reading through all of these emotional
outbursts. It ends with pages and pages of confessions.
In the weeks of her death it was also discovered that
Cecily's brother had developed cancer of the brain. And then we hear of
other people they know with cancer, not to mention the older generation also
dying off.
Death.
Why is it that a woman of 46 dies of lung cancer, even
though she had given up smoking 20 years before? Why did her 2 year old
daughter suddenly develop the symptoms of autism? When telling us how
perfect his wife was, he says that her life was a picture of healthy living.
When later a lawyer who was interested in organic foods suggested that she
would not have contracted cancer if she had lived in a healthy way, the
author nearly punched her out of the house. He angrily tells her that his
wife knew more about such things than she did.
But then he tells us about the medicines she had taken
all her life. And how it was such a fight to conceive their daughter. After
all, she must have been 43 or 44 years old. We are told that she took strong
medicines which made her ill, nauseous, in order to achieve a sufficient
level of fertility in her aging body. And how is it that Maddie, the
daughter, suddenly stopped talking, looking vacuously into the distance for
hours at a time to be followed by hours of hysterical screaming?
As we have learned, California is truly the epicenter of
medical drug abuse. Babies are injected with astonishing numbers of
"vaccines", filled with questionable ingredients. Who knows what the
consequences of fertility drugs are? It is said that 60 or more years ago
autism was unknown, or at least it was so seldom that doctors were
unfamiliar with it. And what was the probability in those days, before this
drug culture overwhelmed us, that two middle aged siblings simultaneously
developed two different forms of deadly cancers?
In one or two places in the book the author expresses
astonishment about the costs of medical treatments. His insurance covers
most of it and he has further insurance to cover three quarters of the rest.
But he tells us that a CT (computer tomography) in the hospital costs
$10,000, and he compares this with another CT they had in a private clinic,
not in a hospital, which "only" cost $1,000. As I have probably mentioned at
various times here, my philosophy is to avoid medical doctors as much as
possible. Statistics show that the average German goes to a doctor something
like 9.5 times per year. In contrast with this, the figure for Sweden is
only 2.2 visits each year. And of course the average Swede is healthier and
lives about 2 years longer than the average German.
Dying is something we will all go through, sooner or
later. There is certainly no way around it. One might believe that, as in a
computer game, dying advances one up to the "next level", whatever it might
be. Who knows? I am open to all sorts of speculations. In the concrete story
of the book, Cecily is afraid of death and she is afraid of not being with
her daughter Maddie. And so Jim tells us how he continually admonishes her
to fight on; that they will get through this together; that of course she
will be saved and they will live on for another 50 years in their new house
and Maddie will grow up with them together. All of this is related
spontaneously in his daily e-mails as he has just experienced it. An
hysterical optimism. Everything must be optimistic, no false thoughts
allowed.
Six months after she has died, after many days of
weeping, counselings about how to cope with grief, telling us his innermost
thoughts, the author gives us a list of things you shouldn't say to
a grieving person, such as: "You need to be strong" or "You should not feel
bad". Such things made him angry, or produced further spasms of weeping. But
surely the same rules should apply to a dying person. Do they really want to
be surrounded by hysterical optimism? Isn't it better to be calm. To listen
to the person, understand their thoughts, their fears, and accept them. Be
peaceful.
The Wikipedia page of Albert Camus describes the details
of his life in a nutshell. He wrote much: novels, essays, columns for
newspapers, plays. In fact he occasionally acted in his own plays, directing
and producing them as well. But I had only read his famous The Stranger.
My knowledge of the French language is less than rudimentary (if only
slightly greater than nonexistent). Still, my understanding is that the
original title of the book, L'Étranger, can be primarily translated
into English as "The Foreigner"; a secondary meaning would be "The
Stranger". This reflects the difficult relationship Camus had with his
native born Algeria. He was not a "native": an Arab or a Berber. Rather he
was a pied-noir, a descendant of European French settlers of the
early 19th century.
Later, in Paris as the famous author, Nobel Prize winner
and socialist, he was at first close friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir, but then they had a falling out. Camus was rightly
skeptical of the supposed "paradise" of the Soviet Union. But also all those
other socialists and communists in France supported the FLN, fighting for the independence of Algeria. Camus,
whose family remained in Algeria, condemned both the FLN and the French Army
for its abuses, saying that people should learn to live in peace with one
another.
Was Algeria a colony of France? How does one define a
colony? For example is Scotland a colony of England? Is Hawaii a colony of
the United States? Most people today would say that in both of these cases
the native people and the immigrant people should try to live peacefully
together. Similarly France considers Tahiti and New Caledonia to be parts of
France itself. Maybe a place could be said to be a "colony" if it is being
unfairly exploited by the people in some other place. Was this the case with
Algeria? Certainly Camus, who grew up in poverty, would not say so. An
alternative view might be that the native population of Algeria became
caught up in the violent excitement of a pan-Arab movement, an essentially
racist - or perhaps religious - idea, excluding people who were not Arabs.
Camus' call for peace led to him being reviled both in Algeria and in the
left-wing, socialist movements of France. I wonder if the people of the
present-day Algeria might see things differently.
And then the book tells us about all of the women in
Camus' life. Apparently they threw themselves at him, similarly to the
experiences of President Kennedy or Frank Sinatra. It was said that Camus
considered sleeping with a woman to be nothing more than having a casual
drink. He had two children with his second wife, but I wonder about all the
other women. His first wife, who he married when he was only 20, was
addicted to morphine. He met his second (and final) wife, Francine Faure, in the Algerian city of Oran. He was a
penniless author and she was the daughter of an established family. A
beautiful woman; a pianist of almost concert level; a teacher of
mathematics. She was totally devoted to Camus and suffered deep depression
with his womanizing. But perhaps the worst was his enduring love for the
actress Maria
Casares.
Well, I must confess that I stopped reading this one
after getting only halfway through; it bored me. The story takes place in
the real-life Oran
in Algeria. It is a French city, and so we imagine the story to be some time
in the 1930s, before Algerian independence. Rats dying everywhere. Then
gradually people start dying as well with all the characteristic symptoms of
the bubonic
plague. I was astonished to read that in the western states of the
United States, cases of plague are being reported even today. It seems that
the fleas have infected the wild rats of the mountains and the prairies. It
is a deadly disease which can be treated with antibiotics. I don't know how
people were able to treat it back in the 1930s.
As Pepys described the London Plague in his diary, people
went about life normally. Those who could, traveled away to stay someplace
else until the disease died down. The houses where cases of plague occurred
were quarantined, shut up for some time until presumably the infection had
passed. In the present novel it is imagined that similar measures are taken.
But in addition, the whole city of Oran is quarantined. That is, people live
normally, going to restaurants, meeting one another, but they are not
allowed to leave the city. One of the characters, an outsider, keeps trying
to leave, but at each twist in the story he is blocked. We think of Franz
Kafka. It is said that the book is an allegory of the conditions in closed,
repressive dictatorships.
All of this is completely different from the absurd, fake
"plague" which was imposed upon us starting in 2020. Healthy people were
forced into quarantine (or "lock-down": that repulsive word used in
prisons). Sick people, those in old peoples homes, were forced out so that
they could infect others. Everybody was forced to re-breathe their own
breaths, concealing their noses and mouths behind masks. Hospitals refused
sensible treatments for the sick, instead giving patients untested,
poisonous medicines and then murdering them with ventilation machines. It
was a plague of billionaires, led on by William Henry "Bill" Gates III,
increasing their riches by peddling their genetic injections, hoping that
somehow, by becoming richer and richer, they might become godlike, avoiding
their own mortality. But they were too greedy. If they had only required
people to be injected just once then I can imagine that they could have
fulfilled their ambitions. But they tried to force people to repeat the
injections over and over again, something which even the most subservient,
compliant person would eventually question. And thus also the unelected
commissioners of the European Union have been shown to be the greedy frauds
that they are.
The Poles seem to be the greatest cheerleaders for the
Neocon's war with Russia, killing off hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians,
depopulating the country, and John Pomfret, writing this book in a
breathless style, is a cheerleader for the good old USA and its CIA in
bringing the Poles in from the cold of communism to the friendly warmth of
NATO.
To understand this whole unfortunate business we should
think about the history
of Poland. At the beginning of the 17th century, Poland, together with
Lithuania, occupied a large territory in Eastern Europe. Over time, through
wars and other things, the territory gradually diminished and was then
finally dissolved by the Congress of Vienna of 1815 which established the order
of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. The Polish speaking peoples were
divided between Prussia, Russia and Austria. Many of them emigrated to the
United States. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles created a new territory which was
designated as Poland. Then we had World War II and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of
1939, dividing up the territory between Germany and Russia. After the war,
Stalin declared that Russia must be compensated for all its losses, and so
it retained a large part of the territory it had grabbed in 1939, and to
compensate for that, the newly defined territory of Poland expanded to the
west, encompassing a large part of what was defined as Germany before the
war. Finally, in 1989 communism collapsed, leaving the former countries and
Soviet Republics of Eastern Europe free to do what they wanted.
I remember that time, thinking how wonderful it is that
the world can now experience a long period of peace, free of those old
conflicts.
But no.
As with the end of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire,
excitable people began discovering their ancient lands and linguistic
barriers. The different parts of Yugoslavia - which was a construction of
the Versailles treaty - fought one another in a sequence of horrible little
wars, particularly encouraged by Germany and the United States.
Czechoslovakia separated more peacefully into its two natural halves.
During the Cold War, some German politicians, especially
those in Bavaria, pandered to the people who had been displaced from what
used to be Eastern Germany. There were annual conventions of those who had
come from Silesia
and Pomerania.
They dressed up in their traditional costumes, the bands played and the
Bavarian politicians told them that eventually the injustice would be made
right. And so the years went by. The original displaced people became older
and older and their children and grandchildren found it to be embarrassing
to wear those silly costumes. But at least the politicians kept getting
reelected and the conventions became a fixed holiday and celebration. It was
an annual folklore get-together for old times sake. Hardly anyone took it
seriously. And after 1989 and the unification of communist East Germany with
West Germany, all of that Silesian and Pomeranian folklore seems to have
disappeared.
But it was taken seriously in Poland. How could they
forget all of this history? Austro-Hungary had degenerated into two little
countries of little importance. Russia had already taken their piece of what
had been Poland. In fact it had become parts of Belarus and Ukraine. The
Poles perceived that there was a danger of Germany wanting its
pieces back. Who would protect them from Germany? The idea of just being
neutral was out of the question. They needed to become closely allied to the
United States.
