Short rounds: things that are not Star Trek, like North Koreans and Aeneas

Believe it or not, I have been reading books without a Star Trek label appended to them this week. Just recently I finished off Don't Go There, a short collection of travel pieces that interested me with its mention of visits to Turkey,  Chernobyl, and North Korea.    The actual collection contains these along with trips to Israel, Ghana,  China, and a few other places deemed 'interesting'. The first piece, a visit to Istanbul that threw the writer and his girlfriend unwittingly into street protests and clouds of tear gas, sets the stage:  the narrator has no idea what he's doing or why, and seems to stumble into catastrophes just to get a good story to write about.   None  of Fletcher's trips had any reason or planning to them, most developed miserable complications, and when his girlfriend threatens to leave him, the reader must be sympathetic.  If one endures his laughable ignorance in visiting places like Jerusalem (he is annoyed by religious people and religious references, which would be akin to going to DC when one hates politics), and similar episodes, eventually he ends up in North Korea. It's about what you'd expect, but he comes away believing the hostages of Kim are not as brainwashed as is commonly held, and that they would be more expressive if they could get away with it.

My other read during the last few weeks has been a volume called From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics.    Markos opens the book with a remonstrance against the Protestant attitude that anything that predated Christ, or anything outside the Bible, is value-less.  Although a Protestant himself, he regards the Catholic church favorably for its integration of the classic western tradition into its own tradition, in effect building upon and continuing the queries of Aristotle and Plato into the nature of the cosmos, ethics, beauty, etc.  Markos' conviction is the same of CS Lewis'  as expressed in The Abolition of Man, namely that while Christianity is the ultimate truth,  basic truths are also available in other traditions.  The aim of Markos in this volume is to see the truths which the Greco-Roman myths express about the nature of man and meaning. He then guides the reader through the works of Homer, selected works by Greek playwrights and historians, and ends with the Aeneid.    As someone who has been removed from Western Literature I and II for far too long,  I was interested in this chiefly as an accessible  look at Greek literature, a reminder of its stories and writers.  Markos reflects on the themes present in literature, like the struggle between familial duties and loyalty to the polis.  Because the Greek dramatic tradition is in fact a tradition, Markos notes how  differently the same myths might be use by different authors, and examines how the Aeneid is a deliberate Roman tribute to the Illiad and Odyessey,  using its structure, locales, and  elements.  It was not a Latinized copy of the Greek epic, however, but one written with Rome's own history in mind -- and not ancient, but recent, as Aeneas' story can be read as a tribute to Augustus' victory over  Marc Anthony and Cleopatra.  Markos also connects the classical heritage to Christianity when he can, argue at times that the Greeks are foreshadowing the advent of Christ.  This is similar to Luc Ferry's approach in Wisdom from the Myths, in which he argues that the Greek myths and plays constitute a coherent worldview -- a Stoic one.   Markos isn't as insistent as Ferry, however, and the core of the book is merely in seeing what truths the old stories still tell us about ourselves and our relationships to our own polis and the cosmos.

A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War

A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War
© 2014 Joseph Loconte
256 pages

When some future Gibbon writes of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, he will have to devote a great deal of attention to the Great War.  However more numerous the deaths of its daughter, the Great War’s damage was more foundational, destroying as it did not only an entire generation of young men and leveling empires, but in derailing the western dream of unstoppable progress.  Western faith in itself and its ideals was fractured, and more damage would follow in the decades to come. The generation that followed was understandable cynical and lost, believing in nothing and pursuing only fleeting pleasures; a war opened with religious zeal ended in despair.  A Wardrobe, a Hobbit, and a Great War  examines the lives and work of two young men who fought in the war, but who survived it with their spirits intact -- who neither entered it as a crusade, or came out of it as jaded warriors.

The book is effectively a brief history of the war as experienced by Lewis and Tolkien, expressed as a two-part biography  that focuses on how the war shaped their writing.  The primary difficulty in supporting the authors' thesis, that Tolkien and Lewis developed ideas about heroism amid their war experience and later applied it to the worlds and stories they later created, is that neither man wrote a great deal about their war experiences.  What few references exist in their letters from the time, and their recollections later, are connected by Jenkins to passages or themes in their stories: Lewis' descriptions of combat in his own life and the depiction of the same in his Narnia stories; Tolkiens' description of Mordor and the corpse-filled bog around it are connected to the horrifying spectacle that was a trench warzone -- where men lived among the dead and the engorged rats that fed on them, sometimes seeing past battles' dead unearthed by artillery strikes.

Loconte's general thesis is that Lewis and Tolkien both rejected the 'myth of progress', that society was growing Better and that men were evolving to become superior beings. They did not counter this with a theory that things were growing worse, but rather shared the conviction of GK Chesterton that things simply were, that the nature of fallen man was such that he could never become anything  new-- he only exist to make his choices day by day, for good or ill.  Heroism, as described by Jenkins and illustrated through the Narnia and Middle Earth novels,  meant ever pushing to do the right choice, even when it was not easy, wise, or safe.

Ultimately, I don't know that there's enough evidence to support the authors specifically being inspired by the war to create the kinds of stories they did. However, I also don't know if there's an upper limit to how much I can read about Tolkien and Lewis, because they were old fogeys in their own time and thereby my countrymen. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

Further Up and Further In

Further Up and Further In: Understanding Narnia
© 2018 Joseph Pearce
200 pages

”The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets.” - The Last Battle

Christendom and Narnia are never far removed from one another, and in Further Up and Further In, Joseph Pearce takes us through the thin veil between them. He pores over the literary and theological references that deepen the world of Narnia, relying on his previous research into the life of Lewis, as well as his work on Lewis’ influences, Tolkien and Chesterton. Both are companions not just of Lewis, but of the reader here, as the three dwelt in the same moral and literary universe.

Most anyone who has visited Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe realizes its Christian connection. Aslan’s deliberate self-sacrifice to destroy the power of Death and revive not only Narnia, but redeem the withered soul of young Edmund, makes that obvious -- as does the Garden of Eden story seen in The Magician’s Nephew where the same white witch leads to the corruption of Narnia seven hours into its creation. And if anyone was missing the point, then in Voyage of the Dawn Treader Aslan explicitly tells the children that he is known by another name in their world, and that they were brought to Narnia so that they would know him better there.

Although Pearce expands on the multitude of links to Christian culture -- Aslan’s repeated use of “I am”, a la God’s reply to Moses in the desert, his treble use of the same phrase and other sets of three to bring to mind the Trinity, and so on -- Pearce also understands Lewis as a man deep in history, and particularly in medieval history. He points out Lewis’ allusions to other figures, like El Cid and Charlemagne, based not on dry history but on legends about these men, like “The Song of Roland”. Commentary stretches to the modern age, too, as Pearce points out how Eustace Scrubbs’ parents are caricatures of George Bernard Shaw, who loved “humanity” but disliked most people, and believed in progress for its own sake, rather than people for theirs.

