A-Z 2021 N - Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Pablo Neruda, 1924)

I've never really read a lot of poetry.  Part of that is that I've often gone through spells where I don't read anything but non-fiction, but equally, it's simply that I've often leaned more into novels (and usually genre stuff at that) than into shorter works, let alone works where the whole thing might be over in a matter of lines.

I may have decided that I don't much enjoy reading Keats, but that absolutely isn't the case with reading poetry in general, as I've learned with this small volume of Pablo Neruda's verse.  Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a small volume (Penguin's edition comes out to 112 pages, and that's with an 18-page introduction, every poem being bilingual on facing pages, and about a dozen Picasso illustrations with blank facing pages), but it packs a punch, to say the least.

The title isn't 100% accurate; the 'Song of Despair' is absolutely a love poem as well, simply one that's more about the pain of love ending than about adoration of the woman Neruda is devoting the words to.  So what we have here is a small collection, just twenty-one poems, most only a page long.  And yet, there's a very good reason that this was chosen to have not just a whole volume to itself, but one in bespoke Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition styling, making it stand out just that little bit more on the shelf, despite having the lowest spine height of the whole bunch.

The poems here are quite unlike the Romantic poets, with their tendency toward placing the object of affection on a pedestal of sorts, as if the lovers were Greek goddesses.  Rather, there's a sort of raw, earthy quality to Neruda's writing, his lovers a part of the world, creatures of sensuality who inspire both words of love and of lust.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.

I mean...  That's definitely a form of worship toward one's lover, but not in any kind of remotely chaste sense. There's a sense of unbridled eroticism to every poem in the collection; the most common metaphors compare the lover to the ocean's depths, to the weather, love as something more akin to a force of nature that cannot be resisted or controlled, rather than anything that could be captured in stone and placed in a museum.

It's difficult to say that this slim volume gives a solid idea of what Neruda's poetry was like over the course of his life, however; this was one of his first published works (composed when he was only 20), while his career lasted until his death in 1973.  That said, given that it is still, a century on, the highest-selling poetry collection in the Spanish language, their timeless quality ensures that Neruda occupies a solid position among the acknowledged masters of poetry.

Picking up the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 certainly doesn't hurt, though.

A-Z 2021 M - The Crucible (Arthur Miller, 1953)

If there's one thing that my country is really, really good at, it's attacking itself.  All you have to do to see evidence of that is look at the news; we're always divided, often with at least one side quoting Bible verses as justification for their hatred of the other side.  I've actually seen Leviticus quoted as a pro-face-mask argument in recent days, which, on one hand, good on whoever found that for locating something that speaks the right language, but on the other hand...  Ugh.  I'm not going to get into the theory and practice of using historical religious documents as a guiding principle in the modern world, that's just not what I'm here for, and it would probably just turn into a crazed rant anyways.

What I am here for, right now, is Cold War/Red Scare commentary disguised as a play about the Salem witch trials.

So, because it's absolutely not existing in a vacuum, the first place to start any discussion of The Crucible has to be with the political background to its writing, specifically the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and its intersection with the entertainment industry.  If someone pointed a finger at you and said 'Communist!', you got dragged into Congress where you had to answer whether you were a Communist, and if you knew anyone else who might have been a Communist, and if you say no, they're not going to believe you, and if you say yes, you'd better have names to give, and if you plead your First or Fifth Amendment rights, well, that's just proof that you're a Communist, because nobody has anything to fear if they're innocent, right?

So basically, anyone who got pulled in was either guilty or had to point fingers.  Refusal wasn't an option.

Arthur Miller, The Crucible's author, saw all this happening, saw his friend Elia Kazan actually pointing fingers in 1952, and then went to research in Salem, Massachusetts, because, well...  we've seen this kind of kangaroo court situation before, in this country.  And the result is a Tony-award-winning play that ended up perfectly describing how he was going to end up acting when he got dragged in front of the HUAC himself in 1956.

The play itself does a little bit of playing fast-and-loose with history, but the general form of the narrative follows what actually happened.  Some of the girls of Salem Village get caught doing stuff they shouldn't be, decide to blame it on witchcraft, and when they suddenly have everyone's ears and become celebrities of a sort, which isn't helped by everyone being willing to go with their argument and go into a state of paranoia.  With the courts deciding that since supernatural evidence by definition lacks a physical presence, the situation ended up that the only way out was to lie and say you were guilty of witchcraft, repent before the Lord, and name names.