But the fact is that Germany remains an occupied country
with countless American military bases. The other victorious countries that
occupied Germany after the end of World War II: Russia, France and England,
have gradually withdrawn, but the United States maintains its presence into
the future, controlling the German government (as we can see in the present
behavior of the Socialist and the Green parties). As long as the United
States continues to exist there is no way that Germany would suddenly start
to invade Poland. And even if the United States did not exist, given the
disastrous experiences of the World Wars there is no way that Germany would
even think of invading Poland... But still, after 1989, Poland was hell-bent
on the idea of joining NATO.
Back then, Poland was hardly being mentioned in the
"news". After all, the cold war had ended. Everything was good. People could
travel freely. Many Polish people settled here in Germany. But reading this
book, I see that the Polish government, and particularly the Polish secret
service, were doing everything to achieve their goal of NATO membership.
Lots of lobbying in Washington. In those days only very few people in
Washington wanted to expand NATO. Almost everybody was opposed to the idea.
The Poles sought every possibility for making themselves useful to the
Americans. In a long chapter of the book, a daring operation to smuggle six
Americans out of Iraq just before the American war against Iraq in 1990 is
described, organized by the Polish secret service. (Of course the book does
not mention the meeting of the American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, with Saddam Hussein, on the 25th of
July, 1990, when she encouraged him to invade Kuwait.) President George H.W.
Bush was euphoric with the success of the operation and he promised to have
Poland's foreign debts cancelled. The lobbying increased, the Main Stream
Media was brought under control so that gradually the idea of NATO expanding
to include Poland was no longer considered to be a dangerous provocation.
The substantial ethnic Polish population of the United States celebrated.
And so NATO was brought up to the borders of Russia,
loaded with rockets (and atomic bombs?). Russia was declared to be the
enemy. The Neocons, led on by Victoria Nuland, meddled in all of this,
provoking the modern Ukrainian Banderites to its terror, inspired by the Nazi terror
against Jews, Poles and Romani, but in its present reincarnation principally
directed against Russian speaking people. And the result is catastrophe,
apparently cheered on by Poland. There are those who say that Poland would
like to regain the territories in the present day territory of Ukraine which
were part of the territory which was defined to be Poland between 1919 and
1939. Who knows? Hopefully, eventually, peace might return.
The subtitle of the book is: Bernhard Riemann and the
Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. I had thought that it would be
primarily a biography of Riemann, but we are told that very little is known of
his personal life. He was good friends with Dirichlet who appended some biographical notes to the
volume of Riemann's collected papers, published some years after his death.
And so we read short sketches of their lives and also of the lives of a few
other mathematicians of the 19th century. But the ambition of the book is to
describe Riemann's zeta function and the Riemann Hypothesis in such a way as to make these
things understandable to someone who had not studied mathematics, or perhaps
someone who was a student just beginning a first year course in mathematics.
It starts off in the style of the first lecture of an
Analysis 1 course for a beginning student, describing how analysis is based
on the idea of convergent series. We have a long-winded chapter describing
what prime numbers are, at least within the realm of the positive whole
numbers. We learn what it means to raise a number to some power. That is...
2 squared is 4. And so forth. All of this with huge amounts of examples with
numbers written out to the 10th or 15th place after the decimal point. The
book was first published in 2003, so the author must have been enjoying
fiddling with some sort of mathematical computer software. But I can't
imagine that a non-mathematician, wading through all of these trivial yet
tedious examples, would be similarly excited. I just flipped through all
this, looking for the more interesting biographical details.
Soon the author introduces the zeta function for real
values greater than 1, defined as the infinite sum found by Euler. But
immediately an argument is used to extend it to the region between 0 and 1.
More or less plausible. No proof. The non-mathematician, or the beginning
student will not understand this. What is he or she to do? Just accept
things without understanding them? And so it goes on. The idea of analytic continuation is not even mentioned despite
the fact that it is the basis of understanding the zeta function. As we
progress further and further things become sketchier and sketchier. Various
ideas are thrown about which the author has picked up in his conversations
with mathematicians who are presently working in this field. He tells us
that he doesn't understand these things himself. And I certainly don't
understand them even though I have given lectures on the elementary
beginnings to this subject. Some of these half-understood details are indeed
interesting. Much speculation. All of this would not be so bad if the author
had not thought it necessary to fill up his book with complicated
mathematical-looking formulas, the background to which is simply left out,
undoubtedly rendering them totally incomprehensible to the non-mathematical
reader. It would be better to try to understand the ideas by reading the
Wikipedia articles on these subjects which I have linked to here where these
things are described with much less fuss, although of course the relevant
background is still required.
It has been said that for a book written for the
non-specialist, the number of possible readers drops by half with each
mathematical formula which it contains. If true, then following the examples
in this book, raising the number one half to about the thousandth power,
using John Derbyshire's mathematical software, we will arrive at the
conclusion that only 0,0000000.......something people will read the book. In
fact, much less than one, a number so small that we can simply round it down
to zero. The fact that numbers of people have read the book, giving it 5
stars on amazon, awarding it a prize by the Mathematical Association of
America, shows that either: (i) more people that you think have studied
mathematics at post-graduate level and are actively involved in the field of
analytic number theory, or else (ii) more people than you think are prepared
to praise something that they don't understand.
Why are people obsessed with prime numbers? There are
lots of other things in mathematics and in life which are also interesting.
Only a small proportion of Bernhard Riemann's discoveries were concerned
with the zeta function, and it is only speculation that his thoughts on the
Hypothesis went much beyond the remark in his famous Lecture.
This is a biography of Dorothea Jordan, the most famous and beloved English
actress during her career around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries.
People wrote of her wonderful, captivating voice, like sweet, ripe fruit. I
try to imagine what it must have been like. The only actress I know of with
a voice that could be so described is Romy Schneider. But unlike Dorothea - or Dora as she
was always known - Romy Schneider was a tragic figure. And I don't know if
she sang. Dora Jordan could bring the two thousand and more visitors at the
huge Theatre
Royal at Drury Lane to tears, of joy, with her songs. With her happy
being. They laughed along with her. She had them in her hand, night after
night, throughout her career of over thirty years. Half of her roles were in
Shakespeare, filled with song, but also contemporary plays, in particular The
Country Girl.
She is also remembered for being together with the future
King
William IV for over 20 years, having 10 children with him. In fact she
had 14 children in all. In those days it was nothing special for an actress
to perform even in a state of high pregnancy; roles for which pregnancy
would be out of place: for example playing a male character. The audience
found this to be quite normal. Despite constantly performing, touring the
country, she was a dedicated, loving mother to all her children.
She grew up in Dublin as Dorothea Bland. Her father,
Frances Bland apparently married her mother and they had six
children, but then he abandoned the family to marry someone else, using the
argument that the first marriage was without the agreement of his father
when he was still less than 25, or whatever it was, and was thus illegal.
And such an argument was upheld in the law of the time! The family was left
practically destitute. Dora began her acting career as a child to support
the family. Then the manager of the theater in Dublin, Richard Daly, made her pregnant against her will.
Disgusted, she left for England where she performed with a touring company
for three years, eventually making a triumphant entry onto the London stage.
Richard Ford, the son of one of the owners of the Drury Lane theater,
promised marriage if he could get the approval of his father. They lived
together, everywhere recognized as husband and wife, having three children.
Yet he continued to hesitate to marry her. Her many admirers included
William, the Duke
of Clarence, and she confronted Ford, saying that if he would not
marry her then she would go to William. And thus began her 20 years together
with the future king. It seemed an ideal relationship. He was a devoted
father and he loved Dora. But she was a commoner, and even worse, a famous,
celebrated actress. There was no question of marriage, and indeed she was
completely excluded from the rest of the royal family. William was the third
son of King George III who placed impossible restrictions on his children,
not allowing them to have sensible marriages. Thus his daughters remained
unmarried and his sons produced numbers of illegitimate children, but no
official progeny to inherit the throne. The result was that the monarchy was
considered to be degenerate and many thought it should be done away with.
But with the death of William III, the young Victoria from another branch of
the royal family was brought in to be queen.
Given this situation, after 20 years with Dora and the
pressures of the aristocracy, William tried to find a legitimate wife. He
wooed one woman after another of the various European royal families, being
rejected, but finally marrying a German princess. Dora received a
substantial yearly sum added to her income from the theater. But William was
deeply in debt. Dora had tried to help him during their time together,
giving him large sums from her own income, but his expenditures were simply
to great. For example he had Clarence House built in London which, at the time of
writing, is the official residence of King Charles III and his Queen
Camille.
Dora was always generous, giving freely to her children.
The daughters from Richard Ford married and their husbands saw no reason to
have professions and work, given all the money which seemed to be freely
flowing about. She went on a last tour, earning enough to retire into old
age in comfort. But being overly trusting, she had signed some sort of
agreement with one of her sons in law, leaving the details blank. And he
robbed her of everything, leaving her deeply in debt and in danger of being
arrested and thrown into a debtors prison. She fled to France, living
anonymously in Paris, destitute, where she died. Such a sad ending, and such
a contrast with her wonderful life.
Her daughters with William married into the high
aristocracy, being accepted into a society from which Dora was excluded,
while the sons in their military careers were the "bastards", the laughing
stock of the other officers.
At the end of the Second World War all of those countries
of the "third world" which had been colonies of countries of the "first
world" had the ambition to become independent. (Of course the "second world"
was the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites.) Also many people
in the countries of Latin America wished to become more independent of the
United States and the oppressive local oligarchs which it supported. All of
them had suffered under the excesses of an out of control capital system and
dreamed of a more just society. They had not known the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith. Instead they had only
experienced the very visible and brutal hand of their colonial or
neo-colonial masters. What was the alternative to this rapacious, out of
control capitalism? Should we call it socialism? Or communism? The groups
who called themselves communists had little or no contact with the
government of the Soviet Union which everybody could see was also a
repressive system. And yet, particularly in the United States, a witch-hunt
developed, finding "communists" everywhere. A religion. The Evil, the Devil,
must be found and destroyed. The greatest believers in this new religion
were the oligarchs who were afraid that their riches and their future riches
might be endangered.