More than anything else, Pearce shines a light on the moral universe that was Lewis’ made ‘physical’ in the land of Narnia. There delivered were his convictions about heroism and temptation, of the self-defeating nature of evil, of the dignity of creatures both great and small, both simple and clever. In The Magician’s Nephew we see condemned the will to dominate; in Voyage of the Dawn Treader we experience again Tolkien’s “dragon sickness”, the madness brought on by fixating on materials -- gold, in Eustace’s case, and secret knowledge in Susan’s. Each book has its lessons, and those who have experienced Narnia’s story and loved it will almost surely appreciate his look deeper into the wardrobe.

The Republic of Imagination

The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Other edition subtitle: A Case for Fiction
© 2014 Azar Nafisi
352 pages

When Azar Nafisi taught literature in Iran, she dreamed of America. Not the United States, the government of which had been making itself decidedly unpopular in Iran, but "America" -- an idea, a dream, where people were free to pursue their own lives, to grow and flourish without a shah or a thought-police militia's interference.  She discovered and explored this America via its literature,  an experience which is partially shared in her Reading Lolita in Tehran.  When she came to the United States to teach literature, another Iranian immigrant disgustedly told her that these people were not what she was looking for. Americans weren't passionate about literature the way Iranians were -- not even their own.   Although Nafisi rejected his resignation,  the fate of the humanities - literature, particularly --  weighs on her in writing this, and the experiences that she and others have had wrestling with American literature are offered here as proof of what serious engagement with literature can provide.

Nafisi's subtitle, America in Three Books, takes reader through Huckleberry Finn,   Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, and Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  Nafisi describes all of these as subversive, and links them as Individualist experiences --  the individual against conformity, consumerism, and their own lonely anguish.  My own experience with American literature has been so paltry that I haven't read two of the three books mentioned,  but Nafisi's strikes me as a fair take on Huckleberry Finn -- both because he resists being 'sivilized' and shut up in doors, and because his instinctive human sympathy for a friend of his outweighs the dictum of the day that his friend is a slave who should be punished for escaping.   Nafisi's intent is to connect themes in literature with our lives, so amid the literary discussion are events from Nafisi's life, and conversations (or arguments) she has had with Americans and Iranians. Those who have read Lolita in Tehran will remember the style from that book. Nafisi's deep love of literature puts her slightly at odds with the political currents she is otherwise sympathetic to: she abhors the knee-jerk reaction the academy has to classics, of automatically dismissing them because they are old and by the wrong people.  Literary criticism has missed the point altogether; instead of embracing works like a friend or lover to relate with, the books are beaten to death and the corpses picked at..  (To borrow from Douglas Adams:  “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.")  Similarly, she is not a friend of the 'common core', and its sterile treatment of education as nothing more than mounds of Gradgrind facts to memorize.

When I first heard this title, it resonated with me, making me think of both the Greek cosmopolis -- an ideal republic admitting all with reason as citizens -- and another republic, one that absorbing a tradition makes us a member of, allowing us to learn and fight with a lecture from Cicero, or an argument from Aquinas or de Montaigne. Nafisi's conviction that literature unites people across political boundaries led me on, however, as her republic of the imagination is a little more ethereal. It's a place where people escape to -- a place where people can find connection even if they live in a dehumanizing state. But it's not merely a place of escape; in her epilogue, Nafisi admonishes those who demand trigger warnings on books and cry out for safe places. The world is not a safe space.  Even if you live in a perfectly bland place, a Pleasantview right out of 1950s television, you may fall in love or lose a parent or find yourself facing some other emotional storm. Literature, Nafisi argues, prepares us for these storms: it fixes our feet, steels our spine, clears our mind.   We must embrace its challenges, not shrivel away from them.

While I suspect anyone reading a book subtitled America in Three Books would already regard fiction as important,  for me this was a welcome exposure to a couple of books I've only heard a little about,  an encouraging reminder about the universality of good literature.

Related:
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, Fatehmeh Keshavarz

Rousseau and Revolution

Rousseau and Revolution
© 1957 Will and Ariel Durant
1092 pages

"...little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever."

Edmund Burke, on the execution of Marie-Antoinette

In the tenth volume of Will Durant's  Story of Civilization, we now approach the latter half of the 18th century.  This is an age of titanic personalities, in every field.  Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia,  Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Bach, Schiller, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire -- what an age to be alive in!    For those unfamiliar with Durant's epochal series, his approach was a symphonic history that covered politics, economics, religion, architecture, music,  and literature. This particular volume opens with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of reason, and -- amid all the politics -- examines the influence of the Romantic reaction on the arts and politics, ending with the storming of the Bastille.

This is an age of enormous change; the industrial revolution has spread beyond England, and its social consequences are brewing political revolution, especially in France. It is an age of war, like most ages; Russia, Austria, and Turkey bicker incessantly over the Black Sea, and western Europe sees several wars of succession. The most influential conflict, however,  is the Seven Years War. This saw most of Europe allied against Prussia and England, with from some instability on Russia's part. While the consequences in Europe were minimal,  this was the war that made England an superpower.  While everyone invaded (and was rebuffed by) Prussia, the English chased the French out of  both India and North America, creating an incredible global empire.  The Seven Years War would set the stage for the American War of Independence, removing as it did America's great opponent on the continent, and pressuring the British to make the colonies pay for themselves via taxation.

Although the Enlightenment has already provoked its reaction in the form of the Romantic movement in the arts, the 'age of reason' itself is not yet spent: it is only now beginning to enter some subjects, like economics.  Irreligion among the intellectual caste is de rigeur, although in the Protestant north, a few individuals (Boswell and Gibbon, for instance) get their subversive kicks by embracing Catholicism, if only temporarily.  Writers like Voltaire and Rousseau write constantly of novel approaches to old problems: Emile, for instance,  is ostensibly about the proper education of a human being. (A curious subject, given that the author sent his own children to an orphanage on their birth.)  In the decline that which had been sustaining public morality, the Church and faith in general, people tried to find new ways of justifying a moral life. Some, like the Marquis de Sade, didn't bother; they rejoiced in the fact that without God, all things were permissible. Much of the philosophy here, skeptical as it was of the old authority, also rebelled against reason; this was an age of Feeling, of sensibility -- hence a larger role here for literature, theater, and other arts in the history. Rousseau in particular is used to epitomize the beginning of the romantic age, for his writings condemned cities, civilization, and material learning as corruptive elements leading the inherently good hearts of men astray. (Burk's comment about sophisters and economists almost echoes him there.) His emphasis on humanistic morals, however, did not make him a traditionalist; he regarded the Church with suspicion because it threatened patriotism, being an institution which transcended nations. (This was an age of French literature, Italian opera, and German music -- every nation had something to be extremely proud of.)  Rousseau is most remembered for his political philosophy, which emphasized the 'will of the people'.  While sometimes cited as an inspiration for the American revolution, Rousseau did not believe that representative legislatures truly served the will of the people; that had to be effected through full democratic assemblies, and so genuine democracies must remain small.   Rousseau's emphasis on popular will  and republics put him at odds with Voltaire, who distrusted the populace and smiled upon enlightened kings. In general, Durant noted, the revolutions of the 19th century would follow Rousseau in politics and Voltaire in religion.