There's a lot to unpack in the real events, particularly in the political underpinnings; I'm far from an expert, but I can point at the podcast Remarkable Providences as a source of good background information (in particular, the political and economic motives are only glossed over in The Crucible).  Miller provides several short essays in the midst of Act One, in order to give some historical background for the characters, though he does leave out where his inaccuracies lie.  It would be difficult to argue that he wasn't aware of what he was doing, but given that he was making a statement about the nature of guilt in the middle of an uncontrolled moral panic, his messaging through the lead character, John Proctor, requires a bit of that.  In particular, the personal conflict in the play revolves around a past illicit dalliance between him and Abigail Williams, the primary instigator of the witch panic, and ringleader of the group of girls pointing fingers at everyone around them.

In real life, this almost certainly never happened, given that Proctor was in his 60s and Abigail a pre-teen, but in the play, these ages are changed to mid-30s and 18 respectively.  The main reason Proctor gets involved in the proceedings is that Abigail points a finger at his wife, in what is all but directly stated to be an attempt to render Proctor a widower so that she can marry him, but his attempt to talk some sense into the court instead results in him being declared a witch, himself.  In true kangaroo court style, he's essentially declared guilty without anything even remotely resembling a fair trial, and the play ends with his execution after perjuring himself in an attempt to get some real justice for the innocent, an act which he very forcibly recants after it becomes clear that no such justice is present.

In the end of the play, we're told that Abigail stole her uncle's fortune and hopped on a ship; the epilogue suggests that she was later seen as a prostitute in New York, a somewhat poetic ending based on the play's version of her.  It's unclear where Miller got this from, however; Abigail Williams doesn't seem to exist in the historical record after (or, indeed, before) the witchcraft scare in Salem.

So, what are we to take from this?  That paranoia is bad when it results in a bit of face-spiting?  That using scripture and religion to determine what is or isn't a sign of guilt results in the innocent being punished?  That trusting the accuser with no actual evidence is a really, really stupid idea?

That people are really, really good at putting their brains into coast and just going along with whatever the loud voices shouting in their ears tell them?

In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy (admittedly, not part of HUAC, but very much of the same political moment) made the ill-advised move to turn his anti-Communist attentions toward the US Army.  The resulting proceedings were very much public, and led to his popularity and approval spiraling downward, and eventually a formal censure by the Senate, effectively ending his political career.

In the script he wrote for the 1996 film version of the play, Miller added a scene, just before the final day, where Abigail is directly confronted by Reverend Hale, one of Proctor's allies, who has come to realize how he's been used over the length of the story, and exactly what his expertise in finding apparent witchcraft and devilry has been used for.  In response, Abigail declares Hale's wife to be a witch, an act which results in her being largely discredited due to having accused a preacher's wife, considered beyond reproach, of being a witch.  While this doesn't get those previously accused off the hook, it's the point where she decides to make her escape, ahead of any repercussions landing on her head.

One has to wonder what the tipping point in our culture's current moment of paranoid self-harm and self-destruction is going to be.

A-Z 2021 L - Kalevala (Elias Lönnrot, 1835/1849)

I think I've gone over my love of fairy/folktales before, so I'll forego any introduction about such things, for now.  Instead, given the nature of Kalevala, I should look at the political underpinnings of a writer composing a collection of such stories.

Fairy and folk collections essentially fall into two categories.  There are the variety that most people likely think of, where the stories come from a variety of sources and are thrown together because someone from outside the culture enjoys them; this might best be defined as the Lang approach.  Then there are the collections made with purpose, by people within the culture they are collecting from, trying to make a specific, often inherently nationalistic, statement.  Kalevala is firmly a member of this second variety.