Encouraged by the CIA and the other secret services of
the USA, horrible campaigns of violence and torture were carried out
throughout Latin America, especially in Brazil, eliminating completely all
possibility of change. Of course there was Vietnam. But the worst excesses
were in Indonesia where Suharto
was installed in power with the murder and torture of millions of people,
accompanied by almost unimaginably horrible excesses. The surviving
population has been cowed into a state of frighted timidity, afraid to think
of anything which might be even slightly contrary to the wishes of their
masters and of the USA. This is the title of the book. The Jakarta Method.
And so now, as I am writing this, the skies over Germany
are rumbling with what is said to be the largest maneuver NATO has ever
performed, with a couple of hundred airplanes flying impotently in circles
around one another. Will Russia, which has recovered from both the evils of
Stalin and the oligarchs of the Yeltsin era, avoid becoming the latest
victim of the Jakarta Method? Hopefully we might emerge from this dangerous
time into a more benign world with different systems and different countries
competing peacefully with one another.
I had always imagined Jane Austen to be a withdrawn, introverted type of
person, sitting alone at home writing her romances while regretting the lack
of romance in her own life. But this book tells a different story. Her
father was rector of the church in the obscure village of Steventon. It was
a large family, many brothers and sisters. Lots of cousins, uncles and
aunts. Some very rich. But the Austen family existed on the modest income
the father derived from the church and from his private school, boarding a
few boys from more well to do families. There was no question of a dowry for
the daughters; prospective husbands would certainly not be marrying into a
fortune. And yet one of the sons inherited a large estate and fortune from a
great aunt. Other sons went into the navy - one becoming in later life an
admiral - or became ministers of the church. When Jane Austen was a child
amateur plays were performed by the family together with other members of
the gentry class in the neighborhood: Shakespeare as well as more
contemporary plays, for example those which Mrs. Jordan had been acting in.
When writing letters to one another they often wrote in poetry. Other
members of the Austen family also had literary ambitions.
When Jane was perhaps 20 she fell in love with a visitor
from Ireland, a relative of some neighbors, and he was in love with her. But
he had no income and so he was quickly sent back. There was no question of
marriage. Later, when she was 30 or more, one of the squires asked her to
marry him. She said yes, but then after a sleepless night she withdrew her
consent. It would have been a relief for the family, financially, if
she had gone through with it. The man later married someone else and we read
that although he had a slight speech impediment, he lived on with a large,
happy family of his own. But Jane Austen said that she could only marry
someone she deeply loved.
She was very close to her older sister Cassandra who had
been engaged to someone who died before the marriage could take place.
Cassandra then resolved never to marry, and perhaps Jane went along with
that. They gradually took on the roles of looking after all the various
children of their brothers and sisters and cousins, traveling for extensive
stays at the different houses of the relatives spaced about in England. Jane
Austen's first books were published anonymously, to much acclaim. But she
hardly earned more than a small pocket money from the royalties before she
died at a young age.
I've forgotten which of her books I've read. Certainly I
did read Persuasion some time ago and wrote about it here.
Undoubtedly also Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility
many years ago, all lost to memory and confused with the various television
films of the books. I have certainly never read Emma, and so I
downloaded that book via Gutenberg.org, but quickly got bored with it,
irritated with the main character, and gave up.
There was strange casting in the recent Netflix film of
Persuasion, very different from the older BBC film. But perhaps the BBC
version, reflecting the fairy tale fluff of much of its present "news"
coverage, may be the less authentic of the two.
When the inmates of a prison become unruly the
authorities sometimes order a lockdown. The prisoners are locked
into their cells. The prison guards might come in to the individual cells;
heaven knows what they do to the prisoners there. And who knows what happens
in cells filled with larger groups of criminals locked together inside,
consumed with anger and frustration. In the year 2020 many people who had
not thought that they were in a prison suddenly found themselves to be
locked down. In some of the cells, horrible things took place. Cases of wife
beatings multiplied. There was a dramatic surge of young children beaten
senseless, taken to hospital, thought to be dead, locked in together with
their tormentors.
Here in Germany, owing to the memory of the Nazi GESTAPO
and the communist STASI, there was no real lockdown. I just went on with my
life, practicing the viol, going for walks and runs, bicycling, reading,
observing people walking in the open with silly cloths on their faces. The
only restriction was that when going to the shops people were required to
wear some sort of mask. We only shop once a week, so I only had to endure
that suffocating masked feeling for a half hour or so. For some months - too
many - schoolchildren were required to sit in school the whole day, masked.
I don't know how much they suffered, but they do seem to be back to normal
now. At first in the shops some people made fun of the whole business
wearing World War I gas masks. I also saw one or two people wearing those
birdlike, beaked masks one sees in pictures of doctors in the middle ages
during the plague. In fact I even looked it up in Amazon.de and found
numbers of such plague masks on offer, but I didn't bother ordering one. It
was said to be illegal for more than two people, or whatever it was, to
gather together in a house (exceptions were made for families). Yet a friend
told us of clandestine parties in isolated houses where everybody got
together, sang songs, had dinner, played music, and discussed the evils of
the world.
It seems that the madness was most extreme in the United
States, and unfortunately it was equally extreme in the other English
speaking countries - the so-called FIVE EYES. While the Wikipedia is a good thing for
quickly looking up a fact or two, it is also very much an organ of the FIVE
EYES. For example we can have a look at the Wikipedia page of the author of this present book and
have a laugh... or a frown of despair. He has had a very distinguished
academic career and has advised political institutions and government
agencies of all kinds for many years. As the lockdown fever - a symptom of
the hysteria - began to spread through society, he wrote various articles,
pointing out the dire consequences. These were noticed and he was asked to
come to Washington. Although he was working continuously, reading all the
medical literature as it was coming out, he brought along a copy of Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland for light reading in the evening to go to
sleep. But he soon discovered that the real-life COVID rabbit hole was more
strange and absurd than anything Lewis Carroll had imagined.
The face of COVID-mania on television was Anthony Fauci,
who was also present in the various meetings of the official Task Force. But
the real power was with Deborah Brix. The author only became a member of the
Task Force in the summer of 2020 when things had settled down into a fixed
routine. The message was LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN, accompanied by
TESTING, TESTING, TESTING, and MASKS, MASKS, MASKS. The meetings were
chaired by Vice President Pence. He was extremely nice to everybody, and our
author, Scott Atlas, was enthusiastically greeted. Everybody told him how
wonderful it was to have such a distinguished person on the Committee. Only
Brix, Fauci, Atlas and another name I've forgotten had any medical
qualifications. The others were political advisers who were either trying to
get Trump reelected or else gotten rid of. At first good old Scott, as
everybody called him, enthusiastically described all the latest published
research on COVID, the effects of the lockdowns, the masks, and the testing.
He described what he thought was the best strategy: opening schools since
children had essentially zero risk from the virus, but isolating and testing
more strongly the risk groups - the elderly, the obese. Everybody listened
politely with glazed eyes as he described in detail the latest literature,
the science. Then Vice President Pence thanked him very politely, as did
everybody else, a resolution was passed to increase even further the
lockdowns, the testing, the masks, for everyone, and Dr. Brix resumed her
strenuous mission, touring the country, spreading the Message.
At one meeting, Deb (that is Dr. Brix) mentioned a
possible consequence of the virus, struggling to mispronounce a complicated
technical word which described some sort of medical condition. But Scott
realized that Deb didn't know what she was talking about. He explained what
the word was, what the condition was, and the fact that he had personally
dealt with hundreds of patients with the condition. Tony (that is Dr.
Fauci), after a few embarrassing demonstrations of his ignorance when
responding to Scott's descriptions of the latest medical research, kept his
mouth shut and simply followed everything Deb had to say. But under the
surface, everything was not sweet and honey. Once, after the Vice President
left, Deb shouted at Scott in front of the others never to embarrass her
like that again. The fact of the mater is that both Deb and Tony had spent
their lives in government bureaucracy, out of touch with The Science. And
Scott learned that nobody seemed to know how Deb became part of the team.
They told him that she just seemed to have appeared from somewhere and had
taken over control of everything.
The author had various meetings with President Trump. He
tells us that Trump was very focused, asking sensible, relevant questions,
trying to understand what would be best. But of course he was nothing more
than the despised laughing stock of Washington. His word was worthless, or
at most it was worth making fun of in the "news" media. According to the
MESSAGE, Trump was the real Hitler. The stooge of Putin. And the
fact that Scott Atlas sometimes accompanied Trump to his press conferences
made him also a part of this real Hitler. Perhaps he was the real
Dr Mengele. People spit at him in the streets. They shouted in his face that
he was advocating the evil of Herd Immunity. Somebody should have
the courage to kill him. Rid the world of fucking scum like him.
What possible reason could these hysterical people have
had to accuse a distinguished doctor, a leading professor in the most elite
universities in the country, of being in favor of "herd immunity", as if
that was something monstrous? After all, corona viruses are, next to
rhinoviruses the main causes of common colds. They mutate quickly. People
get mild colds every so often and their immune systems become "updated" to
recognize the new variants. More aggressive variants cause people to stay in
bed for a couple of days, and so they are not spread through the population
so easily. They die out and the mild but more infectious versions survive.
My problem with this book is that on the one hand the
author describes in detail the literature which shows that masks are useless
when it comes to corona viruses. He also describes the well known problems
with PCR tests and with only testing for antibodies without taking into
account the various cells of the immune system which give long term
immunity. Still, in his meetings in Washington his message was to spare the
children, but to subject older people to more and more testing, isolation,
masks. The nurses should be tested every day, masked continuously. And he
was for cutting corners even further with "Operation Warp Speed", rushing
genetic injections into the public before they had been properly tested. I
suppose that now, after being spat at and threatened with murder, he might
be doubling down, telling people that genetic injections are a wonderful
thing and they should be applied in the future to all possible infectious
diseases.
And so we are left with Donald Trump. I had thought of
him as a meaningless clown. At least he didn't start any new wars. But his actions
were as dreadful as with all the rest of them. He increased the military
buildup of Ukraine. He had General Soleimani of Iran murdered, using a
cowardly drone strike. He brought in the despicable John Bolton to destroy
all the peace initiatives he had started with other countries. He gave many
billions to the pharmaceutical oligarchs in his Operation Warp Speed. But
who knows? Perhaps he had nothing to do with all this, being powerless in
the face of the hostile media, Washington bureaucracy, and all that. He was
left to deal with the world by means of a few pathetic "tweets" in the
internet. If we are to believe Scott Atlas then at the deep epicenter of
this madness, at the bottom of the rabbit hole which seems to be leading us
more and more quickly toward nuclear Armageddon, there might be a
loudmouthed, discredited, powerless clown who is sane in the midst of all
this insanity. But Trump should get out of politics since his role seems to
have become to simply goad the other oligarchs into increasing even further
their greedy desire for the profits to be gained from wars and drugs.