Rousseau and Revolution is, like  all of the books in Durant's series, formidable in its size but not in its writing. Durant, when he shows his personality, is utterly amiable. He is not as personal with his pen here as he was in The Age of Faith or The Reformation, but at times we witness the human being behind the pen, mindful that he is not writing of abstractions but of real people. He cautions the reader to never lose sight of the individual people whose lives were creating what we perceived as larger trends. Accordingly,  Durant writes not just of big things -- the epic novels, the epic personalities -- but of passing affections, like fashion and frivolities, the concerns of the flesh and blood creatures who then walked abroad. The Durants are gentle and humane authors, students of the very history they write, forgiving of their subjects' sins and excesses.  We'll see if that lasts throughout the French Revolution, for this book ends with the storming of the Bastille.

We move now to Napoleon and the end of civilization; or at least, the end of Will and Aerial Durant's Story thereof.

Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy
© 1955 C.S. Lewis
252 pages

"When I first read Chesterton, I did not know what I was in for. God is, if I may say it,  quite unscrupulous."

Mention the name C.S. Lewis and the image of a prolific author comes to mind, secure in reputation as a scholar of medieval literature and author of Christian apologetics.  Surprised by Joy reveals a Lewis far removed from the pedestal of memory. A brief autobiography, it tells the story of how he came of age, losing and refinding faith as the world destroyed itself around him. Here is a Lewis outside the university, unguarded by coats of tweed; he is a man, struggling with  fear and doubts, spurred on by hope and far more entertaining than I would have ever expected.

The Lewis of expectations is here; an introverted, bookish, and supremely thoughtful boy with a rich imagination fed by a love for classic and mythic literature.  Lewis’ gift for storytelling is not limited to fiction, evidenced by the side-splitting account in which he recounts his father  -- an orator who could be intoxicated by verbosity once he’d gotten started --  subjecting five year old boys to momentous speeches full of pomp and storied prose, all for ordinary  errors like getting one’s shoes wet in the grass. Beyond the story of an early-20th century English childhood, however, this is the coming of age of a profound   man, who sees his life as driven on by a search for "Joy", which he experienced in brief stabs of ecstasy at various points in his young life. Such joy was not to be found in his childhood religion, which as as badly taught as everything else. He experienced shades of ecstasy when stumbling upon the Nordic myths, and despite his later materialism had a strong interest in the occult.  Later, he would come to see these experiences as momentary glimpses of something greater, and the book ends with his return to theism.  He doesn't make arguments to the reader, only outlines of the philosophical questions and themes he grappled with in his youth.  This can tend toward the heady, as Lewis' tipping point is the moment when he begins to understand the universe as some sort of cosmic mind, an Absolute, and another author (Chesterton) forces him to call a spade a spade. When Lewis is being philosophical about the writing can get heady -- 'thinking about thinking' always does, and Lewis' attempt to understand consciousness appears to have been a major factor in his rejection of a purely material universe. Here the difficulty is further complicated by frequent mentions of intellectual movements that Lewis was arguing with and flirting with that have since faded not only from the intellectual scene, but from memory altogether.

I've read this book several times in the last two years, partially out of affection for the author and partially to understand his experience.  The latter still eludes me in part, but epiphanies aren't a mental commodity that can be packaged up and transferred from brain to brain. However much some of his experience may elude me, there's still so much about him to appreciate: his contempt for authority, his imaginative passion and curiosity, his dogged efforts to wrest understanding from old books and new friend,  and his utter delight in simple things like country walks and stolen mornings spent with a pipe in the library.  He's one of those authors who I spot on a bookstore display  and have  a sudden burst of affection for, as though I'd spotted a friend out of the window. (Wendell Berry  has a similar effect, but Lewis has that old-fashioned  Oxford don aura about him.)

The Aeneid for Boys and Girls

The Aeneid for Boys and Girls
© 1908 Alfred J. Church
300 pages

What do I know of The Aeneid? It's the story of a survivor of Troy, who goes on to found the City of Rome after breaking the Queen of Carthage's heart.  That much I've retained from  -- strangely enough  -- a college music appreciation course that covered an opera about Aeneas and (Queen) Dido.  With that ignorance in mind, I decided to read The Aeneid for Boys and Girls by A.J. Church before trying the actual poem -- to make understanding the story easier, rather like I listened to an audio play of The Epic of Gilgamesh before reading it.

So, if you've never heard of The Aeneid except as something vaguely famous,  let's begin with the story of the Trojan War. The Greeks have, after an eleven-year siege, finally taken and sacked the high-walled city of Troy,  via the famed wooden horse doubling as a troop transport.  One young man, the daughter of the goddess of love, is given sight to see that this was Troy's tragic destiny, for even the gods are aiding in the city's destruction. Aeneas's own destiny is to sail towards the west,  to the land his people originally came from, and build a new city there.

Unfortunately  for him, Juno -- wife of Jupiter and the queen of heaven -- still has an axe to grind against the Trojans.  Oh, sure, they've lost their city, and well they deserved it. (Their ruler didn't think she was as pretty as that Spartan trollop, Helen! Obviously everyone had to pay.)  But now the Trojans are coming west, and if they do that they're destined to found a city that will destroy her pet city, Carthage. Carthago delenda est? Not on her watch!  So, like Ody- sorry, Ulysses --   Aeneas is driven hither and yon by  malignant winds on Juno's promptings, losing seven years of his life. He meets a woman - Dido -- and falls in love, until Jupiter sends down a little reminder to get with his Italian destiny, whereupon the now-abandoned Dido delivers an aria and stabs herself. (Okay, the aria came later.)

At long last the Trojans reach Italy, navigating to the city of the Latins, and there they are met in celebration.  Seers have prophesied that the king'd daughter would marry a stranger from overseas, and glory would be in the offing -- but naturally, Juno has to screw things up by poisoning hearts here and there. She is most successful in turning the warrior (former suitor of the king's daughter) Turnus into the organizer of an Italian alliance against the poor Trojans, who are forced to flee making allies among the Latin's other enemies.  Eventually, after much bloodshed -- at least three battles -- Jupiter orders Juno to stop  meddling.  After exacting a promise that the new city of the Trojans won't be called Troy, she relents, and everyone lives happily after after.

(Except for the Carthaginians.)