To begin with, it's important to address the things that Kalevala is not.  It is not a collection in the sense that most would think of collections being.  Rather than simply compiling an anthology of sorts, Elias Lönnrot collected the tales that flitted around the 19th-century Finnish landscape, then took his own hand at the bardic skillset, weaving the stories and songs around each other into a single coherent whole, a 600-page poem with chapter breaks.  This is not to say that it's internally consistent; several times characters take credit for events that are properly attributed to others.  That said, the central plotline, largely telling of the interactions between Väinämöinen the eternal singer, Ilmarinen the immortal blacksmith, Lemminkäinen of the islands, and Louhi the Mistress of the North, has mythic qualities all over it, with characters routinely singing (or smithing) reality into the shape they desire, shifting the forms of themselves and others at will, and calling on the gods with visible effects.  A recurring object, the Sampo, is crafted by Ilmarinen for Louhi and provides her homeland with riches, seemingly without end.  While most animals are simply animals, trees and boats seem to be able to speak with Väinämöinen easily.

There are segments that feel almost like in their earlier existence as song-poems in the oral tradition, they were intended almost as a call-and-response; many times through the book, whole sections are repeated with minor variation.  If Ilmarinen is smithing something, he's going to get amazing things that aren't what he was trying to make at least twice, and shove the wonders back into the furnace so he can try again.  If anyone is traveling and needs to request something from a village, he's going to knock on at least two doors and not find what he's looking for before finding it in the third.  The rule of threes is firmly in place here.

All in all, a wonderful read, albeit one with a great many unlikeable characters.  Even the most heroic characters are greatly flawed here; I can count the number of characters who never did anything immoral on one hand, and all of those are female characters.  That seems to be a common trait in mythic scenarios, though; it's near impossible to find characters in epics who aren't flawed and, well... human.

So, what about that nationalistic streak I mentioned?  Well, for that, we have to look at the world as it was for Lönnrot.  His Finland was a largely-autonomous part of Russia at the time, and few were recording the folk songs of the forest people in the north of the country.  A generation earlier, the folklorist Carl Axel Gottlund had lamented that there was no national epic for the Finnish people to unite behind, no central mythology.  Lönnrot's contribution, then, provided that; it's notable that he revised the first edition of it into a single unified whole, 14 years after the initial publishing, and later released an abridged version of the work in 1862 specifically so it could be taught in schools.  A visit to Finland now would show just how important this work became for the culture; it's common to find names from the Kalevala attached to places and businesses (a small town started by Finnish immigrants in Michigan is called Kaleva, with street names to match), and when Don Rosa wrote a Sampo-inspired story in Uncle Scrooge comics, complete with relevant characters, it instantly made him a celebrity there.

It could be, and often has been, argued that Kalevala helped to focus the Finnish national identity, enough that when Russia began trying to limit the autonomy of Finland in the late 19th century, the Finnish people pushed back, long and hard enough that they eventually declared independence in late 1917 (admittedly alongside other issues in Russia).  Its reach extends beyond Finland's borders, however; most notably, J.R.R. Tolkien based parts of The Silmarillion on Kalevala, and the character of Tom Bombadil is almost certainly inspired by Väinämöinen.

In any case, this was a very enjoyable read, and significantly less viking-ey than I expected.  Fancy that, the least coastal part of Scandinavia has a different culture...  but just as rich in mythic lore.

A-Z 2021 K - Plain Tales from the Hills (Rudyard Kipling, 1884-1888)

We may as well start today with addressing the elephant in the room.  Rudyard Kipling was absolutely a believer that British colonialism was fundamentally a good thing.  He doesn't write of it as a uniform good, but in many ways this is because he sees that humans are flawed.  He isn't supporting colonialism out of a nationalistic notion of Empire, but rather, he sees it as an almost sacred duty of good European folks (though especially the English-speaking ones) to bring civilization and Christianity to other parts of the world, whether they already had perfectly good civilizations and religions or not.

We will not, however, be addressing any elephants in today's book, as despite their appearance on the cover of my copy, there are no elephants as significant parts of the narrative in any of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills.  Sorry, Hathi, I didn't read the book you're in quite yet.

Plain Tales was Kipling's first widely-published work, so what we see here is a very young writer (these stories are from when the author was between 19-23 years old), working as a journalist in British India, turning his pen to (generally comic) fiction in order to fill a few columns in the newspaper he worked for.  This, then, indicates the initial audience as well; he was writing for English folks in and around Lahore.