This is the story of a bicycle trip around the world by
the author and her husband in 1978-80. They started out in their
native Southern California, heading north into Canada then down through the
United States to eventually end up in Key West, Florida. They then flew
across to Spain, took an unpleasant detour into Morocco, went to England and
Scotland before peddling across the Continent to Athens. Then another
extremely unpleasant detour to Egypt before flying on to India where they
bicycled through to Nepal. They flew from Kathmandu to Bangkok, bicycled
from there to Singapore, then flew to New Zealand where they bicycled around
both islands, then flew to Tahiti for a couple of weeks before finally
flying back to California. It was a very enjoyable story to read. A road
trip. Very strenuous. Perhaps there have been people who have done the thing
in an even more strenuous fashion, filling in the gaps that the Savages flew
over. For example you could also include a trip around South America. And
then you could bicycle across North Africa from Morocco to Egypt rather then
enjoying the comforts of Europe. From Egypt overland to India would take you
through Iraq or Syria, Iran and Pakistan. For United States Americans that
would certainly be impossible now, but perhaps not in 1979. Then from Nepal
one would cycle through Bangladesh and Burma to get to Bangkok. From
Singapore one could travel through Indonesia and then fly to Perth in
Western Australia before bicycling to Sydney, and then flying on to New
Zealand. Has anybody done such a ridiculously difficult tour? The Savages
did want to take in the crossing of Australia, but a very rude and unhelpful
diplomat refused to issue them with visas. The short forays into Muslim
countries demonstrated what a horror Islamic men are to a woman on a
bicycle, even when accompanied by her husband. How can we explain their
primitive, repulsive urges, unrestrained by any civilizing influence?
The book tells us about where bicycling is good and where
it is bad. For example Florida is very bad. Drivers of cars and trucks tried
to force them off the road, nearly hitting them, shouting obscenities. Of
course Morocco was bad, but Egypt was the worst of the horror. North Dakota
was endlessly boring with constant stormy headwinds. And lots of mosquitoes.
Scotland was great, as was Nepal (if extremely dirty), and according to the
Savages, New Zealand was an absolute bikers paradise.
When crossing from eastern France to Austria they had a
short stretch through southern Germany, and they found it to be extremely
unfriendly when farmers refused to allow them to camp in their tent on their
properties. Everywhere else they had been welcomed with open arms. But
perhaps they misunderstood the bicycling culture of northern Europe. Many
people go on bicycle holidays for a week or two. There are bicycle paths
everywhere, taking you through woods or open fields, free of motor traffic.
In particular along the rivers there are designated bicycle routes, often
going for hundreds of kilometers. There are small hotels or pensions which
especially welcome bicyclists. And of course there are countless camping
grounds along these routes. In contrast to all this, when traveling through
North America, along the highways, stopping at farms, people were astonished
to see them. The whole idea of long distance bicycling was something new,
strange. And so the farmers welcomed this unusual couple. But a Bavarian
farmer, with hundreds of bicycles passing along the paths near his land,
would obviously tell these two Americans to just go into the hotel or the
camping ground down the road where there would be proper washing and toilet
facilities for them.
In fact our first bicycle tour was just then, in 1979 if
I remember it correctly. We went by train to Ostende in Belgium and traveled
along the coast to Texel in Holland. We took a week, staying in hotels in
the towns along the way, having dinner in the hotel restaurant and a nice
breakfast the next morning. We took our time, maybe only covering 50 or 60
kilometers each day. One day we even traveled 100km, but that was too much,
and I suppose we took it easy the next day to recover. I was astonished to
read of the distances the Savages covered, related in terms of miles. They
rode far more miles in a day than we would cover when reducing that figure
to kilometers. A few years ago, 30 or more years later, we bicycled from
here to Stuttgart, and then started along the Danube bicycle route. Now, for
our 75th birthdays we have gotten electrical bicycles, very nice machines
from KTM, an Austrian firm. Bicycling is a breeze. It would be nice to spend
a longer time traveling further and further along the Danube bicycle trail.
Staying in hotels, thank you, and enjoying the restaurants along the way.
One thing that struck me when reading the book was the
extremely friendly, welcoming, embracing people they met everywhere in New
Zealand, especially on the North Island. How can we then understand the fact
that New Zealand went all the way with these recent lock downs, masks,
injections, and all the rest? The idea of freedom was crushed. But perhaps
the people the Savages were meeting in New Zealand were the people of the
land, not those of the towns and cities. After all, even such a repulsive
woman as Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister, a "Young Global
Leader" of the World Economic Forum with her equine face, following the
orders of her leader, Klaus Schwab, was surely unable to send the police to
force farmers on isolated farms to stay inside.
I read an article about the Byzantine Empire recently in
the internet describing how long-lived it was, existing for over a thousand
years, maintaining a civilized style of life all through the period when
Western, Latin Europe was supposed to be in a "Dark Age". The author was the
author of this book, someone who is apparently a great figure in the study
of Byzantium. I would have liked to read one of his histories, written from
a more modern point of view than, say, that of Edward Gibbon in his Decline
and Fall, but the Kindle editions are priced as highly as are the real
books which are bound and made of paper. I refuse to give Amazon so much for
that. Perhaps I should look in the University library, a place I have not
seen for years now. This book was being offered for a normal price. It is a
collection of a few hundred disjointed anecdotes, quoting Byzantine sources.
Chapter titles are: Marriage and the Family, Unorthodox Sex, Animals, Food
and Dining, Eunuchs, Medical Practice, and so on. Much of it rude. This is
not great literature, but still it is sometimes interesting.
This is the story of Grigori Perelman, the person who proved the Poincaré Conjecture. The author of this book, Masha Gessen, was born in Russia into a family of
Jewish heritage and as a child he took part in mathematics competitions,
thus sharing these attributes with Grigori Perelman. According to the
Wikipedia, the author is "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist". Rather
than being a he or a she, the article uses the pronoun "they" for him or
her, or whatever. But I thought that "they" is a plural. It is said that he
(they?) originally moved to the US in 1981 with his (their?) parents to
escape Russian antisemitism. He (they?) returned in 1991 when communism
collapsed, but left again in 2013 to return to the US to escape
anti-LGBT-ism. The author was unable to interview Grigori Perelman, who has
withdrawn from the world, but he (they?) did interview many of the people
who knew him. The author himself doubts whether Perelman would read this
biography of his life, but if so, I wonder if he would agree with many of
the things that are to be found in the book.
We are told about the math clubs in the schools of
Russia. They are like sports clubs. But rather than playing football or
whatever, the children are given a list of logical, or arithmetical puzzles,
and the winner is whoever solves the puzzles correctly in the least possible
time. The goal is to take part in the formal competition associated with the
Olympics of Mathematics, or International Mathematical Olympiad. We are told that,
as with any competitive sporting endeavor, success only comes through years
of training. Grigori Perelman's trainer during his school years was Sergey Rukshin, a mathematician who has guided the
careers of many other famous mathematicians as well. All of this was new to
me. There was certainly no mathematics club at the simple school I attended
all those years ago. And anyway, I wasn't interested in clubs.
Apparently this whole idea of having an Olympics of
Mathematics, mathematics clubs, and all of that originated with the great
Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov. According to the book, Kolmogorov
was homosexual, and his lifelong partner was Pavel Alexandrov. But according to the Wikipedia,
Kolmogorov was married to Anna Dmitrievna Egorova, a woman, so maybe this
story about Kolmogorov was just wishful thinking on the part of the author.
In any case Rukshin told the young Perelman, who had been practicing the
violin, that he should put a stop to that and instead devote all of his time
to solving these mathematical puzzles. Music, books, everything else were a
waste of time. Also he was told not to waste time with girls, not to kiss
them. And so as the years went by, Perelman became the greatest mathematical
puzzle solver, not only in Saint Petersburg, but in all of Russia. The
Olympics of Mathematics in 1982 was held in Budapest. Before the
competition, the Russian National Team withdrew to a training camp which
followed the principles which had been laid down by Kolmogorov. This
involved runs, swims in cold Russian lakes... It was all boys. Perelman,
whose ambition and pride were enormous, devoted himself to all of these
exercises and in the end he, along with two others, obtained a perfect score
at the Olympics, receiving a gold medal. Reading all of this makes me
realize why there are so many great Russian and Eastern European
mathematicians in the world these days.
The author tells us much about the antisemitism of the
Soviet Union. Jewish people were refused entry into universities. But then
he tells us that unlike the Nazis of Hitler's Germany, the idea of
Jewishness was not clearly defined. A person was declared to be Jewish if he
or she had a "Jewish sounding" last name. Apparently the name Perelman does
sound Jewish, at least in the ears of the Russian authorities of those days,
and therefore Perelman's application would have been blocked. He would have
been sent to some sort of an obscure technical college. However, another
rule was that a winner of a gold medal at the Olympics of Mathematics was
entitled to be admitted to any university he wanted. Thus Perelman attended
the School of Mathematics and Mechanics at Leningrad State University.
There he experienced the highest levels of advancement
imaginable. His supervisors included Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Yuri Burago, working on the theory of Alexandrov spaces which, fortuitously, became useful
in his work on the Poincaré Conjecture. He was able to prove a number of
important theorems and so he was invited to the United States where he gave
various lectures and had a few temporary appointments. He was offered a
position as assistant professor at Princeton but he insisted on having
instant tenure, which was refused. And so he returned to Saint Petersburg,
nominally to a position at his old university, isolated, living off the
savings he had made in America while the chaos and economic catastrophe of
the Boris Jelzin years in Russia passed over him, staying in his mother's
apartment and solving the great problem.
The solution was based on a method developed by Richard Hamilton twenty years before. But Hamilton had
gotten stuck in the details, unable to proceed. It was these technical
details which Perelman was able to overcome. Therefore one could say that
Perelman had filled in the gaps of Hamilton's proof of the Poincaré
Conjecture and the more general Thurston Geometrization Conjecture. He posted his
papers on the internet for everybody to see, not in a commercial, peer
reviewed mathematical journal. But they were difficult to follow. Even the
people who were expert in all things associated with Hamilton's work took
months, if not years, to eventually acknowledge that the proofs were valid.
