Books, Essays

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

A review of Love in the Time of Cholera (in the time of Coronavirus)

“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked. 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

Much has of course already been written about this astounding piece of literature; and it has been put upon unwilling students in World Literature classes around the English-speaking World. Both with good reason.  

The first thing I want to add to all that has gone before is this: if you cannot appreciate this novel, then you cannot yet read well; or, alternatively, you have chosen not to read well, which amounts to the same thing, in the end. The former is more palatable than the latter, because it implies that one day you may be able to read well enough, or that you are just the type of person that is not interested in reading well. Fine. You might be a great person. You might a great writer yourself. There are many many things you might do extremely well, and they might be far more practical and more fantastic than reading.  

As for the latter, there’s a chance that you might still come good, one day. The blinkers you have imposed upon yourself may be lifted. And I’m talking here about the many reviewers who have decided to not appreciate the book because of a moral imposition against actions of one particular fictional character in the story, as if there was some kind of encouragement in the story to be-like-him, or that is was advocating his behaviour; as opposed to creating a an all too terribly human tension between how you empathise and despise. I can’t understand how anyone reading this book could possibly read it that poorly, so I’m assuming it’s related to the importance of a Cause versus the reading of the book; in which case, I’d suggest you just stick to simpler literature and focus more on the Cause. You might do very well with your Cause, and achieve great things, and I might have great admiration for your achievements; but you cannot be taken seriously as a reader.  

You don’t get to have this both ways. 

One of the reasons I chose to read this book was in response to the Chinese Flu, the Cholera-of-the-moment (henceforth both shall be referred to as ‘the disease’, interchangeably). People have been reading Camus’ The Plague at a greater rate than normal for this reason, but I’ve read it several times in the past, and I have been meaning to get to Marquez’s Cholera since reading Solitude many years ago … and since all the problems caused in Victoria, Australia, when they put the novel on the HSC reading list. While Camus’ novel is much more actively disease-driven, and deals explicitly with methods of dealing with the disease, both works play with the sense of disease itself, using metaphor and the visceral in interplay with each other. 

Yarra Bend Park, Melbourne, Australia: 12/4/20, courtesy of X.T.

So I’m going to talk about it in terms of the disease that contextualises the story, and in terms of the disease that is contextualising us at the moment. Suffice to say that the book plays with structure masterfully while remaining highly readable; is beautiful in so many ways, both angelically and diabolically, because beauty has an infernal aspect too, its entropic capacity, and can destroy people as easily as create and augment them; and breaks every rule of good writing that you have heard of in the way that only pure genius can. 

By the time she finished unburdening herself, someone had turned off the moon. The boat moved ahead at its steady pace, one foot in front of the other: an immense, watchful animal. 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

The disease, remains a peripheral ghost-like thing throughout the story. It emerges occasionally in the background of the action. Death is ever present, and represented in the story in many ways other than the disease, such as through the many civil wars going on, through crime and through sexual violence.  

“The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.” 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

The warfare is always somewhere else. It’s reported on. But death in the cities comes more by decree, through laws and statements. Each of these things can be accounted for as a kind of disease, and with decrees, it’s a social disease. The pressure of people as a group over the individual drive, which can be seen directly in the relationship choices of the three central protagonists. And we, in the cities with our disease now, we die by decree also: there are running totals of figures, graphs, pie charts … and then the curious cures that keep ramping up. For our own good we must… And now, further, we must… Pie charts change, columns on graphs go down, up and down, and the decrees keep coming. 

There was no one else: the woodcutters had abandoned their trails, fleeing the ferocity of the lords of the earth, fleeing the invisible cholera, fleeing the larval wars that governments were bent on hiding with distracted decrees. 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

The economic collapse of the region despite all the advances that had been illustrated throughout the story is marked. But poverty too is a disease, and enough people have fallen under that flag in the region, caused by decree or not. There is maybe something of the nostalgic here, but there are also some quite concrete regressions also. Three conflicts are mentioned here, three forms of violence causing death: the bandits, the revolutionaries; the disease, that has no substance, that can’t be seen; and the legitimate power over the people. The first make demands, the third make decrees … the second is simply unseen, insubstantial, but also having the same effect. So, how to deal with it? 

From the time the cholera proclamation was issued, the local garrison shot a cannon from the fortress every quarter hour, day and night, in accordance with the local superstition that gunpowder purified the atmosphere. 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

How quaint it seems, and how unscientific. The good doctor fights differently, of course. And methods come and methods go. The search for the cure, the remedy, the course of pills … the vaccine! Oh, now the vaccine. This is also a purifier. And the announcement that the vaccine is here, this is also a cannon shot from the social media fortress of Somewhere Inc. that will sound like a cannon across so many accounts. It’s a symbolic act of violence against the enemy, which of course is the disease, in case we need reminding, and the many decrees are part of the symptoms, the social symptoms, like pustules or warts. They may leave scars. 