Perhaps due to that audience, Kipling has a particular focus on English characters; few stories have "native" protagonists, and many have only white characters at all.  There are recurring characters at times, references to earlier stories abound, and it's very clear that the readership were following along from episode to episode.

The subject matter varies widely.  There are a number of short romantic comedies and tragedies alike, tales of pranks gone horribly wrong or spectacularly right, several stories told in a remarkable vernacular about the goings-on of a military regiment...  In short, a cross-section of what life in and around Simla during the mid-1880s was like, at least if you were an Englishman.  The mental imagery created in some of these tales is amazing, particularly in the case of the military regiment's offerings, one of which includes a ghost horse with a skeleton and a pair of timpanis on its back galloping toward a whole battalion.  It makes sense in context.

Kipling's narrator is a sort of self-insertion, usually standing to one side of the stories and simply observing what happens through his journalist's eye; while several times he is drawn into the narrative, this is rarely done in a way that gives him any great agency within the story.  Rather, this device is used to allow him to act as a sort of straight man for the other characters' foolishness (in one case, having to race on a horse in a dust storm to try and stop an unfortunate aftermath to a friend's proposal to the wrong sister; the obvious mistake having been to propose to someone you can't clearly see in a dust storm).

It's hard at times to tell if some of the things Kipling says about India and its people are actually his views or if they are intended as satire.  He clearly feels strongly for the country and its culture, but at the same time, he has an outsider's view, and especially feels that Western culture has some degree of primacy that should be brought in to sort of... improve on what's already there.

It's worth noting that the text that Penguin has used, at least in the edition I have (which is not identical to the one currently in print), is from the third compiled printing of these stories, which was partially adjusted by Kipling due to its nature as a book intended for the "Home" market, back in the British Isles.  This has required some adjusting of text here and there, largely to make things that would have been obvious to his readers in Lahore more clear for readers in London.  The endnotes provided do a good job of making it clear where this has happened, however, and much of the content that one looks at slightly askance now was there all along.  It's not a surprise that this is coming from the same author who would, ten years later, write "The White Man's Burden".

One last thing that I really have to wonder about, and do want to bring up, is the way of referring to race here.  For some reason, the Indian peoples are referred to as "blacks" if their race is mentioned at all, as if they're the same as Africans.  I really don't know for sure what to make of that; in a couple of places it's been described as looking similar to a "Spanish complexion", perhaps indicating that any darker complexion would be considered 'black' in this case.  This would line up with one of the knights in the Arthurian legends, Morien, a half-Moorish knight described as "black of face and limb", despite by all indications being someone who would have something akin to a middle-eastern or, indeed, Indian complexion.  This is one of those places where being American may be to my detriment in this case, as my specific cultural background gives a likewise-specific idea of what 'black' means that may not line up with literature that comes from a British background, particularly that from other centuries.

It's ultimately impossible to separate Kipling from the colonial views and mindset, in any case.  He's a product of his time and culture, and his writings show that.  While the racism on display isn't as hateful as, say, that of H.P. Lovecraft, it's still a clear through-line of sorts in the stories where Indian people appear.  This isn't to say that the English get away without some solid jabs, but the overall form of Kipling's work still celebrates imperialism.  It's simply impossible to escape from that in many of his works, and this early fiction puts it front and center.

A-Z 2021 J: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson, 1962)

If you read American fiction, you have probably encountered Shirley Jackson's writing at some point, even if you don't remember her by name.  She's especially known currently as the author of The Haunting of Hill House (thanks, Netflix), but she first made her name rather earlier than that, with a 1948 short story in the New Yorker.  In that story, a small New England farming town is engaging in an annual tradition.  It's quite a festive occasion, except...

If by some chance you haven't read that story (and believe me, if you've read it, you know exactly what story that is, just from that one sentence), do please take a moment to follow that link.  I'm not going anywhere.

...

...I know, right?

So, why do I bring this up?  Well...  I think I could safely argue that We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes place in, if not the same small town, one very nearby, perhaps just a few miles farther down the highway from Haunting's Hillsdale.