They wrote books trying to give a complete, self-contained, connected proof.
In particular one such book was written by two Chinese mathematicians and it
was hailed in China as being itself a large part of the final proof. It was
asserted that the proof was 50% due to Hamilton, 25% due to Perelman, and
30% due to those two Chinese authors. (The author of that statement seems to
have been unable to understand simple arithmetic.) Of course the two Chinese
professed their innocence of all such nonsense, declaring that indeed
Hamilton and Perelman were the exclusive provers of the theorem.
Perelman wanted nothing to do with all this squabbling.
He rejected all offers of professorships at American universities. He
rejected the million dollar Millennium Prize money which had been put up by Landon T. Clay, an American oligarch, hoping thus to
associate his name in history with the achievements of others. And so
Perelman withdrew from the world, living with his mother in Saint
Petersburg, saying that he is no longer interested in mathematics and
refusing all requests for interviews. Perhaps it would have been better if
the Poincaré Conjecture were not so well known, not associated with a
million American dollars. Perelman would have had the satisfaction of having
solved it; he would have enjoyed the respect of the few other mathematicians
who were interested in such things; and he would have become a professor at
a leading university, teaching courses, encouraging students in the manner
of his early problem solving, leading a fulfilled life. But as things stood,
if he had accepted a professorship then he would have been either (i) the
person who had done it all just for the million dollars, or else (ii) the
person who stupidly threw away a million dollars.
After all, is the Poincaré Conjecture really the greatest
thing in mathematics which has ever been done, as Masha Gessen, the author
of this book, suggests? What is this idea of a 3-dimensional manifold? It
starts with our usual vision of 3-dimensional physical space, then we
imagine the space might curve about in some way, connecting with itself,
producing all sorts of possible imaginary spaces in the eye of the
mathematician We go on to other dimensions, 4, 5, and so on, imagining them
using other complicated mathematical thoughts. Of course theoretical
physicists are always keen to incorporate the latest mathematical results
into their subject, producing reams of abstruse publications. Who knows what
lasting value they have?
Without detracting from the greatness of what Grigori
Perelman has accomplished, it seems to me that Andrew Wiles, who finally completed a proof of
Fermat's Last Theorem, must be just as great. After all, while the
3-dimensional topology of the Poincaré Conjecture languished in an obscure
corner of mathematics for a hundred years, Fermat's Last Theorem was the
focus of many of the greatest mathematicians for more than 400 years. Large
parts of modern abstract algebra were developed in order to try to prove the
theorem. And any child can understand Fermat's Last Theorem. It is a simple
statement about everyday arithmetic, almost impossibly difficult to prove.
Both of these theorems were not proved by one person.
They are the culmination of many theorems and programs of research, carried
on by generations of mathematicians. Perelman and Wiles were the last links
in a long chain of steps which finally completed the respective proofs.
But how pleasant it would be to live in another world
where it would be possible to prove both of these immensely difficult
theorems using simple, elegant arguments which could be grasped at once by
the non-specialist and written down in a few pages of clearly expressed
mathematics.
The author thinks that the Old H.G. Wells is not
such a good subject for a biography as is the Young version. Wells
wrote many things, perhaps in his later years not so interesting for the
modern reader. Of course when I was young, even in school, I read the
science fiction stories: War of the Worlds, Time Machine, Invisible
Man, Island of Dr. Moreau. Then years later, maybe not so many
years ago: The Sleeper Awakes, and Kipps.
The story of Kipps had much to do with Wells' young
years. He was forced to do an apprenticeship in a haberdashery, standing
about, serving customers for 10 or more hours each day, earning almost
nothing. Indeed, when I go into the shops in town I always feel sorry for
the salespeople who are tied down with such meaningless jobs. Kipps is
liberated by an unexpected inheritance of £25,000. (Wells was liberated only
very gradually and with difficulty through much work, studying and writing.)
Given that inflation has reduced the value of English money by a factor of
100 - which the internet inflation calculators tell us - then that would be
the equivalent of £2,500,000 in today's deflated money. In the story, Kipps
uses something like a tenth of his fortune to have a huge house built for
him on the south coast of England with many bedrooms, kitchens and all sorts
of luxuries. This seemed to me to be unrealistic since £250,000 of today's
money would only suffice for a modest cottage these days. Yet reading of
Wells' actual experience we see that he had Spade House, an opulent mansion, built for a mere
£2,000 in 1901. Since the cost of building a house consists mainly of the
wages of the construction workers, we see that laborers were paid very
poorly relative to their position today.
Wells spent freely, always remaining just above the level
of bankruptcy despite earning well over one or two thousand pounds each
year. After finishing the book, thinking to read something more from Wells,
I downloaded Anticipations from gutenberg.org. This was written in
the first years of the 1900s, and Wells tries to imagine, to anticipate,
what life would be like in the year 2000. I only made it through the first
few chapters, but his discussion of economics was interesting. He tells us
that the idea of shareholding only developed in the 18th century.
Prior to that, wealth was either kept in gold or silver, or else in actual
physical property: land, buildings, livestock... Things that you actually
owned: real estate. Your wealth involved responsibility, keeping
things in repair, defending it from whatever might diminish it. But the
modern share holder simply owns shares, mutual funds, held in some bank, or
some vague internet thing. It is held without responsibility, eventually
perhaps being sold for some unearned profit.
Wells foresaw what this irresponsible share holder class
would come to. And this is part of what The Sleeper Awakes is about.
A member of the share holder class has fallen into a coma; he sleeps for
perhaps 200 years or more and then awakes to find that his share holdings,
earning compound interest and thus growing exponentially, have grown to such
an extent that he now owns the entire world. (Wells did not foresee the
modern phenomenon of inflation which exponentially reduces the value
of money over time. These days money is based on debt rather than on some
immutable physical substance such as gold. This leads to a positive
feedback: increasing debt => increasing money supply => increasing
inflation => increasing debt.)
We are told what life is like in this future world. Power
is obtained by windmills turning electrical generators. I remember when
reading this all those years ago thinking that such an idea would be
nonsense since the wind does not blow consistently. And yet now we know,
through the sublime insight of the German Foreign Minister, Annalena
Baerbock, that it is not a problem! Happily all electrical energy is stored
in the electrical grid.
Transportation in the world where the sleeper awakes
takes place by means of moving bands, as in the big airports these days
where you would otherwise have to walk a kilometer or two to get to Gate
57a, or whatever. Wells imagined such bands next to each other, going
progressively faster, so that by stepping from one band to the next fastest
and then to a still faster one you would be transported very quickly by just
standing on the band. This sounds a bit far-fetched and impractical, typical
of the green ideology of today.
We are told that Wells considered his book Tono-Bungay
to be his masterpiece. So I also downloaded that one and started to read it.
It is again very much a kind of autobiography in fiction. It goes on and on
about how evil the degenerate aristocracy and the share holding class of
England is. I soon gave up. We are told that it also dwells in fiction on
his various sexual exploits. Wells considered that marriage was a
discredited, outdated institution that would be done away with in the future
to be replaced with free men and women, enjoying unrestrained sexual
relations. In reality he remained celibate before marrying his cousin,
Isabel Mary Wells at the age of about 25. Apparently the wedding night was a
catastrophe. Soon the marriage was settled in divorce. He then married Amy
Catherine Robbins, who he decided to call "Jane", for some reason. They
certainly did not wait for the wedding night. But also they agreed to have
an "open" relationship. We do not read that "Jane" had many lovers wandering
about the house, satisfying her occasional sexual urges. In fact all of this
is really very unfair. The gradually aging man in such a relationship,
especially if he is famous and is earning huge amounts of money, finds
himself in the pleasant position of having flocks of increasingly young,
active, intelligent, nubile women throwing themselves at him. And he takes
them, one after the other. On the other hand, the gradually aging woman,
married to the famous, wealthy man, is seldom thought to be attractive by
all the increasingly younger men who are instead looking for attractive
young women. Does the old man who has exploited all of these opportunities
arrive at a state of happy contentment? In any case "Jane" died in 1927 at
the age of only 55.
When I first arrived here in Germany all those years ago
there was a member of the Faculty who I didn't get to know, but whose name I
remembered. He soon left to go elsewhere. But then more recently there was a
film on television, a documentary made by a young man, the son of that
mathematician. It was about his mother who had developed an advanced form of
dementia although she was not so old, and the film accompanied the process
of her loss of mind and her dying. We were told that she had agreed to have
an "open" marriage and that the husband had had many other women. It was not
said that this was the cause of her fate; but surely it was. Worries,
loneliness, sleeplessness will grind a person down. I have read that one of
the main functions of sleep is to clear the brain of the waste products
which accumulate in the fluids around the cells during the waking day. If
you don't sleep enough then all of this can build up, causing dementia. A
sad fate.
In contrast, what can be better than to sleep long and
peacefully beside a loving spouse through many happy years of marriage?
The first four minute mile was run by the author in 1954.
It was said by many that such a thing was impossible. The mile record had
improved from the start of organized amateur athletics in the middle of the
19th century in England, 4:30, 4:20, 4:15... slowly approaching four minutes
before Bannister finally smashed the four minute barrier. But could it be
that professional
runners in the 18th and 19th centuries had already run a 4 minute
mile? An interesting question. Certainly they were also very fast. Roger
Bannister wrote this book just a year or two after accomplishing his great
feat, but then in old age he added in a postscript to the book, telling us
about subsequent events. He tells us that more than 2000 people have now run
the mile in less than four minutes. It has become a banality; merely a first
step for a serious runner on his way to gradually trying to achieve world
class.
Roger Bannister was proud of being the first, but I am
skeptical of Bannister's dismissal of the records run by professional
runners of the past. After all, those runs were the subject of serious,
heavy betting. Large sums were bet for and against the result. And so the
course would have been very precisely measured to be exactly one mile,
beyond dispute. And the watches timing the run would have been very
accurate. After all, the chronometers of those days used for ships
navigation were extremely robust and accurate. The sporting magazines of the
time tell us of the results, and one of them was a bet on the four minute
mile - which was won.