Church's adaptation of the Aeneid renders the story in much simpler prose, of course, yet -- given its publication date in 1906 -- still retains some formal beauty. In that vein, it frequently borrows Biblical  phrases:  "he who  gives his life will save it", "your people shall be as my people", "put away childish things", "pondered it in his heart".  The initial framing device -- copying that of The Odyssey, in which the beleaguered hero is asked to tell of his arduous journey -- is abandoned for a straightforward recap of the Trojan war, moving straightaway into Aeneas' escape and further adventures. Virgil's original text was itself  made constant allusion to the Odyssey, beginning with the muse invocation and continuing throughout.. At one point, one of  Odysseus'/Ulysses' own men is even rescued from the island of the Cyclopes, No doubt the poems will prove to have structural similarities, too, as I now attempt to read Robert Fitzgerald's verse translation.

The Greeks

The Greeks
© 1950 HDF Kitto
256 pages

HDF Kitto's history of the Greeks came highly recommended to me by another author, and I found it utterly delightful.  Here we have history written not by an archaeologist, but by a classicist whose head is brimming over with the life of his subject, who knows not only their stories but their language.  Kitto begins with a political overview,  from the first settlers to the rise of Alexander the Great, before covering the Greek mind in philosophy and myth.  Kitto brings to this little history great affection for his subject, praising the Greeks despite their faults, as he might a friend.  His style makes the reading enjoyable -- affable, readily knowledgeable, and with just the right amount of wry self-deprecation.

Most fundamentally, Kitto appreciates the Greeks for their rustic well-roundness. They valued autarchy, not specialization, which was one of the reasons their governance often filled important positions with amateurs, choosing citizens by ballot to assume offices.  Related to this is the Greek concept of the polis; for them, the polis wasn't merely a city in which they lived, it was the community through which they fulfilled human nature itself.  The polis was a place in full, supplying its own needs, just as the people it created were men in full. Odyessus, the king of Ithaca, prides himself not on his palace but on his straight furrows: he is a farmer first, a man whose own hands produce works he can take pride in.  Greek appreciation for the fullness of the human condition is exemplified by  art and philosophy which took the body seriously, delighted in the senses while never forgetting the higher things. (Plato would change things, of course, with a dualism that scorned the flesh.)  If we condemn them for not abandoning the free nature of the poleis for a greater empire,  Kitto warns his readers, then we should consider how the Soviets view the west. We have refused their planned society in the name of our liberty, so did the Greeks.  And when we hail the Greeks, is it Alexander's underlings we have in mind? Or is the multitude of men who flourished in Ionia and Athens' golden age?  There's a trace of sadness with Kitto; having judged postwar England against Athens, he finds it inferior -- not in material terms, but in those of human flourishing. Specialization brings with it enormous material prosperity, but men are narrower, less experienced with life in the main;  lost is the Greek man in full, one who could farm and think and craft and love, who put to the test every sinew of his body and mind.  GK Chesterton and Wendell Berry's judgment of modernity is much the same.


Related:

• Edith Hamilton's works, especially The Echo of Greece and The Greek Way. 
• The Life of Greece, Will Durant. Durant's epic history. 
• Who Killed Homer?, Victor Davis Hanson

Jasmine and Stars

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran
© 2007 Fatemeh Keshavarz
180 pgs

Fatemeh Keshavarz's Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran rebukes Azar Nefisi and other writers for contributing to a 'new Orientalism' that looks at Iran only as a place inferior to the west. The author opens Jasmine and Stars with a reminiscence of her summers spent in Shiraz. Growing up, Keshavarz's family spent the nights outside, bringing out wooden cots so they could fall asleep to the view of the glittering stars above, and wake up to the smell of jasmine flowers that her grandmother used during her morning prayers. As exquisite as these summers could be, there was a moment of gloom: the annual migration of grasshoppers. Their migrating mass blocked the starlight and threatened the fields, and some lollygaggers would fall from the skies and litter the yard. Most of the literature westerners read about Iran or the middle east -- Reading Lolita, Tehran Honeymoon, The Kite Runner -- focus on the transient grasshoppers, with nary a mention made of the beauty around them. In response, Keshavarz simultaneously provides tales of jasmine and stars -- recollections from her youth, mixed in with reflections on Persian literature -- and directly critiques the substance of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Her greatest problem with RLT is the depiction of literature as something foreign, as though Nefisi's literature circle created the only opportunity for her students to ever encounter thoughtful literature. Keshavarz holds that there is no culture on Earth more passionate about its literature, or literature in general, than the Persian people. As illustration, she discusses many works, only one of which (Rumi's poetry) has any name recognition in the west. She also points to the enormous popularity of particular authors and poets, most of whom have produced literature the authorities would not endorse, but do not oppress. The Persia of her youth, and the Persia she visits regularly today, is one that engages with literature and arts constantly -- filling public theaters. Similarly, Keshavarz contends that the depiction of Iranians in literature like RLT is simplistic: the women are naive, and the men all knuckle-dragging tyrants. As a counter, she recalls many stories about extraordinary men and women she knew in Iran, and continues to visit - stern military officers who spent their nights painting, and of an illiterate peasant farmer who so loved a particular poet that he committed her every verse to memory.

Jasmine and Stars is a fascinating little mix of literary reflection, criticism, and memoir that provides readers with a welcome view of Iran beyond its political structure.

Related:
Interview with the author on NPR's Speaking of Faith/On Being, covering "The Estatic Faith of Rumi".

America First

America First: Its History, Culture, and Politics
© 1995 Bill Kauffman
296 pages

For slightly over a year prior to the attack at Pearl Harbor, there existed a civic organization of nearly a million people called the America First Committee. It dedicated itself to stymieing the attempts of D.C. and Hollywood to embroil the United States in yet another European war  Despite its name, this book isn’t about them, though Kauffman does honor their heritage in the expanse of people it celebrates here. America First hails writers and politicians commenting on not just foreign policy, but the American spirit.   Here collected are the broadsides and literary stabs of men and women from across the political spectrum, from across the country,  from across income brackets -- who have resisted the idea that America needs to be great to be wonderful.  Politically, their concerns are straightforward: they are against foreign wars and against involvement in organizations that jeopardize American sovereignty. This isn’t merely a rehash of Ain’t my America, with added rebukes for NATO;  instead, Kauffman  shares the ardent love of these writers for America in itself via literary reflection. These authors don’t love it for what it could be – a global player, even a global savior – but for what it is, a vast land of beauty and promise, with a healthy individualistic tradition that protects people not only from the state, but the danger of social smothering.