For there were no more wars or epidemics, but the swollen bodies still floated by. 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

…but she noted that none of them had the coup de grace in the back of the neck as they had at the time of the balloon. “That is true,” said the officer. “Even God improves His methods.” 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

Even after the disease has gone, and the violence of the bandits and the revolutionaries and the governments (interchangeably, depending on their fortunes) … even so, bodies are still floating in the river. These are the dead for which there have been no decrees, and the novel gives us nothing to explain them. The un-decree-ed dead. What disease must this be? Obviously, not a famous enough disease. Not notable through any decree. Not yet, at least. No-one provides us with a pie chart for these, so there is no protection. No flag to fly under. No cannon to fire.  

…although later the health authorities had obliged the doctors to sign death certificates that called the cases common dysentery. Besides, many times in the history of the river the yellow plague flag had been flown in order to evade taxes, or to avoid picking up an undesirable passenger, or to elude inopportune inspections. 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

In the end, the disease becomes something to hide in. The disease is a defense. Not the actual disease of course, which remains just as deadly as before … and if not that disease, then another one, maybe a new strain of something already floating around, insubstantial; or maybe something manufactured in a lab somewhere in China. Who knows?  

After all, everyone knew that the time of cholera had not ended despite all the joyful statistics from the health officials. 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

There are many different decrees on the subject, many more to come. But the trappings of the disease, the narrative of it, how the decrees can be used … all these social things become ways to break down and negotiate through other social problems, whether they be state-sanctioned murder, avoiding contact with the state, or even circumventing the social ramifications of a forbidden love, bad or good, approved-of or frowned-on. The morality of it becomes secondary.  

“The only disease my son ever had was cholera.” She had confused cholera with love, of course, long before her memory failed. 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

He never had the disease, but he had had a terrible love, a disease-level love, something that diseased his life, and made him infectious to other people too. People died because of him. And he was responsible for that, though the sense-of-disease he experienced mitigated his sense of responsibility, just as it leant to him a strange sense of purpose, that in one place seems beautiful and in another seems terrible. He issued out so many decrees on the disease himself, so much writing writing writing … if he had had Twitter, the storm it might have caused. The commentary. The nay-sayers. The yay-sayers. 

“Death has no sense of the ridiculous.” 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

Social distancing becomes their only recourse, in the end. Self-isolation on the river, where the bodies keep floating up and down despite the decrees and because of the decrees. There’s a strange kind of manic horror in the quarantine where hiding behind the false flag of a true disease sends them. Is it a victory or a defeat? You can’t really know. The diagnosis is unclear enough, let alone the prognosis. The captain of the vessel is going mad.  

For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. 

Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Edith Grossman) 

And maybe our disease is not this disease, but either way, it will go as it came. But the decrees will remain, though they might change form and shape. And bodies will still float down the river. Either way, we will keep up with the coming and going, even if we don’t know how.

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Uncategorized

The Uses of Pessimism

In emergencies we must switch from consensus to command, from freedom to submission, and from the order of the market to the order of the plan.

Roger Scruton

If Roger Scruton was still alive today, and I had the opportunity to ask him a question about this book, it would be:

“When, I wonder, does one know when it is right to adopt Fallacy in order to avoid the loss of Truth?”

And I suppose his answer might be something like this:

“When one no longer wonders.”

In this magnificent book—measured in tone, epic in scope, focussed in theme—Scruton makes his argument for civilization over tyranny. He’s in the kind of space that contemporary defenders of freedom of speech are in, whereby they are often told that this freedom does not correspond to a freedom from consequence. And there’s some truth to that … as long as it’s inconsequential consequence, like annoyance or unfriendliness; if the consequence is heavily consequential, such as loss of livelihood, assault, cancelation from society, imprisonment … right up to the Soviet bullet in the back of the neck, then, yes, it does imply a freedom from consequence, as without that, the freedom of speech becomes merely theoretical as opposed to practical.

But, even so, the onus of the argument has shifted to justifying freedom of speech—a self-evident good to those with a sense-of-common—as opposed to justifying not having freedom of speech. This involves on of Scruton’s identified fallacies, of which, more later…

The city is a community of neighbours who do not necessarily know each other, but whose obligations come from settlement.

Roger Scruton

But I came to this book (lovingly on the way to Scruton completion-ism) immediately after a book suggested to me by friends called “Bronze Age Mindset”: a book I lost patience with about a third of the way in. But it was an interesting thing to prelude Pessimism, because, while the authors of both books oppose what is now called ‘The Woke’ in contemporary society, they are also both poles apart in their response. Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) calls for a return to a mindset of the Axial Age that adopts the very fallacies that we crawled out from into the West; a zero-sum game life/death emergency mindset. While Scruton champions the development of agriculture as maybe the greatest achievement of mankind, BAP laments it as the descent into ‘bugmen’ status. While Scruton champions finally forgiveness and irony, BAP wishes for conflict and identifies irony as ‘faggotry’ (ironically, or otherwise). That such a thing as “Bronze Age Mindset” exists and is read if not widely but … AT ALL, is a testament to the degree at which the fallacies Scruton identifies have taken hold.

…we see the marks of the same transition – from wandering collectivities to free individuals, from clans and blood-brothers to law-abiding neighbours, from a life of emergencies to one of settled worship, in which the words and rituals are found to evoke the eternal, the reliable and the true.