During the 19th century, in the colleges of Oxford and
Cambridge (Bannister was a medical student at Oxford), the wealthy young
aristocrats began organizing running competitions amongst themselves. In
order to exclude undesirable lower class elements they specified that these
competitions were only open to amateurs. And this unfair, elitist
idea became enshrined in the code of the modern Olympics of 1896. Bannister
tells us that he only had a half hour, or perhaps an hour in the evening for
training after a full day on his feet of hospital work. Judging from the
narrative in the movie Chariots of Fire, in the 1920s even
professional coaches were looked down upon and it was considered to be
unsporting to employ them. But Bannister is not ashamed to tell us about the
professional coaches he used; so by the 1950s such things were allowed.
Bannister's rival was the Australian John Landy who, only weeks after Bannister's effort,
lowered the record. By 1958 the great Herb Elliot - a hero of my youth - set the world
record at 3:54.5. Thankfully now this amateur hypocrisy has long ago been
done away with. The current record stands at an incredible 3:43.13, run by Hicham
El Guerrouj. This record was set in 1999, twenty four years ago.
Nobody looks like running as fast as this for many years to come. It is so
impressive as to leave the results of those past heroes far in its wake. But
on the other hand we must remember that Herb Elliot was running on a
traditional "ash" track. There was none of the bounciness of these modern
synthetic tracks. And his shoes were made of thin leather with spikes, not
the modern elastic shoes which act like springs, giving an extra bounce at
every stride. And then there is the question of drugs which were not
available back in the 1950s. I would like to believe that champion middle
distance runners of today are free of such things... In any case it is often
said that alone the difference between an ash track and a modern track is
about a second per lap, or 4 seconds of advantage over the mile.
It is no longer usual to have competitions over the mile.
As far as I can see, only the United States continues to use these old
scales of measurement; everybody else uses the metric system. The mile was
supposed to be the distance covered by a roman legion after taking a
thousand strides. Then there is the yard, which is three feet. For some
reason, tradition seems to have settled on the number 220 yards. Doubling
this gives 440 yards - a quarter mile. On the other hand, the meter was
defined to be one ten millionth of the distance from the equator of the
earth to the north pole, but it has since been redefined in terms of some
sort of atomic frequency, combined with the speed of light. We have the 100,
the 200, the 400 and the 800 meter runs as part of the Olympics. One would
think it natural continue with the 1600 meter run which would be very near
the mile and be exactly four laps of the track, but for some obscure reason
they settled on 1500 meters, necessitating a start somewhere around the
first curve. Then 5000, and 10,000. But to be honest, whereas many years ago
I followed these things - the Olympics on television - with great
enthusiasm, now I can't be bothered. Apart from the electrifying
performances of Usain Bolt, life has other things to offer.
I was astonished to see the photo which was taken of Roger Bannister together
with John Landy, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the "first" four minute
mile. They can each be hardly more than 75 years old here. Landy seems
rather old for his age, but look at Bannister! What has happened to him? He
tells us in the Afterword to the book about all the very responsible
positions he has had in life. Medical professor. Dean of Oxford colleges.
Advisor to the British government. Landy had become Mayor of Melbourne. Thus
the moral of the story seems to be that becoming an important figure
is not compatible with the good life.
This is about madness. The author is a forensic
psychologist, dealing with the criminally insane; those put into closed
psychiatric hospitals rather than prison. He tells us that after many
years he has gotten a new position, and he is clearing out his old office,
looking at the cases he has dealt with in all that time. And so the book
describes various levels of mental disturbance and insanity by describing
in detail some of these cases. Some were indeed fearful. Forensic
psychology is not a profession for the weak of heart. But for me, who has
practically nothing to do with it, I can think of other things which seem
to me to be much more fearful, For example the situation of a man in
Ukraine being dragged off the street and immediately thrown into the
senseless slaughter. Or the possibility that it will suddenly lead to
nuclear war.
We are told how wonderful it is that there are
psychoactive drugs which often help these people. Given the very extreme
cases the author describes, we appreciate the role they play. But then
when we are told of the various mass shootings in the United States, it
often comes out that the shooter had been taking prescribed psychoactive
drugs which in some way had caused his behavior. It is easy to say that
society itself is mad, and so it is no wonder that some people act out the
madness in disturbing ways. But in the end, despite having read this book,
I realize that I don't really want to think about such things.
Lessons, by Ian
McEwan
Ian McEwan was born in 1948. This must have been the
most ideal, perfect time to have been born. Our generation has experienced
the growing prosperity of the last 75 years. Life has been easy. And so
McEwan celebrates this life with a novel about an imagined life with all
of its ups and downs. The protagonist is Roland Baines, also born in 1948.
And as with McEwan, Roland Baines' father was in the military, looking
after the various areas of British imperialism in the world so that, as
with the real life McEwan, he spent his early years in North Africa. He is
then sent to boarding school in England.
The little 11 year old Roland has a strange experience
at school. He is enrolled in piano lessons, and his teacher, the seemingly
straight-laced 25 year old Miss Miriam Cornell suddenly kisses him on the
lips and places her hand inside his shorts, touching him. Roland is
confused and he is glad to be assigned a different piano teacher with whom
he makes great progress. He avoids Miss Cornell, quickly tuning away if he
happens to see her in the distance. But in the evenings, in their
dormitory, while the other boys in the boarding school discuss their
sexual fantasies, Roland thinks of Miss Cornell, dreaming of her,
imagining what it would be like. And so when he is 14 he gets on his
bicycle and rides a few miles to the village where Miss Cornell lives in a
small house. It is as if she has also been waiting these years for him to
finally come. She first instructs him to clear things in the garden. To do
a few chores about the house. She is in control. Guiding Roland from step
to step. She puts a piece for four hands onto the piano and they play it
together. Roland is at first nervous, making one or two mistakes while
sight-reading; then they play it together again and it floats forth in
beautiful harmony. Miss Cornell guides Roland upstairs to her bedroom and
then through the full experience of sexual intercourse. He is completely
overwhelmed. He keeps coming back. Miss Cornell is once again assigned
Roland as her pupil and they spend many days together, playing music and
sex. Gradually as time goes by Roland reaches his 16th birthday; he cannot
be bothered with his other school work and so, at the end of the year, he
fails his exams.
Thus he leaves school without graduating. He works at
odd jobs, house construction, whatever. His life develops. It is a long
book with many different characters, women he marries and those he dosen't
marry. Various lessons of life. He ages. His profession is to play
sentimental "old time favorites" in the evenings on the piano of a lounge
in a London hotel. Soft, meaningless background music. A dead end job. He
achieves nothing in life; perhaps he can no longer be satisfied with
anything after all his emotions as a 14 year old boy.
He has now become 60 years old or so. A policeman tells
him that there have been rumors of a female music teacher who sexually
assaulted a small boy. He seeks out Miriam Cornell who he finds living in
a large, elegant London mansion, and he pretends to be someone who wants
to take lessons from her. She is still an elegant woman. Roland, who is
hardly elegant, confronts her with his wasted life. He threatens to report
her to the police, and she tells him an elaborate story about her feelings
all those years ago. The guilt and so forth. It is an empty threat. He has
no intention of going to the police.
In the final parts of the book Ian McEwan tells us
through Roland, his apparent alter-ego, about his views on politics and
everything else which fill the pages of the present-day Guardian
newspaper. In fact we learn that McEwan even writes articles for the
Guardian. Thus Roland's son has become a major scientist for the Potsdam
Institute for Climate Research, or whatever it is called, writing computer
programs to show that the world is burning up.
***
Remark: The weather here is cold and wet despite the
Guardian claiming that the world is hotter than it has ever been before.
Or at least the last 100,000 years, or a million, or whatever.
***
Then Roland wears his medical mask everywhere, telling his family that
they cannot visit him. He is angry about Boris Johnson for not locking
everybody down much earlier and longer than was the case. He is especially
angry about the people who have not taken their mRNA injections. They
should be put into prison, or at least into enclosed camps where the
authorities can concentrate on teaching them the proper respect for
authority. He cannot get over the fact that the British people voted for
Brexit. And on and on. Still, I enjoyed the book.
In a few places Roland compares his vacuous life to
that of Marlow, the figure in Joseph Conrad's Youth. And so I read
that, downloading it from Gutenberg.org. It is a short novella, or longish
short story. Similar to William Golding's Fire Down Below. Good
books to read.
Going back to older books. John Galsworthy published this one in 1918. I
started reading his famous Forsyte Saga but got bogged down in the
maze of characters which were introduced right at the beginning and I was
turned off by their unpleasant characteristics. But these short stories
were well worth reading. In contrast with a lot of the stuff I have been
reading lately, Galsworthy writes of higher moral principles. People
finding themselves in one dilemma or another and we wonder what should
have been done.
For example The Juryman has a comfortable,
complacent, if not cynical man being called to sit on a jury, much against
his wishes. It is the middle of the Great War. An unfortunate little man
who has been conscripted has tried to commit suicide. He is charged with
treason, and so on. If he had killed himself then England would have lost
a soldier which could have then more patriotically died under German fire.
The other jurors, who have themselves avoided becoming soldiers, express
their outrage at the cowardly behavior of the accused. But the protagonist
of the story is repelled by these false emotions and refuses to vote for
guilty. Thus the accused is pronounced not guilty and is returned to his
regiment, rather than being thrown into jail. Perhaps not the best
outcome.
The First and Last is about a successful,
established lawyer whose loose living brother is in trouble. He tries his
best to help him, putting himself in jeopardy, advising the brother to
flee. All to no avail. The Apple Tree is about a young man on a
walking tour with a friend from university. He injures his leg and so
stays in a farm while the friend returns to his studies. He falls in love
with the farmer's daughter, an innocent child of nature who is unfamiliar
with everything in the world of the young man. He says that he will take
her into his world and they will be married. When his leg is recovered he
travels to the nearby town to buy her fashionable clothes in order for her
to fit in with her future life, promising to return in the evening. What
should he buy? Everything seems wrong. Suddenly he meets an old friend who
is holidaying nearby. The friend's sister and others are there as well.
They insist that he come swimming with them in the afternoon. Everything
is so friendly, so natural. The sister is beautiful. They are part of his
life, his natural circle of friends. He stays the night in a hotel. They
have a wonderful time the next day as well. The story then jumps years
into the future. He has a beautiful family; his wife is that sister and
they have a number of children. On a drive in the countryside they stop
for a picnic and he recognizes the farm where he had stayed. He asks about
the people there and he is told about the young maiden, such a lovely,
wonderful girl, who had died of a broken heart.