Kauffman begins in the early 20th century, examining the populist and progressive backgrounds of many who later joined America First. They included Amos Pinchot, written out of the Progressive movement for his strident anti-imperialism. (The rough riding-Caesar, Teddy, referred to him as the party's lunatic fringe.)  Teddy's pistol-packing  daughter Alice Roosevelt also appears,  vexed at both Wilson's League of Nations and her cousin's entire administration. After the war, Kauffman pivots again to literary types -- Jack Kerouac and that magnificent son of the desert, Ed Abbey. Another dear fellow, Wendell Berry, is quoted a few times. (One reason I'm so fond of Kauffman, besides his punchy writing filled with words like katzenjammer: we're both fond of men like those two, plus Dorothy Day.)  Kauffman finishes the book with a section on the contemporary of this 'peculiar nationalism', one that wants to celebrate America as America, not as another frustrated and penniless empire. Writing in the early 1990s, he saw in the campaign of Ross Perot great promise. Here at last was a sign that Americans were escaping the bonds of the establishment -- and there were other kooky fellows like Pat Buchanan waiting to do their part, too.  (Buchanan is hailed as convert to the cause; while previously supporting military adventures in Grenada, he's since written numerous books  urging Americans to focus on the home front --  protecting American industry, discouraging immigration, etc.)  Twenty years later, here we are again, faced with the most depressing candidates in American history.

The high point of America First are the long-forgotten authors whom Kauffman exhumes. Hamlin Garland, Amos Pinchot, Harold Frederic -- who knows these names, other than Kauffman and his readers?  On the low end, a fair few of the people chronicled here carry  the faint aroma of xenophobia.  To their wholly-legitimate fear of railroad monopolies (who controlled their only means of getting produce to market) and of banks (to whom they were often in hock), they added the specter of immigrants with strange cultures swelling the ranks of New York  voting machines, or surging into the heartland and taking what few opportunities were there.  "Americanism" had its dark side, manifested most obviously in the Klan -- who, in their 1920s iteration, seduced many by targeting outsiders. Kauffman doesn't mention this, and while he always acknowledges racial tinges to populist criticism, he doesn't dwell on it. He is more interested in the quiet pride and content people can take in simply being home, in taking solace in the simple pleasures like good company and a family recipe for blackberry cobbler.   Kauffman's own embrace of homebodies from across political camps -- he is a localist with an affection for Gene Debs, who always won his conservative hometown's presidential devotes on the merits of his being a good neighbor --  is well reflected in one chapter's closing remarks:

Who should 'run' America? No one. Or 250 million single individuals.[...] As Americans from Emerson to Mencken have known, following leaders is a fool's game. Only when we restore to Americans their birthright -- local self-government in prideful communities that respect the liberties of every dentist and Baptist and socialist and lesbian and hermit and auto parts dealer -- will we remember what it means to be an American, first."

In commenting on the Harold Frederic novel for which he did a screenplay, Copperhead, Kauffman wrote that the essential tragedy of the story was that its characters had lost sight of the human. They contended against one another not as neighbors, but as ideological nemeses.  That is how the Civil War nearly destroyed their town -- not by artillery fire, but by the fire of their self-righteous rage.   While American money and attention is constantly devoted to defending Europe, defending  southeast Asia, managing the middle east,  and policing the seven seas, there's little time or opportunity for tending to each other.

Related:

• Copperhead, Harold Frederics
• Selected Quotations from America First!

Inferno

Inferno
created 14th century Dante Alighieri
translated © 2002 Anthony Esolen
528 pages

If Dante's Inferno is to be believed, Hell is mostly populated by Italians.  The first piece in the Divine Comedy, Inferno takes the reader down into the depths of the infernal abyss,  through ring after ring of the damned. Fire is the exception, not the rule down here;  Hell is a vast geography of misery.  The ground is rocky and steep, the air filled with cold and lashing rain, or noxious fumes.  The reader, taking Dante's place as he wanders off the straight roads of life into the wilderness, is guided through Hell in safety by Virgil -- the greatest of all classical poets.

 Inferno contains two things in abundance:  classical allusions and Italian politics.  The world of the Inferno is peopled by characters, beasts, and places that draw on the rich vocabulary of the classical tradition. We see here not only the 'virtuous pagans' hanging around a medieval version of the Asphodel Plains, denied entry into paradise but not damned either, but more than a few heroes of the canon. Odysseus is here, condemned as a liar -- and so is Brutus, a traitor in the gnawing maw of an angry devil.  My original intent was to read the Inferno as part of a series of medieval history and medieval literature -- and considering the amount of Florentine politics here, that may have been helpful. Dante can't so much as move without tripping over a corrupt pope, an exposed friend, or some hapless Florentine giving a  dire warning about impending civil war. (And I do mean tripping -- people are stuck into the ground head first, or trapped in a frozen river with only their heads exposed..) The ranks of the traitors are especially Italian-rich. A little familiarity with medieval cosmology helps in understanding the text -- the idea that the universe is a series of spheres, each level nesting inside the other.  Dante also displays an intriguing imagination, creating poetic punishments. (Schismatics who create division within the church or society are themselves divided with an axe to the head.) At the bottom of the pit is a frozen wasteland, with the greatest of traitors entrapped by darkness and ice. The artic winds that create the ice are created by Satan's wings, constantly beating in his eternal attempt to rise.

When the year's young in season, 
and the spray washes the sun beams in Aquarius
and the nights dwindle south toward half a day
When the frost  paints a copy on the ground
of her white sister's snowy image, but
Her feather's sharpness doesn't last for long [...]   (Canto 24)

 Esolen errs on the side of accuracy rather than rhyme with his translation,  but he does achieve a certain lyric quality and uses footnotes judiciously, creating a text neither confusing nor cluttered. Esolen's appendices are unusually rich, containing textually similar lines from The Aenid, text from the non-canonical "Vision of St. Paul", which describes different  degrees of punishments for sinners, and theological writings from Aquinas and Boniface that would have informed Dante's view.  More extensive notes follow the end of Canto XXXIV, but of course that's not the end of the story -- it continues on the mount of Purgatory.

Literary Converts

Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief
© 2000 Joseph Pearce
452 pages

            

Literary Converts is a historical survey of the 'second spring' of Anglo-Catholic literature and all that followed, covering most of the twentieth century.  Its author would call it a history of grace acting through literature, and Joseph knows about the power of literature; his own soul was rescued through it. In his youth he was the publisher of Bulldog, a vicious racial newspaper in the U.K, but while exploring economic debate he encountered Chesterton, and through Chesterton the redemptive power of the Christian faith.   In Literary Converts, he takes on nearly a century of English literary society, focusing on a group of authors  whose paths brought them closer to Rome, even as the rest of society became more secular. While the 32 sections appear to be miniature biographies, they are in fact intertwined; Pearce tells here the story of a multi-generational community, one decade’s converts inspiring the next through literature and personal conversation.  There are many familiar names here, the greatest being G.K. Chesterton, but some have passed into obscurity.  Many caused scandals when they converted, either because of their social status (R.H. Benson, the son of an Anglican archbishop), or because of their long-respected stature as libertines, like Evelyn Waugh.   What did they see in tradition and the Catholic church, amid increasing material prosperity?