Roger Scruton

The fallacies of Best Case Scenario, Zero Sum, Planning, Moving Spirit and Aggregation are mapped out beautifully, and for those who have heard Scruton speak, you can hear the timbre of his voice in your mind as you read… And he responds with a bottom up versus top down alternative, an ‘organic’ and ‘we’ approach (the ‘we’ First Person Plural) as opposed to the collective ‘I’. In this way, he contrasts the strawman argument of conservatism being essentially about individualism. The rights of the individual are important, of course, but only insofar as the individual is part of a group of other individuals who have shared interests in themselves as a group, past, present and future.

It’s ten years since this book was published, but it has matured like one of Scruton’s prized Burgundies. He admits at the beginning that his arguments are futile to those who live under the sign of one or more of the fallacies. In fact, to even point out any of these to the fallacious is to only, in general, further strengthen the hold it has on them. He is writing for those of us who do not, then. Are we perfect then? Are we so smart and the fallacious dumb? Does everything work out well for ‘we’ the holders of the great beacon of truth?

They accept the world and its imperfections, not because it cannot be improved, but because many of the improvements that matter are by-products of our cooperation rather than the goal of it.

Roger Scruton

Of course not. We have, in a sense, committed a terrible act, which Scruton compares to the first murder in the bible: we have killed our brother, we have turned our back on brotherhood and tribal alliances. Which of course makes us vulnerable to Believers outside of our agreed upon geography. ‘We’ have a land, a region, and an identification though this with others who we may not even know, but they are part of us within that agreement. And when disagreements occur, they are worked out on their individual merits and, in the future, reference is made to these solutions for further disagreement. There is not so much a top-down entity, God or god-like, but a grass roots negotiation process.

…when unreason triumphs, it does so in the name of reason.

Roger Scruton

Pessimism, as the title suggests, has its uses. And to be scrupulously pessimistic is one way to at least avoid falling into the destructive fallacies Scruton identifies. It is the unscrupulous optimist who is willing to destroy everything that social evolution has brought to us through tradition and careful community agreements etc. in the hope that by making everything crash down something so much better will emerge … despite the many lessons of history otherwise.

The fallacy here, of taking a retrospective view of something that has not yet happened, became an integral part of progressive thinking not only in politics but also in the arts.

Roger Scruton

Scruton also looks at art and architecture while considering the fallacy of the Moving Spirit. Reference to the Zeitgeist for persuasion. That you have to get-with-the-times-Daddio… This call comes up particularly during such things as referendums on gay marriage. Don’t be in the past. This is now. Think of how history will judge you. Etc. Zeitgeist literally means time-ghost, and it is as if the things is a ghost-like figure that can haunt all timeframes at once. It lives in the future, present and past.

The emphasis on originality is something that the bohemian could consider a good, but Scruton rightly points out the difference between an originality that still develops upon the grounding of human beauty, and the acts that are merely empty efforts at originality for its own sake. Because it is original it has value. The absurd recent situation with the banana taped to the wall of a gallery comes immediately to mind. Originality needs a framework, something to hang itself on, lest it be far worse than the derivative done well. Reaching for the original must be a concern for an artist, of course, but always within certain boundaries, just as humans live within their perceptive boundaries.

It involves an attitude of care – care towards institutions, customs and consensual solutions. It involves a recognition that it is easier to destroy than to create, and that we fulfill our task on earth if we look after the small corner that is ours, and take that ‘ours’ to heart.

Roger Scruton

Personal responsibility is a key theme in the face of the fallacies that surround us in the West. There is still much to hold on to. We sacrifice our regressive violent demands to master the world through forgiveness, in order to live with strangers as a ‘we’, and to live in the irony of being able to see what’s wrong with what’s wrong, just as much as what’s right.

From the culture of forgiveness springs the other habit that helps us to be at home in the society of strangers. This is irony, by which I mean the habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself.

Roger Scruton

Irony, in its full social form as alluded to here, n’est plus à la mode; it is something that we have lost touch with not because it was lost to us, far from it, but because it has become corrupted into a catabolic self-destructive urge; a cultural form of a death drive. I started writing this review before Chinese Flu really hit us here in Europe, but at the same time that Greece was fighting on its borders. The wondering time has finished, and this is a dark day for all of that. The correct form of Pessimism is breaking through in a strangely provocative way. There may be changes. They may last long.

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Books, Essays

Camus’ ‘The Plague’ in the age of the Viral Virus

…and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

Albert Camus

A plague before the 24 hour news cycle was a different animal to the uber-virus after it. The uber-virus is viral in ways the plagues were not; and the plagues more mortal and demanding. But there are some similarities too, and some of them quite visceral ones. The suggestion by the American Conservative Blog to read this book is a good one:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/reading-camus-the-plague/

Great literature always invites new contexts upon itself, and encloses them in unexpected ways. Just as the politics of Camus’ time collects around the politics of ours in equally unexpected ways … certainly in ways Camus (the artist) would have had trouble comprehending, as opposed to the art he produced.

Yes, Nazism influenced the writing of this story, Camus was living through it and resisting it, in his way; but it is not about it. This novel, published after ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ and written during the sometimes hostile response to the book, begins what became to be known as Camus’ Cycle of Revolt (along with ‘The Rebel’ and the plays ‘L’état de siege’ and ‘Les justes’).  