This is a story told to us by the very neurotic tomboy Merricat (Mary Katherine Blackwood), about how she and her older sister, Constance, came to live alone in their family home.  Merricat is... Something.  She's eighteen years old, but in a similar fashion to Nell in Haunting, she seems somehow emotionally stunted, younger than she actually is.  She's obsessed with mushrooms and other forest foraging, buries treasures as protective amulets around the house, and has a very hard time with breaking rules that determine what she is and isn't allowed to do.  I'm going to be honest, with her intense reliance on schedules and ritual, not to mention the insinuations by the most obvious "villain" of the piece (not that he ever actually states it outright) that she belongs in an institution , I read her as being somewhere on the autism spectrum, though that's never stated in the text (not that the "spectrum" was even an idea at the time).  That or she's actively a budding Baba Yaga sort; she does specifically say early on that she prefers her library books to be fairy tales.

Merricat opens right up with laying out for the reader that she has Constance, and all the rest of her family is dead (though this isn't completely accurate), along with making it rapidly clear that the people of the village all hate her family, mercilessly teasing her whenever she goes into town to get groceries and library books.  Constance, who is rather mentally broken in other ways, unable to handle other people for the most part and rarely willing to leave their manor house any further than the edge of her vegetable garden, is acting as the caretaker for the family, primarily for their sick Uncle Julian, the only other member of the household, who is wheelchair-bound, half-senile, and obsessed with trying to recreate the night that, according to the schoolyard rhymes that continually appear, Connie poisoned the whole family with arsenic in the sugar.  After all, Connie could never be that subtle, and if she was the poisoner, why didn't she do something earlier in the day, like the rarebit at lunch?

This mystery floats through the whole book.  Julian survived the poisoning because he only took a very small amount of sugar on his blackberries for dessert, Constance doesn't especially like sweet things so didn't take any, and Merricat had gotten in trouble for something and was sent to bed without dinner, so wasn't present.  It didn't help that Constance, before help arrived, had washed out the sugar bowl, "because there was a spider in it."  She really doesn't like spiders.

There are a few visitors, now and then, people who were friends of Merricat's mother and insist on inviting themselves to tea in order to try and coax Constance out of her fear of other people and leaving the safe space that is their home, but Merricat is distrustful of all of them.  Anything that might change the routines that she relies on; she gets a chill when Constance even mentions the idea of venturing beyond the garden's edge.

Into Merricat's orderly world comes Charles Blackwood, a cousin from a part of the family that completely cut themselves off when Constance was arrested (though later acquitted) for the mass murder.  Charles very quickly insinuates himself into the household, using Constance as his route of choice, and begins efforts to convince her that his way of addressing everything is better, that it would all be better if he and Constance were the only ones in the house, that Uncle Julian should be in a hospital with trained nurses and Merricat should... he never says it outright, but it's clear what he thinks.

Merricat is distrustful of Charles from the start, and Julian seems to agree in his lucid moments.  This seems to be borne out as the interloper seems to have no compunctions about making himself completely at home, making use of her father's valuables (after noting the value if they were sold, more than anything else), and continually finding Merricat's buried talismans, none of which are given anything less than an utter rage-filled rant that drives her from the house repeatedly.

Everything comes to a head when a fire is "accidentally" started by Merricat, thanks to the newspapers that Charles leaves strewn everywhere and a tobacco pipe left smoldering in his room, at which the entire town becomes involved in a mass riot and looting event.  And here's where we see just how bad the village actually is; when everyone in town follows the fire engine to watch the biggest excitement they'v'e seen in a long time, the crowd includes calls to just let it all burn down, and laments that the girls should have been inside, rather than having been allowed to run for safety.  Even when the fire is put out, it doesn't stop them from, en masse, storming into the manor and starting to just destroy everything they can get their hands on; the only thing that stops them, in fact, is the discovery of a dead body.

So, here's the thing...  After Merricat and Constance they start putting their world back together, the townsfolk, for the most part, seem to realize they made a huge mistake, and it becomes clear that they're going to be trying to make up for it for a very long time.  They know they went beyond the pale, they feel remorse for the way they've treated the Blackwood girls.  It's unclear how long they'll be continuing to try to make up for it, but it's perfectly clear that everyone in the village knows exactly what their mistakes were and are going to apologize specifically.  They know they did wrong, even if it took a complete catastrophe to realize it.