 In an age of dehumanizing work and political machines, of eugenics and social 'darwinism'*,  they saw an institution which insisted on the dignity of the human person, regardless of the ideology of the hour; when populations were being shifted from the fields to the cities, when everything seemed chaotic and new, they saw stability in a  tradition that had weathered the storms of centuries and would, most likely, stand fast through these,As  monstrous factories belched smoke, armed mobs brawled in the streets, and ugliness was enthroned,  they saw in the west's tradition a preserve of beauty, truth, and love. The work produced by these authors -- a lifetime's worth of reading --  wasn't mere spiritual dabbling. Chesterton and Belloc, for interest, provided works of political economy in The Servile State, What's Wrong with the World, and An Outline of Sanity;  T.S. Eliot created The Waste Land, and Christopher Dawson contributed insightful history. Even if they did not join the Catholic church, as was the case with C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, they still drew very near it, and did so through literary engagement – and often through engagement with one another. To read this book is to eavesdrop on a great conversation, a century of  passionate and introspective men and women grappling with the fundamental question of meaning.     

While Pearce is an accessible writer, this is a book of density, and may fall on the obscure side for those who aren't passionate about -- even smitten by -- literature.  I only heard of it while listening to Pearce  lecture on the 'English spring' following the Romantic period in literature. 

Related:
Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis
The Fellowship: the Literary Lives of the Inklings, Phillip Zaleski
The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and Davis Jones; Adam Schwartz


* With apologies to Charles Darwin, since that pernicious social policy owes its name to Herbert Spencer. 

This week: science, the middle east, and a duel

Dear readers, I'm beginning to suspect books are a racket.  Today I began reading one and within fifty pages, I'd already written down four  more titles that I wanted to investigate.  No wonder people read fiction -- it's far less addictive.  Anyhoo, May is off to a promisingly interesting start, with more science and middle-eastern politics coming up.  Speaking of --

 A few weeks ago,  I read Reading Lolita in Tehran, and apparently didn't mention it.  It's a curious mixture of literary discussion and revolutionary memoir, as the author, Azar Nafisi, discusses great books of the western canon (and Lolita) with her classes in Iran as the country heaves with revolution.  Ms. Nafisi was a leftist revolutionary in her youth, at least during her time in America: imagine her surprise when she returned to Iran and got one, just not the one she expected. While opposition to the Shah's regime drew from both the secular-Marxist left and the reactionary-Islamic right, it was the latter which prevailed.  Feeling irrelevant by the new regime, and appalled by its puritanical culture,  Nafesi would seek sanctuary first in her classroom, and then in a private class taught from her home, teaching to a select group of girls.   Throughout their discussions they sought to apply the themes engaged by Nabokov,  James, Fitzgerald, and Austen: for instance, as Humbert from Lolita turns a young girl into an object of his own interests, to be molded by his own proclivities, so the government of Iran has turned them into objects to be molded by its desires.  While I haven't read most of the books discussed by Nafisi's class or her reading group,  I found it very interesting as a memoir of the revolution. I'm particularly interested in following up with The Republic of the Imagination,  as Nafisi -- having fled Iran  -- seeks her true city via the literary world, engaging with minds across the ages.

 I'll also be having a little fun with titles later. You may remember when I read Into Thin Air, followed shortly by Into Thick Air,  or my reading two books entitled Kobayashi Maru back to back.  Well,  another dueling duo arrived in the mail today, and the only thing preventing me from diving right in is...all the other books I'm intent on reading. We'll have to see what  I cram in where...

Frodo's Journey

Frodo's Journey: The Hidden Meaning of the Lord of the Rings
© 2015 Joseph Pearce
158 pages

Noting that Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring trilogy is rich with symbolism is rather akin to observing that the Pacific Ocean is big. The description is accurate, but weightless. Frodo’s Journey examines much of its symbolism in detail, chiefly elaborating on Tolkien’s observation that it was, “of course, a deeply religious work”. The religion is present not in the trappings of a Church, as with Asimov’s Foundation series, but in the epic’s core story of grace against evil.   Pearce informs his argument by studying the details of the story in the context of Tolkien’s mythic background, drawing from the Simarillion. Although his focus is on Tolkien’s Christian symbolism, Pearce also touches lightly on Tolkien’s love for the language and lore of pre-Norman England.

In the Simarillion, Pearce writes, Tolkien establishes a celestial atmosphere not unlike the Christian one. There is one central deity, the Iluvatar, who creates the Cosmos by conducting music. One heavenly musician refuses to play in harmony, and is struck down to Middle-Earth, but is told that no matter how much discord he attempts to introduce,  the grand master will always restore harmony..  Central to the story of the Lord of the Rings is, of course, the Ring, which is far different from the ring of The Hobbit. There it was a mysterious but powerfully helpful object;  in the Ring trilogy, it dominates the minds and hearts of those who wear it, and exposes them to attack by dark forces.   The ring, writes Pearce, is Sin – not only is it burdensome, but taking it on distances the wearer from the good world which was divinely created, and makes them more visible to the Dark Lord – Sauron,  Morgoth’s chief servant.  The coup de Grace:   according to Return of the King,  the ring was destroyed on March 25, the same day that Catholic tradition maintains was the date of the historic crucifixion.  The whole story has the stamp of Providence on it, writes Pearce, for Gandalf muses that Bilbo was meant find the Ring, so that it might be destroyed.  Although Pearce’s brief work shines a light on many of Tolkien’s other little allusions – the Charlemagne-like crowning of Aragon, the linguistic fun Tolkien has with the “far-seeing” stones that dispirit Sauron’s enemies and have the same etymological structure in Elvish as Television and Fernsehen do in English and German,   the Christian connection is the most broadly developed.

This meaning is not nearly as overt as C.S. Lewis’ own Narnian chronicles,  in which the Christ-figure Aslan announced to the children that he was known by another name in their world, but it definitely registers.  Being as Tolkien was a practicing Catholic, some degree of the inspiration could have been accidental, like the Mary-like veneration of Galadriel, but the use of dates has the stamp of deliberation.  For the Fellowship to have started out on December 25 (by Tolkien’s appendix) and triumphed on the same date of the first Good Friday makes clear that Tolkien was paying homage at the very least.   While this is my first foray in reading books about the Ring trilogy, it won't be the last, and I'm eager to see if other authors share or differ from Pearce. I'm sure the trilogy has tremendous depths to plumb!