It is of interest to note that one of the regular complaints regarding ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by both Camus’ contemporaries and thinkers today is that it is ‘…too abstract’ to be taken as a serious philosophical tract. Putting aside the fact that Camus never referred to it as a book of philosophy, but as a series of essays, the journalist in ‘The Plague’, Rambert, echoes these critics when he says to Rieux: ‘You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions. To which Rieux later muses to himself:

Yes, an element of abstraction, of a divorce from reality, entered into such calamities. Still, when abstraction sets to killing you, you’ve got to get busy with it.

Albert Camus

In this story, a city in North Africa, Oran, where Camus had lived for short amounts of time, becomes quarantined due to an outbreak of bubonic and, later, pneumonic, plague. Lots of people are dying and everybody has to deal with it, in their way. We follow the responses most closely of a Doctor (Rieux), a journalist (Rambert), a writer (Grand), an intellectual [for want of a better word] (Tarrou), a priest (Paneloux) and a criminal (Cottard).

Also of note is the asthma patient that Rieux treats at key points in the narrative (in particular, right at the starts of the plague and right at the end. Why? Because his lung condition is mirroring Camus own (tuberculosis) ‘he required frequent treatments from Doctors, like Rieux’ and its important to note that Camus often considered himself on the verge of death due to his condition, mirroring the psychology of those living with the plague: to live with the knowledge of the threat of imminent and unavoidable death.

‘They’re coming out, they’re coming out…’ …the asthma patient says gleefully. And later, at the end, he poses an important rhetorical question that has been foreshadowed throughout the story: ‘But what does that mean, plague? Just life, no more than that.

And Tarrou, much later: ‘I had plague already, long before I came to this town.’

No, not Nazis, but life; but more specifically, life being brought into sharp focus, creating an awareness of it through an understanding that it ends. Being forced into exile by the plague, or not, the absurd conditions of life remain unaltered. It’s the awareness of the conditions that shifts through plague-caused exile: to be separated from the rest of the world, from love, from culture, etc; for it to be a part of your consciousness, and the consciousness of all the exiles around you; this is the plague. What does this do the people? It drives out Hope. It makes them live only in the past (through memories) and the present (through knowledge). The future no longer exists. Your illusions regarding your existence have flown. You have no peace.

This is the Plague; the awareness of the Absurd. And then, the only active option is revolt; even in the face of the unchangeable. And through this it’s possible, maybe not to be a saint, but to be a man.

It was only right that those whose desires are limited to man, and his humble yet formidable love, should enter, if only now and again, into their reward.

Albert Camus

How these characters come to terms with the plague and, thus, the Plague, forms the bulk of the story; and how they all, in different ways, follow Rieux’s lead and accept revolt, forms the work’s chief intellectual interest. Without wanting to give away serious plot points, think about this when one of them contracts both varieties of plague—bubonic and pneumonic—the first person ever to do so.

Don’t get me wrong: this is also an aesthetic achievement of the highest order, even in translation: the scene with the dying boy reaches the aching terrible narrative beauty of one of Camus greatest literary heroes, Dostoevsky.  But, indulge me in discussing some of these characters and how they played out in a kind of general sense, if you will…

Tarrou and Rieux have the most special relationship: the moment of respite they share swimming alone at night in the forbidden sea is memorable to both of them, and to the reader. Just before hand, in conversation with Rieux, Tarrou comes to his main point about his life:

‘It comes to this, Tarrou said almost casually, what interests me is learning how to become a saint.’

‘But you don’t believe in God.’

‘Exactly. Can one be a Saint without God?’

A little later on, Rieux finally responds:

‘But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than the saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man’.

‘Yes, we’re both after the same thing, but I’m less ambitious.’

Seeking sainthood is its own variety of retreat from the plague, not revolt. It’s full acknowledgement that the plague is greater-than. While Tarrou obsesses over existential issues, and broad morality, in his efforts to not transmit the plague to others, he can’t help but do so anyway.

Paneloux (the priest) and Rieux clash on the other side of the plague. When Paneloux is introduced into the story, it is early days in the plague: people are seeking the solace of the Church, and he delivers his First Sermon, which is your typical this is Gods vengeance upon his misbehaving creation kind of fare. Rieux is unimpressed. However, he asks Paneloux to become involved in the Santization Groups  and he accepts, throwing himself into the actions of the revolt against the plague. After the death of the boy scene, there is a shift in his beliefs, and his Second Sermon follows that event. For those who have read The Brothers Karamazov…

(if you have not, what are you doing reading this? Stop it and go out and read this book instead… No, wait, there’s time, as long as you don’t have plague: finish my review first)

…this sermon could be read as how Aloysha should have responded to Ivan Karamazov when the death of innocents was put toward him as a reason to revolt against God (Book V, Ch. IV). Rieux summarises Ivan’s position nicely:And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.Instead of Aloysha’s quiet wishy-washy acceptance (coupled with his refusing to face the outcome of this acceptance)  a little like modern Western Christianity generally, Paneloux responds:Believe everything so as not to be forced to deny everything.They must acquire and practice the greatest of all virtues: that of the All or Nothing.He’s not saying that you’re either for God or against Him, but that you’re either with God or without Him. It’s no good being with Him when without plague, and without when you are. Because then you are without him anyway.