Romance, by
Joseph Conrad and F. M. Hueffer
Hueffer was the son of Francis Hueffer, the German-born chief music critic
of the Times newspaper. The book was first published in 1903, before the
first World War. Hueffer changed his surname in 1919, becoming Ford Madox Ford and thus apparently less Germanic.
It is said that Conrad and Hueffer were good friends for many years.
A young Englishman, John Kemp, suddenly finds himself
aboard a ship bound for Jamaica, filled with various shady characters.
Although Kemp is impoverished, his uncle is an earl and he seems to have
various aristocratic Spanish relations, all resulting in connections with
wealthy plantation owners in Jamaica and Cuba. It is a swashbuckling
story, perhaps reminiscent of Robert Lewis Stevenson. Kemp falls totally
in love with Seraphina, a Spanish maiden, a cousin, the most wonderful,
perfect person in the world who is also the fabulously rich heiress to the
greatest fortune of Cuba. They escape from pirates, prison and lots of
other things in an unlikely sequence of implausible adventures to finally
live happily ever after in the last few sentences of the book. I read on,
curious to find out how things develop from one scene to the next, but we
really can't compare this with Conrad's more famous volumes: Lord Jim,
Heart of Darkness, and all that. If we are to assume that this is
basically a book by Joseph Conrad then it would seem that Ford Madox
Ford's influence disrupted his style. On the other hand if this was
basically a book by Ford Madox Ford then Conrad would have done better to
have just left him to it.
The author was an English historian. According to
the Wikipedia he was the favorite historian of three prime ministers:
Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson. The present book was
published in 1940, describing the catastrophic aftermath of the First
World War and how it led to the Second World War. The responsibility lay
chiefly with France, and in particular with the brutally rigid prime
minister, Georges
Clemenceau, while the other powers of the Entente stood by and let
it happen. After publishing the book, as the hysteria of the second war
led into an even greater catastrophe, the author, being an advisor in the
corridors of power, found his book to be an embarrassment, and so he tried
to suppress it, buying up as many copies as possible, destroying them. It
was no longer a popular idea to try and understand the enemy.
How easy it is to make generalizations: Germans
mindlessly obey orders; Russians are drunken brutes; Ukrainians are Nazis;
Americans are gun-loving killers. If we don't know anything else then we
might accept such ideas, especially if the newspapers and television have
been bought up by powerful financial figures and turned into a virtual
monopoly, broadcasting such ideas. Indeed, the author, Arthur Bryant has
been accused by some of being an anti-Semite, a Nazi. Such people have
either not read the book or else they distort the truth for whatever
reasons they have. There is a YouTube video of an interview with the author as an
old man.
The book describes the situation in Germany during the
First World War. Owing to the blockade of the North Sea by the British,
large sections of the German population began starving, living in
destitution, there was abject poverty everywhere. The war ended when
sailors of the German navy refused to sail out in a hopeless, last ditch,
suicidal mission to finally break the blockade. Terms were agreed for the
surrender on the basis of a fair plan put forward by President Wilson of
the United States. But as soon as the Germans, Austrians and Hungarians
gave up their arms, these terms were thrown aside and crushing, very
unfair terms were imposed. It was specified that Germany must transfer
impossible amounts of money to the victors. This led to the inflation,
destroying most peoples lives. The author describes how as a young man he
had traveled to Germany, living like a prince in great luxury while only
spending a pound or two of English money. Similarly people in Germany with
relatives or friends in England or America who sent them small amounts of
money could buy up huge amounts of value, becoming suddenly rich out of
the suffering of others. This led to great resentments. And still, even
ten, fifteen years after the end of the war, into the Great Depression,
the financial interests in France, England and America kept insisting on
huge reparation payments from Germany. Is it any wonder that this led to
the catastrophe of the Second World War?
Bobbi (Roberta) Gibb was the first
woman to run in the Boston marathon. In fact she was the first woman to
run in any marathon. The whole idea of a marathon run originated when the
first modern Olympics were organized in 1896. The ancient Olympics - which
didn't allow women - had no marathon. It continued in an uninterrupted
sequence every four years from 776 BC to 261 AD when the 260th Olympiad
was held, marking the last of the continuously recorded list of victors. Wars were suspended to allow the
Olympics to go on, plagues were ignored; the Olympics were more important
than such things. What a contrast with modern times.
The author was born in 1942 and thus she was 23 when
she first ran the marathon in 1966. As I remember 1966, just starting the
first year of university, I cannot imagine the restrictions on women which
Bobbi Gibb describes. The hall of residence at the Australian National
University where I stayed consisted of two large buildings containing
identical rooms for students. One of the buildings was for women and the
other for men. We all had our meals together in the central hall. There
were certainly no restrictions on women coming into the men's building or
men coming into the woman's building at any time of the day or night.
People just come and went as they pleased. It is true that few women were
taking the courses I was taking: mathematics, physics, and in the first
year, geology. But there was no suggestion that they would not be welcome.
What sports there were: tennis, running around the
sports ground, were done as much by women students as men. But for formal
sports competitions (which were nonexistent at the ANU) there was the
division between men's and women's competitions. After all, most sport
involves some sort of test of strength, and as a general rule men have
more strength than women. Therefore it would be unfair for men to compete
in women's sport. And if a woman were to feel unfairly handled if she were
to lose to a man in a woman's competition, I am sure many men would
equally feel unfairly handled if they were to lose to a woman in a men's
competition.
Bobbi Gibb tells us that her father was a professor of
chemistry at Tufts University in Boston. Her mother was a frustrated
housewife. The father laid down the rules and the mother and daughter
suffered. The mother drank wine to drown her sorrows, together with pills,
psychopharmica, prescribed by the doctor. Bobbi took to sleeping outside
in her sleeping bag, covering herself with a camping sheet if it rained or
snowed. She ran with the local dogs through the woods. To escape the
tensions at home she moved in with a more open-minded family. In 1964 she
stood on the sidelines and watched the runners of the Boston Marathon pass
by, and she resolved to enter and run herself.
She had studied at Tufts: mathematics and physics,
philosophy, but for some reason she had not taken a degree. Instead she
was studying art at an institute in Boston. She describes all the
restrictions she feels that she suffered as a woman. When I compare this
with the women students I knew in those days, I simply have to wonder what
sort of a world Boston must have been like.
In any case she tells us that in the summer of 1964 her
parents left for an extended holiday, leaving her in charge of the house
and their VW bus which the father had fixed up for camping. Bobbi decided
to take the bus and drive across the country to California, and she also
bought a puppy dog to accompany her. This was a great act of rebellion
since the bus was her father's special project and also he was strictly
against dogs, saying he was allergic to them.
There follows long passages describing her trip,
sleeping rough, taking long runs through beautiful landscapes. She tells
us of her love for nature, for the world. And when running she is
meditating about the world. Half of the text is in italics, representing
her inner thoughts when running. What is God? Is he - or it - the creator
of everything? But then what created God? She sees that life creates
itself and so she realizes that the whole of everything is self-creating.
Everything is love and beauty. She thinks about the physics she has
learned at Tufts and much of her philosophy revolves around such ideas. In
the middle of all this the following sentence appears:
Existence creates space and time within it, or
rather space and time are just the way we order events, so the events
define the distances and times, which we think we are measuring.
Well, indeed, this sentence can be thought of as being
a question in pure mathematics. She would have done well to have thought
further about how to formulate an appropriate mathematical theory to make
this idea precise rather than submerging it in loads of vague
philosophical speculations.
She tells us about her boyfriends. First there is
Will who went running with her and they had lots of talks together about
philosophy and all that when she was studying at Tufts. But he had joined
the Navy two years ago and was gone. Then there was John who was studying
medicine. She loved John and he loved her. But when she had proposed to
set off on her own to California in the VW bus he tried to stop her,
saying it was dangerous for a woman alone. Maybe he was right. But Bobbi
detected something of her father in this and so was angry with him.
Halfway to California the VW bus began making unpleasant noises. Pulling
into a VW dealer, she was told her that the engine was broken, it had to
be replaced with an new engine. So she sat in an armchair for a couple of
hours, giving us pages of further italic philosophical musings, and then
the car was finished. The whole operation cost $135.
Oh for those good old days of 1964! Just put in a new
motor and drive off into the sunset. No worries. She had earned $400 being
a "den mother" at a summer camp for children the month before, earning
enough money for her drive across America. That was three times the cost
of a new VW motor together with the labor of installing it. What a
contrast with the world of 2023! A new motor for a VW transporter would
cost well over $10,000, and it would take a week to put it in, whereas
being a "den mother" for a month these days would hardly earn much more
than $400.
She had lost a third of her funds for the trip, but
despite that, in San Francisco, after camping out on the beach with a
bunch of hippies, she decided to splurge and check in to the most
expensive hotel in town and eat the most expensive dinner in their
restaurant. Her funds were reduced almost to zero. She put an
advertisement in the paper asking for people who would share the expenses
of driving back to Boston. A group of (male) students answered, and they
set off, apparently intending to drive nonstop. When she was sleeping in
the middle of the night and one of the students was driving, the car
suddenly left the road and tumbled over. A write off. Nobody was really
hurt. They spent the night in a motel room together, Bobbi on the bed and
the students on the floor, and then she bought a train ticket and returned
to Boston. When the father learned about all of this he was hysterical,
accusing her of being a prostitute, saying she was no longer his daughter.
I suppose he was also upset about the loss of his car. She was confined in
the house as punishment (a 21 year old!) but John secretly came in and
they became intimate in the middle of the night by the fireplace. The
father suddenly stormed in in his pajamas. Shouting, screaming. She was
shut up in the bedroom as punishment. He rang up John's father, a pastor
of the church, who in turn shouted and screamed at John, telling him that
if he ever saw Bobbi again he would no longer be allowed to study and his
life would be ruined. And so John broke off all contact.
Then came Brandon. A suave student at Harvard. Rich
parents with an opulent Manhattan residence. Stockbrokers. Finance. Money.
She was taken to parties, became friends with the girlfriends who wanted
to marry into all this money. She even moved in with them in a large house
in Boston. But Brandon's rich father, uncles, the rest of them, smelled of
the smoke, the alcohol, the rich foods, the sleepless nights. Bobbi wished
that she was away, alone in the woods with her sleeping bag, under the
stars.