The Wisdom of the Myths

Wisdom from the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life
© 2014 Luc Ferry
416 pages

Well over a year or so ago, in a mood to read about the classical tradition, I happened upon Wisdom from the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Save Your Life. Well, that seemed serendipitous, to say the least, despite the fact that the last time I read Ferry he was rather underwhelming.  That mood passed, but it's come round again, and so this weekend I enjoyed Ferry's introduction to the Greek mythos. Wisdom from the Myths is two things;  Ferry retells the major stories of Greek mythology, patching them together from Homer and the dramatists, but brings them together to argue that they constitute a coherent worldview.  This is one of an orderly  universe in which man has a definite role as a member of a polis. (Odysseus' journey is read then as a spiritual one, with the hero confronting the death of his identity when tempted by Calypso. He may remain with her as an immortal, but in so doing would destroy every aspect of what makes him human -- his identity as a father, a son, a husband, a king...a mortal, whose glory is in living well in the face of death.) The cosmos' order is nearly self-correcting in that most negative behavior results in self-destruction, though it does seem to require the occasional hand from Zeus through his agents, Heracles and those who are aware of this unitive order.  As in A Brief History of Thought, Ferry turns again and again to Stoicism, which he views as the fulfillment of this worldview.  Ferry is not a Stoic, but quite sympathetic. He's unusual in that he champions a secular worldview but takes mythology and philosophy seriously, as more than just-so stories and naval-gazing.  He manages to go almost the entire book without overly arcane references, a triumph for an academic.   I enjoyed this far more than A Brief History of Thought, at least as a recap of Greek mythology with a Stoic bent, but the title is overblown.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray
© 1890 Oscar Wilde
180 pages

Dorian Gray is the picture of youthful innocence, but his portrait is one of deathly corruption. After sitting for a painting rendered by his friend Basil, Dorian becomes a source of infatuation for himself.  Awed by his own beauty, Dorian is driven to angst by the sight of his own beauty and confesses that he would do anything, even give his soul, if the figure in the painting would age instead of himself.   Through such a Faustian bargain, the portrait becomes Gray's hidden self, his conscience  reflecting the ugliness within as he becomes increasingly self-obsessed. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a tale of sin and degradation, of a man's destruction -- the fulfillment of the teacher's exhortation in Ecclesiastes that all is vanity.

Although The Picture of Dorian Gray ends in death, being the literary account of a moral crash-and-burn,  Wilde's wit makes for numerous fun moments. There is a bitterness to the laughs,  the vicious humor; the many stabs taken at society and middle class morality are strikes rendered by truly vicious men,  individuals who commit murder and abandon themselves to moral chaos. Many witticisms attributed to Wilde are placed in here the mouth of the malicious Lord Henry, like "The only way to get rid of a temptation is yield to it."  One hopes that few readers look for wisdom from the likes of Henry, who is such a profoundly dismal influence that the painter Basil begs him not to corrupt young Dorian. (Alas for Bas, soon Dorian will be doing the corrupting...and to such an extent that many of his deeds can't be named directly, but alluded to only by the fact that people leave the room when he arrives.)    During at least two points in the work, Dorian wavers at a moral crossroads, but at both times he only slides further into the pit, unable to free himself from his one fixation: self-adulation.

Gray is a curious accomplishment,  humorful but with a great sadness. Gray's obsession with himself, his surrounding of himself with trivial amusements, are haunting.  For all his pleasures taken, for all the pursuit given to making himself feel good, Dorian at the end is worse for the wear. The one character who remains interested in his person -- Henry again -- does so because Dorian is an amusing spectacle.  Even the man who encouraged him on his descend will not accompany him on it, merely watch coldly from above.  Selfishnesss reigns. In a world filled with trivial amusements, and now more than ever obsessed with perpetual youth, Dorian Gray remains a warning.  In both art and substance, Wilde's sole novel commends itself to the modern reader.

Related:
Mephisto, Klaus Mann

The Adventures of Henry Thoreau

 The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond
© 2014 Michael Sims
384 pages

Shortly before retreating for two years to his self-built cabin at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire. A simple attempt at having fish for lunch reduced 300 acres of woodlands to charcoal, and very nearly ignited Concord.  The village pariah would eventually be pardoned, for the town had known him before his attempt at civic ignition;  they knew his reputation as the nice if odd boy from a respectable family of teachers and pencil merchants. Before Henry David Thoreau loomed large over American literary history,  eventually helping inspire the environmental and civil rights movements, Henry was that nice if odd boy. The Adventures of Henry Thoreau examines Henry's life outside of Walden,  giving a history of his life as he lived it -- as a boy, as an awkward, courting teenager, as a adventure-thirsty young man who explored the whole lengths of rivers with his brother.

Michael Sims puts a human face to the man who has cast such a long shadow over American history. Here, Henry is no icon, but a frequently distracted student who barely gets into Harvard and who itches to escape it. Throughout his life, his abiding passion is the outdoors. Raised a Unitarian, Henry was already predisposed to look askance at traditional religion. For him, spirituality was an individual journey, and he communed with God best in the outdoors, skipping church to take long walks in the wilderness. He idealized Nature, and revered the native Americans as having lived more closely connected to it. But his lust for the natural wasn't limited to getting "moony-eyed over mountains";  his mind also had a scientific cast, and those long hours of meticulous study resulted in one work of technical import.  These aren't solitary quests, either; young Henry is companionable. He takes long walks into the woods with  remarkable friends, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne;  spends weeks on a river with his brother, and even takes classes of children into the wild to teach them how to observe,  investigate, and come to understand the world around them. As the books wear on, however, these connections fall away; he leaves his work as a teacher, his brother dies, and his object of affection rejects him on the advice of her father that Henry's prospects are too dismal to make him a fit husband. Throughout, he escapes increasingly more into solitude, and though he dies at home, with family watching over him, he seems a lonely figure sometimes substituting philosophy for people. He sought an authentic life free of distractions, and produced extraordinary work as a thinker -- but in light of the ordinary happiness of his early years, one wonders if the later monkishness was truly necessary.

Related:
I to Myself: from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
"On Civil Disobedience", Henry David Thoreau

* "moony-eyed over mountains", as a skeptical professor of mine once described those who identify as spiritual, but not religious

Sailing from Byzantium

Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
© 2005 Colin Wells
368 pages           

       Isaac Asimov referred to Byzantium as a forgotten empire, lost and dismissed to the western mind as a decayed remnant of a once-great power. But Byzantium had a greatness of its own that inspired civilizations around it, even its enemies. Sailing from Byzantium  examines the literary, political, scientific, and other influences the Eastern empire had on the western Renaissance,  Eastern Europe, and even the nascent Islamic civilization.  Though somewhat impaired by being name-dense and not giving sketch of the Byzantines in brief, Sailing  does deliver a sense of the eastern empire as an inspirational fount during the long millennium that followed its western antecedent's demise.  The three civilizations drinking from its waters took different elements of the Empire home with them, with some sharing; to the Italians, Byzantium was the temple of Greek civilization, its scholars the teachers of the first medieval humanists, including by extension Erasmus.  Islam cut its imperial teeth when it seized some of the East's richest provinces, and  Byzantine notions about politics, law, and the aesthetics of royalty became incorporated into the Islamic civilization as it came of age. This lessened somewhat after the conquest of Persia, pursued after Constantinople proved too tough to crack.  The Russians, too, were initially rivals of their southern neighbors, making their introduction with a good old-fashioned Black Sea raid;   having common enemies and rivals, however, pushed the two together, and  as the tribe of Russians matured into a state of their own, their religion was that of Byzantium's. Later, once Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, Russia would even claim to be the inheritors of the Empire; just as it moved from Rome to Constantinople, so it now had moved to the third Rome, Moscow.  The marriage of a Russian potentate to a Byzantine princess even attempted to give such a claim practical validation. In examining the Byzantine influence on these three powers in turn, Wells not only demonstrates the richness of its culture, but pries open worlds probably mysterious to western readers,  connecting exotic history with some slightly more familiar. It's quite fascinating, though readers would be better served reading an overview of Byzantine history before launching in. 