Rambert is the lover who wants to run from the plague. But comes to his own absurd realization; Cottard finds the plague-stricken world better than the normal world; Grand, the writer, revolts with the rest of them, but his life remains disturbingly unaffected. He obsesses over his opening sentence, which hes been working on for years, mirroring Camus obsession with his book, which took him longer to write than any other. When Rieux gets a look at the full manuscript Grand is working on he notices that the bulk of the writing consisted of the same sentence written again and again with small variants.

In the end, even during the victory celebrations, the plagues there, laying dormant, never really gone, waiting, even on the bookshelves Read this book. Get the plague.

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Essays

Goodbye to Goodreads:

On losing a Tribe

The last time I came to Germany I was reading ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ while I was leaving Berlin and heading to Rügen; and, as luck had it, I was reading the chapter in the book on Rügen. It was one of those bookish memories that will stay with me forever. And Christopher Isherwood’s light, almost sepia-like melancholic prose will always be a part of my memory of that train journey. When I think of goodbyes, I think of Berlin and Isherwood’s deft touch.

And while Isherwood’s 1930s ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ had a more dramatically visceral political backdrop, my goodbye to Goodreads contained some similarities—albeit in a more figurative form.

I had been a member of goodreads for over ten years. And I had been a top ten reviewer. I enjoyed the process of writing a review immediately after reading. It got to the point that, if I knew I wasn’t going to finish the book I was reading with a few hours to spare afterwards to write the review, I would wait to finish the book. And I especially enjoyed going back over my own reviews of books I had enjoyed. It was a way of communicating with the me-reader of the past, to see what was going on in his head just after reading the book, and refreshing the sense of the work in the present.

The Likes were nice (who doesn’t like a Like?) but much better were the comments. Mostly positive or questioning, but sometimes agonistic while not usually being overtly negative, it was a great way to communicate with other book-lovers and consider different ideas and perspectives on the works and discuss elements that you had not considered, or to examine your own ideas through argument (and I mean ‘argument’ in that very positive instructive and constructive way). Let’s call this a period of a pre-war naiveté, a Rudyard Kipling golden age (to keep my analogy chugging along…).

But then something happened. Many people left goodreads when Amazon bought it, and the pool shrunk, not too much, but discernibly. The commentary died down a little. The pushing of various Lists and dubious awards for selected pop-Reading ramped up. It didn’t make much of a difference to me at the time. We entered a kind of ‘Gatsby’ period, a Lost Gen vibe… Something had been corrupted but you couldn’t necessarily tell what at the time. There was a Weimar sense of loss and perhaps foreboding.

But the writing was on the wall.

Then, finally… The rise of extremism. Maybe because of the trauma of Trump’s win? It was certainly a surprise, just as much as it was a good one for some or a bad one for others. Extremism though is different to disappointment; you can be disappointed with a political result, and work to make change next time etc… Or you can demand that this-not-be, NOT MY [insert thing], and work to dissolve the system that just didn’t work out for you. The absolute flood of Trump books (I do not write ‘anti-Trump books’ for fear of tautology)—a publishing sensation and almost a genre in its own right—became de rigueur, and some of my reviews that had been on the site for quite some time started garnering suddenly nasty responses.

And then, slowly, commentary dribbled down to nothing. Trump books from many of the people I followed continued to have heavy rates of commentary, but only echo-chamber-ly ones. Just as the post-liberal ‘liberal’ voices de-liberalised further and became more acute and exclusive and repressive, a flight away from the site began of conservative voices. The bohemian landscape of ‘reading books’ was being claimed on the site. Conservative readership began to have the sense of an oxymoron. They were the deplorables. Uneducated. Tricked by Russian bots. Etc.

It had become a strange place to be both bohemian and conservative; I was no longer part of the tribe.

So I took my data and left. If you are no longer made welcome, and sides are being picked with which you are not comfortable in either, and you have somewhere else to go (like Isherwood fortunately did in 1933) then … you go.

Like Isherwood’s continued fondness for the Germany he knew before the rise of radical politics, I will miss what goodreads was. But there are other places to go. Like here. There are other tribes around. And things can turn around. I’m now sitting on the third floor of an apartment building in a Germany that has a Berlin where Christopher Isherwood would receive too many ‘hellos’ for him to deal with adequately…

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Books

Tyll

by Daniel Kehlmann (trans. Ross Benjamin)

On the stage people were themselves, completely true, fully transparent.

Daniel Kehlmann (trans. Ross Benjamin)

This is a very clever book, a very mischievous book (appropriately) and a very mythic book (somewhat appropriately). The title implies that the book is about Till Eulenspiegel, a semi-mythical ideal-jester figure who may or may not have lived in the 14th century or so. He was a mixture of a kind of Shakespearean fool, slapstick comic, acrobat, circus performer, ribald pervert and shock jock. If you read the 16th century English translation of the German chapbook, it’s often difficult to work out where the gag actually lies, and how it is in anyway particularly notable, as opposed to just mean, nasty, brutish and shortly savage.

You belong to the travelling people, no one protects you, and when it rains, you have no roof. No home. No friends but others like you, who will not like you very much, because food is scarce. That is the price you pay to be free.