And then on Christmas Eve the telephone rang; was it
John, finally coming back? No. It was Will, on leave from the Navy base in
San Diego. He came over, they talked through the night, they agreed to
marry. And so she moved to California, now a married woman, training for
the Boston Marathon. She tells us that back in Massachusetts she had run
40 miles a day through woods, following the course of a cross country
rally for horses and riders. And in California she runs long distances,
well beyond a marathon distance. Her new husband, Will, seems strangely
distant. He is more friendly with his shipmates, leaving Bobbi alone in
their small house. But she has made a friend in California, a woman who
has inherited all the riches of a great beer empire, having an extensive
ranch with horses and all that. They stay together in the luxury of her
house into the night, Bobbi explaining the various points of her
philosophy of life and the world.
The time comes for the Boston Marathon of 1966. She
writes to the organizers, asking for an application form but instead
receives a letter telling her that women are not physically capable of
running such distances. The longest distance allowed for women's
competitions according the Amateur Athletic Association of America was 1
1/2 miles. But she decides to run anyway. Suddenly Will, who, unusually,
is home, is angry, refusing to have anything to do with it. He refuses to
drive her to the bus station in San Diego. Her rich, esoteric friend, the
beer heiress, does not suggest buying her an airline ticket to Boston. She
takes a taxi to the bus terminal and with the last of her money buys a
Greyhound Bus ticket to Boston. And so she sits in the bus nonstop for 3
days, day and night, arriving in Boston the night before the big race,
exhausted, and she calls her parents.
Why is she not with her husband? What is she doing
here? They decide not to explode with anger. They just ignore it, giving
her a huge dinner and putting her to bed. The next morning she asks them
to drive her to the start of the Boston Marathon. Anger, shouting. The
father storms out, slamming the door, saying that he is going to the
regatta with the mother. Bobbi pleads with her mother, saying that she
will be setting a signal for women, something of lasting value. Eventually
her mother does agree to drive her to the start, but she quickly drives
back to Boston to join her husband at the regatta.
Bobbi hides in bushes, wearing a sweatshirt with hood
to hide her long hair. The race starts and she joins in. She feels good
despite the three days sitting in the bus and the heavy meal the night
before. Some of the runners behind begin to ask, "Is that a girl?" The
runners next to her tell her how wonderful it is that she is running. She
should take off the heavy sweatshirt and run freely. She does and
everybody begins to say that a girl is running. The local radio picks it
up and her progress is breathlessly followed. Women along the road cheer,
weep. A girl is running the Boston Marathon! The runners around her say
that this is a pace of under three hours. She is feeling good. Everybody
is cheering. She reaches Heartbreak Hill, but then she hits the "brick
wall". She must go on, staggering on for the sake of all women, and
finally she finishes in 3 hours and 20 minutes. Ahead of 2/3s of the other
runners. The governor of Massachusetts congratulates her. Everybody is
happy. She is driven back to her parents house and finds the street full
of cars, people everywhere, reporters clamoring for photos, interviews.
Her parents are back at home, not at their stupid regatta. They pretend
that everything is wonderful, that they are proud of their daughter. What
nonsense. What hypocrisy. And what an extraordinary book this is.
We read that Bobbi Gibb has become a person of historic
importance for the Boston Marathon and for women's liberation. She is an
artist, a scientist, a philosopher. No longer married to the simple-minded
Will. Did she marry John? She gives us a few hints, but perhaps not. She
is famous. But could it be that if had she not become famous then she
might have had the peace of mind to think more deeply about her thoughts
on physics and develop ideas of more lasting value?
The book starts off by telling us
that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate hundreds of different kinds of
foods. Different things in the winter and the summer, during a rainy patch
or a drought, there was always something to be found. They simply ate what
nature happened to be producing. I remember reading that the native
peoples of Australia or the San of Southwest Africa only needed to "work"
for an hour or two each day in order to gather enough nourishment to
satisfy their needs. In contrast with this, we modern people rely on very
few plants: rice, wheat, potatoes, maize, and so on. Huge fields are
planted in mono-culture, and this is necessary in order to feed all the
millions and billions of people in the world. But doing so we are open to
sudden crop failure: insects, bacteria, viruses, fungi. The author tells
us that we live precariously. As in the potato famine in Ireland in 1845,
suddenly from one day to the next a whole crop can fail. Indeed, the potato blight which was the cause of that famine
still exists and it remains a problem for modern agriculture.
We are told that almost all bananas which we have today
are essentially identical with one another. They are all produced by a
huge number of clones of a single plant and so they are practically
genetically identical with one another. Every banana you have ever eaten
is from the same plant. Surely this is a very fragile, hardly sustainable
situation.
Particularly interesting is the example of rubber
trees. In the 1930s, Henry Ford established a huge plantation in South
America in order to make rubber tires for his cars. But it failed. He
tried again and his second project also failed. He didn't take into
account the complicated ecology of rubber trees. Most raw rubber came from
Southeast Asia, and that was cut off by the Japanese in World War II. A
substitute of artificial rubber was invented, but it is inferior to
natural rubber. In particular, even today, airplane tires must be made of
natural rubber since artificial rubber would fall apart during the extreme
conditions of landing. But also the sidewalls of radial tires for cars
need natural rubber. Therefore if you were to go out now and kick the
tires on your car, you will be kicking natural rubber which has dripped
slowly from a rubber tree, probably from somewhere in Southeast Asia.
Why does rubber come from Asia rather than from South
America where the rubber tree originated? The answer is that the natural
enemies of the rubber tree, the fungi, the caterpillars and all that, do
not exist in Asia. They remain in South America so the trees can grow
easily in Asia, free of these pests. Yet what will we do when they
suddenly begin to appear in the vast rubber plantations of Asia? Or
perhaps native Asian insects, fungi, or whatever will adopt and attack the
trees. The same situation applies to cacao, which is mainly produced in
West Africa, away from its origin in South America. And coffee is mainly
produced in countries which are far away from where the coffee tree
originated in Ethiopia and Yemen.
The book describes how over the millennia farmers have
bred crops, crossed them with strains which are resistant to one thing and
another. But this is dependent on the existence of a large diversity of
wild strains. And so it is important to maintain large areas of
undisturbed natural landscapes. It would be ideal if half the land of the
Earth was left undisturbed, leaving the other half left for human
activities. Of course this will never happen. And so countless numbers of
important plants will become extinct. People only think about the animals.
Those horrible, nasty polar bears. The pandas. They are made to look like
cuddly little furry babies on television. When imagining scenes of ancient
dinosaurs we look at the animals, the vegetation providing just a basic
greenish background. But it is not these animals that are really
important. It is the plants and the unimaginably complicated relationships
between them and all the other forms of life which is invisible in the
picture. There is an interesting Youtube video where Rob Dunn talks about all the
microbial matter found in our homes.
The "green revolution" of 30 or 40 years ago increased
crop yields at the price of restricting plant diversity even further and
spraying everything with artificial poisons. And now we have glyphosate -
or "Roundup" - which is supposed to exterminate all plants except those
which have been genetically modified to survive a dowsing of glyphosate.
The author does not condemn these developments. He treats them as if they
are necessary for feeding the billions of people in the world. He also
describes positively the technology for genetically altering the genome of
plants, causing them to spontaneously produce artificial insecticides. But
surely this is making agriculture even more fragile, prone to disastrous
failures. The groundwater is becoming poisoned. As I have written here
somewhere before, in contrast with 10 or 20 years ago, we see few bees and
other insects in our garden. When traveling on the motorway for a few
hours in the summer, the windscreen does have numbers of insect splotches,
but much fewer than what used to be the case.
We buy almost exclusively "organic" food, that is, food
which is derived from plants which have not been sprayed with poisons and
which have not been altered using genetic engineering. It is somewhat more
expensive than sprayed foods, but not that much. More and more farmers in
Europe are changing to organic farming. The fields of organically grown
wheat, potatoes and all that look just as green and abundant as those of
"conventional" farms. Many people say that it is simply false to assert
that artificial poisons are necessary in order to feed the world. Often
the yields of organic crops exceed those of conventional crops.
Time and again Rob Dunn finds it necessary to invoke
the meme of "climate change". New crop varieties must be developed to
endure the imagined horrors of future climate. The last chapter I reached
was about Syria. He recounts the famine of 3000 years ago which is thought
to have resulted from an extended dry period lasting perhaps 200 years.
Then we are told that "climate modelers" have shown that Syria will in the
next few years experience a drought which will last for thousands of
years. The story then lurched into something about how evil President
Bashar Assad is, at which point I stopped reading the book.
Looking at the video, Rob Dunn seems to be an
interesting, intelligent person who has much to tell us. But he would do
well to switch off his television and let his brain recover from the
garbage it seems to have assimilated there. And he would also do well to
realize that the computer programs which "climate modelers" write are
unable to predict the "climate" even a year or two into the future, let
alone a thousand years. As they say: "garbage in, garbage out". But
despite this garbage it is a worthwhile book, describing the very
important yet little recognized work being done by a few individuals to
try to protect and preserve the diversity of plants in the world.
This one reminded me of all the
John Banville books I read last year. An old police officer, retired for
nine months, unsteady, frail, confused, progressing beyond the first
stages of dementia. He is living in an apartment attached to an old castle
overlooking the sea on the west coast of Ireland. We learn that as a child
he was an orphan in a Catholic orphanage. He was beaten daily by the
vicious priests. At night he lay awake in bed, a small child of five or
six, frightened of the footsteps of the priest coming ether to beat him
again or to homosexually rape him. When he was 16 he was finally able to
leave all of the horror and torture, joining the army to become a sniper
in Malaya, killing many people, and eventually an Irish policeman. His
wife was similarly an orphan in a Catholic institution who was
continuously raped as a small child. The criminal priests behind all this
evil had been protected by the Catholic Church, but some time in the past
of his career as a policeman he has resolved the situation. His wife has
long since died, as have his two children. He sometimes hallucinates about
them. But now the past is catching up. It is not an hallucination.
Just this past week I had a long and pleasant talk with
an Irish fellow who is even older than I am. He was an opera singer in
Italy, England, Ireland, and wherever opera is sung. He told me that he
attended a Catholic school as a child in Ireland, and so I asked him if he
knew of any suggestion of sexual abuse. But he said no, of course not. The
priests and nuns were fine, honorable people. His school was not a
boarding school, and certainly not an orphanage. Perhaps Ireland is not
always as horrible as John Banville and Sebastian Barry would make us
believe, despite their poetic prose.