Race with the Devil

Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love
© 2013 Joseph Pearce
264 pages

How does a neo-Nazi become a Catholic literary critic?  An act of God?   Joseph Pearce would surely make the claim, his life having become a miserable shambles before he heard the booming voice of Gilbert Keith Chesterton from beyond the grave (albiet through books).  In his youth, Joe Pearce was an influential white supremacist, rising through the ranks of the National Front through his one-man newsletter, Bulldog. Building success by appealing to football hooligans  and punk rockers, it caught the attention of not only the National Front, but of the British government, which twice threw Pearce into prison for inciting racial hatred.  His first time in chains only deepened Pearce's conviction that the state was out to ruin the English race; by his second imprisonment, Pearce was already in turmoil, already doubting the path he had chosen. Turning prison into a spiritual retreat, he emerged from bars and from his own dark night of the soul to a new life.

In his new life, Joseph Pearce is a distinguished author and scholar, having held positions at institutions like Ave Marie University, Thomas More College, and Aquinas College. He has produced not only biographies of men like G.K. Chesterton and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but works that delve into the deeper meanings of The Lord of the Rings and Shakespeare. This hunger to know the human soul through literature is partially responsible for Pearce's salvation. Although as a teenager he was caught up in reaction against the upswell of immigration, and the enervating influence of modernist politics,  he found little to build on there. His life was filled with passion as he roamed the streets looking for migrant gangs or football clubs to mix it up with, and even some purpose as he became a shaper of the nationalist thinking, but pessimism was a bitter gall to sallow.  Works like Orwell's 1984 diverted his course from fascism, awaking him to the danger of an all-power state,  but unsettled him with its dark vision of Winston Smith's defeat, the spirit of humanity crushed underfoot.  Pearce could not live with it, but an abiding thirst for literature would offer him glimpses of a better world -- particularly Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a retelling of the author's years spent in the Soviet prison-camp system, which he survived, humanity intact.

 Pearce spent four hours a day reading on trains as he traveled for his duties with the National Front,    but literature took him places he surely never meant to go, like Rome. So against popery was Pearce that he traveled to northern Ireland to work with the Ulster Loyalists and joined the Orange Orange, dedicated to ensuring Protestant supremacy over Irish Catholic culture. As much as Pearce despised the Catholic church, he had a grudging respect for John Paul II’s fight against the Soviet system. It was G.K. Chesterton who coaxed him into the Tiber, however, by presenting an argument against the centralizing tendencies of both capitalism and socialism.  Chesterton offered a third way in which the ownership of the means of production – of shops, farms, tools, and the like – is widely as distributed as possible. Pearce, having grown up in ‘the shire’, a quiet arcadian community far removed from much of modernity, saw in Chesterton an argument for what he longed for.  Pearce’s love for his country, warped by racism,  was redeemed by Chesterton, refashioned into ideals of peaceful cooperation.  Delighting in Chesterton’s personality, Pearce  read everything he could by the man, and through his study came to appreciate the Catholic faith and its transcendent moral order that shed insight on not only personal morality, but our socio-economic structure.

Race with the Devil is a powerful story human redemption, part biography and part literary reflection. While the aspects on British culture were fascinating in themselves, particularly the political loyalties of football clubs and musical subcultures,  Pearce's journey itself is the wonder. Consider how powerful ethnic nationalism can be, that potent mix of primal clannishness and modern ideology; it intoxicates both the brain and the blood. Yet Pearce resisted. Having approached the abyss, he stepped back. Despite all of the anger and fear he subjected himself to, there still remained some shades of grace, memories of that childhood steeped in ordinary decency.  When racial turmoil still fills American papers, it is a comforting notion that there still remains some escape route to sanity and healing.

Race is an extraordinary read.

The Age of Voltaire

The Age of Voltaire: A History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756
898 pages
© 1965 Will and Ariel Durant

            The ninth work in Will Durant’s sweeping Story of Civilization, The Age of Voltaire picks up with the death of the Sun King in the dawn of the Enlightenment.   It’s an age of tumultuous change; though its survey ends before the French revolution, Europe is already in the throes of the industrial and scientific revolutions. New worlds are opening; not only are new goods flowing in from the recently-discovered parts of the globe,  but western man’s entire worldview is shifting. The modern age is dawning.

           Voltaire follows the titular philosopher as he travels from France to England, Germany, and later Switzerland, though the first three countries are Durant’s focus here.  As with the rest of Durant’s integral history,  this book carries weight because it examines not only political and military history, but considers in depth the literary, artistic, philosophical, and religious developments of the time. These ideas are not isolated from one another;   individualistic philosophy drives changes in both politics and religion, weakening the claims of absolutist monarchy and state churches alike. England grows with the times;  her king is superseded by Parliament and the prime minister. France hardens and resists, but the tide of history sweeping Europe will break it as surely as the waves break shorelines. 

           Of course, in this era it's less a gentle tide and more of a water-cannon. The radicals of the era are not content with careful, prudent change; no, things must be set on fire. Christianity is beyond reform for the rising philosophes; the world must be overturned, priests must die, churches must be burned. This is the  cradle of the French revolution, the nursery of those who would  take a machete to society until their ideals are satisfied. On a more constructive note, science and technological prowess are abounding, and Durant sets aside a large segment of the book to look at it seperately. 

       Durant is a genteel moderate on the religion and philosophy debate; from Our Oriental Heritage on, he has favored religion as an institution offering stability, comfort,  beauty, and more to the human race, though he is never blind to its abuses. His conclusion, a dialogue between a pope and Voltaire, makes plain his attitude that the tumultuous era his history is heading into is one of mixed blessings; while Durant is thankful that the rise of the philosophes advanced human liberty, checking the abuses of monarchy and organized religion alike, in their enthusiasm they became arrogant.

Benedict: You thought it possible for one mind, in one lifetime, to acquire such scope of knowledge and depth of understanding as to be fit to sit in judgment upon the wisdom of the race --upon traditions and institutions that have taken form out of the experience of the centuries. Tradition is to the group what memory is to the individual; and just as the snapping of memory may bring insanity, so a sudden break with tradition may plunge a whole nation into madness like France  and the revolution. [....] We should be allowed to question traditions and institutions, but with care that we do not destroy more than we can build. 

p. 788

As with his judgment of the impact of the reformation, the entire dialogue puts his tender appreciation for both sides, and the wisdom in appreciating them both, on display.  I suspect his criticism will grow a little sharper in the next volume.