Daniel Kehlmann (trans. Ross Benjamin)

Kehlmann points toward a disruption immediately by setting the book in the 17th century during the Thirty Years War (around a hundred years after the chapbook publication). He doesn’t care for the history of the figure, but more for the mythos. However, he begins the novel in a very traditional manner. He lulls you in. We get a described history, that crashes from view; followed by another described history that also slowly unravels…

And I can see what he’s doing here, and I can see his purpose … and it’s interesting, certainly. And his writing is powerful and often highly effective.

But…

I really wanted more Tyll. The parts of the novel that were more specifically about him (about 20% of the story) were when I was excited as a reader, as opposed to simply interested. When we got into long asides with the Princess Elizabeth (despite the lovely little bit with Shakespeare) and various other figures who encounter Tyll along the way (or maybe they didn’t) I must admit I would glance ahead to see when it was going to end, and if Tyll was going to show up again soon.

“To save time I have already written the chapter in Rome.”

Daniel Kehlmann (trans. Ross Benjamin)

And he does show up (at least in some form) regularly enough to keep you interested. And yes, he’s a mythic figure and so he’s being treated in this mythic clever way etc etc… And there’s a strong dare-I-say postmodern theme throughout the novel of how stories are all stories within stories etc and yes, that’s all been done before, but Kehlmann doesn’t push it on you in an unpleasant way at all. At one point, a person who witnesses a battle uses another account he read of a different battle to describe it, who used another account of a different battle again to describe that battle, by a man who had never witnessed a battle. And of course, we the reader know that Kehlmann has just described the original battle in the usual way we are used to having battles described to us in our era, about the horror and blood and fear and death … and he too has never witnessed one either etc etc. And this all smacks very nicely of Tyll-like trickery and chicanery etc etc.

But…

… I walked away dissatisfied. Is Kehlmann playing me for a fool? As the Reader, am I the King he has the right to mock? Again maybe…

But…

“In front of distinguished lords and ladies I always miss. Then they give more money.”

Daniel Kehlmann (trans. Ross Benjamin)

I gave it three stars on Amazon. It’s a 5 star story with a 1 star focus.

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Books

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

by Roger Scruton

The Necessity of Beauty: a book review

Beauty, I argue, is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world.

Roger Scruton

While the book is short, it is quite broad. Scruton has spent much more time on the notion of beauty than any other contemporary philosopher I know of. Beauty is not so admired, at least in the Academy. The study of aesthetics, beauty’s ugly sister, holds a little more attention, but not so much as it relates to beauty … more so as something to negate beauty, and to judge it an unnecessary extravagance of the privileged. And whereas it might be a privilege to be here, the state of being privileged is not a privilege to be anywhere; and part of the atonement probably has something to do with embracing ugliness.

Why is beauty so important to Scruton, in an age of opposition to it?

Partly because of the opposition, of course. But there’s certainly more to it than that. The burden of beauty is something essentially human, so to turn our back on it is to turn our back on humanity, what makes us human; and he doesn’t want this battle to be considered as simply a matter of taste, but he wants to fight this on the field of rational enquiry.

Nevertheless, you want the table, the room or the web-site to look right, and looking right matters in the way that beauty generally matters—not by pleasing the eye only, but by conveying meanings and values which have weight for you and which you are consciously putting on display.

Roger Scruton

Getting something right, making something fit in—the fitting-ness of something—this is a cornerstone of Beauty for Scruton, as he drills down to some kind of objective essence, and also manages to highlight something from everyday lived experience, as opposed to the experience of what we might call High Art, for example.

When you pause to study the perfect form of a wildflower or the blended feathers of a bird, you experience an enhanced sense of belonging. A world that makes room for such things makes room for you.

Roger Scruton

Belonging-ness is a cornerstone of Scrutonian conservatism; wanting to position the things to conserve as the things that conserve us; and what conserves us has much to do with a sense of belonging. When articles of endeavour and observation become noticeable enough for our consideration to hold them up as singular and worthy of being held up, then we have a model for beauty.

…the look of something, when it becomes the object of intrinsic interest, accumulates meaning.

Roger Scruton

Naturally, Scruton’s two key concerns of architecture and music come into play, but he also covers such things as the silent experience of the novel. He moves through some historical models of how beauty has been appreciated, from the Platonic on, and he often returns to Kant’s lesser known works. Through this he contrasts natural beauty with presented beauty. There is beauty that appears to be un-learned, such as admiring a landscape, but this admiration still comes from a conscious human place. Just as there are degrees in beauty, there are degrees in our capacity to appreciate beauty in its varied forms.

Nevertheless, if stories and novels were simply reducible to the information contained in them, it would be inexplicable that we should be constantly returning to the words, reading over favourite passages, allowing the sentences to percolate through our thoughts, long after we have assimilated the plot.

Roger Scruton

Beauty, when we encounter it, draws upon connections within us, and without us, with the others around us. That’s not to mean that everyone has the same taste, or that everyone maybe is capable of experiencing a particular article of beauty. Scruton uses the example of classical music and talks about the importance of aesthetic education in order to develop our senses in order to progress from the fitting-ness of a well-laid table setting to, maybe … eventually, someone like Bach. To be human is to be social, but, likewise, part of our becoming human is a socialisation process, a learning to be social, from birth.

But dissonance and conflict may also be fitting…

Roger Scruton

Scruton wants to develop a fundamental difference between ugliness and beauty in terms of how beauty might be championed. As he points out, ugly is the new ‘beauty’—particularly in art, post-Duchamp. The problem for a Bohemian conservative, the tension, is that we want open expression and a lively avant-garde in the arts to live alongside the importance of examining and creatively preserving the canon of beauty in the field that has gone before: the après-garde.

Rules and precepts are there to be transcended, and because originality and the challenging of orthodoxies are fundamental to the aesthetic enterprise, an element of freedom is built into the pursuit of beauty, whether the minimal beauty of everyday arrangements, or the higher beauties of art.

Roger Scruton

So a place must be made for challenging without repudiating. Dissonance and conflict can drive beauty, but it cannot overcome it. To overcome it is to become ugly; to under-come it is to fall into kitsch. And while 98% of the avant-garde might fall into these categories, we need it to happen so that the 2% that doesn’t can happen, which maybe wouldn’t otherwise. That is not to say that the 98% should be lauded … as they currently generally are.

Beauty reaches to the underlying truth of a human experience, by showing it under the aspect of necessity.

Roger Scruton

Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people.

Roger Scruton

Finally, beauty is not just an add-on for Scruton, something for rich educated people to understand and experience. It’s communal. Which is part of the reason Scruton was so concerned with architecture, I imagine. I mean, I can avoid seeing the 98% by not going to modern art galleries, but I can’t avoid seeing the concrete and faded-green office block (and I mean ‘block’) on Komödienstraße after walking out mesmerised by the cathedral in Cologne.

Beauty gives us something to cling to among the general entropy of living. It does not have to be of the transcendental kind, but can equally be of the incidental kind. This is a rational and practical means by which to drive being inclusive (and actually using the word as a means of inclusion, as opposed to its more common antithetical meaning discursively). There is common ground in the truly beautiful. There is a ‘we’ in aesthetic delight.

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Uncategorized

The Outsider

by Albert Camus (trans. Sandra Smith)

I wrote this review in 2013. I am now in a German city, but at the moment it lacks a sun. I might squint, but only for the figurative effect. I am a lot closer to reading L’Etranger by Albert Camus (sans translation) now, in that I can read through it, and get the gist when I lack meaning; but it is still hard work, and lacks the experience of reading literature, as opposed to reading a street sign. Literary fluency is still something to achieve.

Writing about the most influential single book of your life (not that that means anything) is a little like staring into the sun, the same sun here in an Australian suburb as that of an Algerian beach: so I shall squint, if you don’t mind.

Firstly, Sandra Smith’s work is excellent. I have read all four English translations of L’Etranger that I am aware of at least once over the years (Stuart Gilbert, Joseph Laredo, and Matthew Ward being the other three. If you know of another, please let me know). Each has its own life, appropriately; which could be just as much to do with me as it does with the translation itself. I am learning French, starting this year, with the express intention of one day reading this book as the author wrote it. It’s a five year plan.

 I have particular imaginings related to Camus writing this story. He wrote it between 1939-40, but it was not published until the Spring of 1942 in occupied Paris. This is a story about how someone lives. Meursault is an ordinary enough office clerk, with a strange kind of anti-social sincerity that the reader immediately encounters in the first two sentences, one of the most famous opening couplets in literature. Meursault talks to us in a candid manner, as if he’s talking to himself. As if, sometimes, he’s trying to re-assure or convince himself of what he’s saying. He’s worried about something foundational, and tries to own his retreat back to first principles.

Some have accused him of being a sociopath. Perhaps there’s a spectrum there, but he is aware of how people react to him, and he genuinely wants people to not be upset. But he also wants to engage with people clearly and openly. He is disinterested in that kind of scientific manner, but not uncaring. His manner of caring is to be honest. Most of all, it is to experience that he leans. He is a caring hedonist, a hedonist who wishes to experience pleasure, but doesn’t wish any more meaning be ascribed to it than the universe offers. Which is none.

When Marie asks him if he loves her:

She asked me if I loved her. I told her that didn’t mean anything, but I didn’t think so.

When Meursault sees her pain in reaction to his response, he softens his honesty as best he can. It surprises him when he answers genuinely and others are so surprised. He is capable of lying, and he does so several times, when someone is bothering him and he realises what they want to hear and so he says it so they will go away and leave him alone. But to people he cares for, as for himself, he is more himself. And that’s the self we are privy to. When he looks at the world his descriptions of a plain Sunday afternoon are almost like a striking impressionist work of art.

He likes smoking. He likes chocolate. He likes swimming and women. He tells the Judge in Part II: One of the characteristics of my personality was that physical sensations often get in the way of my emotions. He shoots and kills a knife-wielding Arab on a beach. Later, in the courtroom, he says it was because of the sun. The ever present heat overhead, the inevitability of life, that-which-cannot-be-avoided-and-beats-down-on-us-all. This was not before he stopped his friend from doing the same thing earlier.

The sky seemed to split apart from end to end to pour its fire down upon me. My whole body tensed as I gripped the gun. It set off the trigger.

…and it was then, with that sharp, deafening sound, that it all began.

Until he is on the way to the guillotine and:

…it might be finished.

That journey is Meursault’s journey towards an acceptance of the Absurd: to put simply, Camus’ notion that human beings live in an essentially meaningless universe where they are compelled as part of that living to search for (and often demand) some sort of essential meaning. It is not until his last outburst at a chaplain purges him of evil, and empties him of hope, that he can finally, for the first time, open himself up:

…to the tender indifference of the world.

This indifference, a tender indifference, is an understanding of how to live in that gap, to be happy, to allow for happiness, within that Absurd gap. He is happy on the path to death, and he is willing the participation of others in it, even if they are hateful. Meursault becomes the ‘…only Christ we deserve.’

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People, Uncategorized

In Their Death They Were Not Divided

2 Samuel 1:23 Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.

I shall liken Harold Bloom unto Saul, and Roger Scruton unto Jonathan. As far as I know, they never met. When I Google the names together I get an old Guardian hit piece that includes them both on the same hit-list of ‘Jeremiah’s of History’ moaning about cultural decline; so, moaning about moaning. Then there’s a blurb Scruton has done for Bloom’s book Ruin the Sacred Truths:

“The wit, the eclecticism and the gripping paradoxes…the force of [Bloom’s] intellect carries the reader from pinnacle to pinnacle, showing a new spiritual landscape from each.”—Roger Scruton, The Washington Times

There’s a reference to Bloom on figurative language in Scruton’s piece ‘Against Deconstruction’ in 1993. But otherwise, no evidence of a physical meeting I can divine. But that’s fine. They met in me. And they they died within ninety days of each other with the turn of a decade between them, like Saul and Jonathan, in their death they will not be divided. In me, at least.

Other than my father, these two men were my biggest living influences. I first ‘met’ Bloom as a foil in the contemporary academy of 2003-2006. Sometimes they would throw up a kind of straw-man to show the contemporary student how-not-to-think about something. In this case, it was how-not-to-think about Shakespeare. It’s a dangerous tactic, of course, because those students feeling something of the cultural climate control mechanisms around them are ready to hold on to something that might prove to be a counterpoint. Which it did for me. A counterpoint that proved more further to be THE point.

No such luck with Scruton, unfortunately. I did not come upon him until 2018, as a YouTube suggestion maybe attached to my interest in Jordan Peterson. If I had come across him, I now like to fantasise, I might well have finished my Ph. D. I was enjoying many of the thinkers my Supervisors were putting me in touch with, the usual suspects of 20th century post-Freudians and deconstructionists, but I was enjoying them as interesting intellectual exercises, and philosophical riddles. I found beauty in their writing, but not in their ideas. I wanted to pursue aesthetics in my work, but I was not being given anything of substance, there was no traction. If I could have had Scruton put in front of me, even as a foil to all the Eagleton…

I was, however, I admit, a lazy student; easily distracted. It might not have made any difference.

They were lovely and pleasant in their lives

But their affect has been profound. It’s easy to be defined by your enemies. To be an infidel of negation. I am against this… But what am I for? As I responded to the direction of my culture, it’s movement progressive for the sake of progression, no matter where or toward what end, and lent away from traditional anarchism into conservatism, I found nothing around me to move through. Neo-conservatism wasn’t even a system of thought, but an economic series of planned jerks of the knees. And religious and paleo-conservatism had too much hand in the rejection of the celebration of art, the beauty in demanding movement within a cultural vector of permissiveness that is essential for our culture to thrive. The necessity of the Bohemian edge.

Harold Bloom had paved the way for my own sense of the Bohemian with his heartfelt spiritual joy for great literature, just as he wrestled with it and made demands of it; his intellectual spine never bowed down to the purely transcendental and romantic. The beauty lived in the world, as much as out of it. He was a perfect realist on an unreal stage. I could love things I despised. It was a terrific terrible freedom, manifestly bohemian in its outlook, but focused fully in the art. So he was Saul, the anointed one, and the eventually rejected one. He was perhaps to close too God, instead of being after His own heart.

Like Jonathan to Saul, Scruton takes the step away, and makes it a lived world. Most importantly, when he talks about the necessity of having a creative approach to conservation; to understanding that things need to be kept, but that things need to change. He was a prince but could never be a King. The King finds it hard to move behind the curtain of power. Look at Shakespeare’s Henry. The Bohemian falters.

But Scruton could make it seem so. This is how important he is. He makes room for conservatism to enlarge into something that isn’t just about conservation of what WAS and maybe IS, but conservation of the bohemian spirit that has made what WAS and IS … what it was and is. And WILL make something greater to conserve further. Let’s have something worth fighting for, yes; but it’s only worth fighting for if you hold on to what is great you have won, hard-fought from from the enemy. The enemy being that of formal regression, in all its guises: regressive leftism, regressive rightism. And if you conserve un-creatively, you regress just as quickly … maybe more.

How are the mighty fallen?

The mighty fall just like the weak, in the same way, in the same sad solitary way. In ninety days. In three minutes. In a hundred years. We all fall. But it is heartening that some stood. And that some are mighty, and encouraging, and making some kind of mark, even on those they never met. There’s still a voice in them, like the silent voice you hear when your reading alone. It’s not just you, reading. And it’s not just the author, writing. It’s a silent sound that makes sense even more than the sensible.

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