Shirley Jackson has a reputation for being a horror writer, but I think labeling her that way does her a severe injustice.  Her themes are, for the most part, extremely mundane and human; what she writes about isn't as innocuous as a monster or a ghost.  Rather, what her books reveal is the weakness of the human mind under stress, the fragility of peaceful existence, and the ease in which humans are capable of inhuman acts.



It seems that there's been a movie made of this recently, with Crispin Glover as Julian.  Which...  Yeah, I can see Crispin Glover fitting in rather well in any Shirley Jackson project, really; he just fits in this kind of creepy plotline.  It's even on Netflix.  Kind of makes me want to see if it's closer to The Haunting (1963), The Haunting (1999), or The Haunting of Hill House (2018) in terms of how well it works with the source material.

A-Z 2021 I: The Cheapest Nights (Yusuf Idris, 1954-1978)

I think I've mentioned the idea of a curate's egg before.  I have to say, at least from my perspective, Egyptian writer Yusuf Idris's short fiction definitely falls into that category.  I loved the writing style, the way that he captures the world that his characters live in, the descriptions that make places I don't know if I would ever go come alive in my mind.

And yet, I can't really bring myself to say that I enjoyed my time reading The Cheapest Nights.

So, what's the problem here?  There's a lot to unpack in this short volume.  First, it's worth noting that collection this is not the same as Idris's identically-titled first collection, أرخص ليالى, which I don't believe has ever been released in English in its original form.  This collection does, however, include six of the stories from that earlier one, along with nine from his later collections.

There's a throughline here, of people trying to find their ways out of poverty and dealing with the societal problems that prevent that escape.  Sexuality is almost omnipresent, but it's dealt with in a very matter-of-fact way, never graphic.  The title story, for example, deals with a man who made the mistake of drinking black tea in the evening being unable to sleep, wandering his village that has too many youth, but unable to find anything to fill the time with that doesn't cost the money he doesn't have due to having six children, so he goes home, wakes his wife, and they pursue the least expensive entertainment available... nine months later, he now has seven children, and still wonders where all the youth running around in town are coming from.

Everything is that simple, matter-of-fact, straight-forward.  A man who can't hold a job discovers that he can sell his blood at the hospital, allowing him to make ends meet for a time, only to be told eventually that he's sold too much and has anemia, and to come back when he's stronger.  A landowner attempting to charge tolls to get into a marketplace on his land is stymied by the merchants' refusal to go around to the one entrance he wants them to traverse, and instead make their own way through the fence where it's more convenient for them.  An old tradition in a slowly-failing rural farming region regarding offers of hospitality to a wedding party traveling down the road goes awry when one particularly large example of such a party decides to take everyone up on their offers.  The word selection is surgical in its precision, leaving no doubt as to what's going on.

That said, I can't say that the stories on display here are even remotely pleasant for the most part.  Especially when Idris is trying to point out a particular social ill, there are rarely anything like positive conclusions (of the fifteen stories, I would only argue that three have particularly happy endings), and more often than not, the protagonists are left in worse states than they began the stories with.

I think the most frustrating thing, though, is that the two longest stories in the collection are driven largely by sexual assault.  The first of these, "The Dregs of the City," starts out looking like it's going to be about a judge looking for his missing wristwatch, and indeed that's the top-level narrative, but much more of the story is about the judge taking advantage of a married cleaning woman whom he has hired and pushing her into eventually becoming a prostitute; the second, "The Shame," is about how an entire village decides that an innocent girl has had sex with one of the young men in town, and virtually frog-marches her to have the one "trustworthy" woman in the village inspect her, a test that apparently involves several women holding her down while she's stripped, with the potential result of a failed "inspection" directly stated to be an honor killing.

And... I mean, this isn't pleasant stuff to read about.  We've got a guy taking advantage of a woman who lives in abject poverty and can't effectively say 'no', and a whole village working as a mob to rob a girl of her innocence, despite her (truthful) pleas that nothing happened.  Elsewhere, we have religious leaders giving in to sinful behaviors, anonymous murders of physically-and-mentally-disabled people, and bureaucratic red tape hindering even those who are trying to do something resembling good work within the system.  Frankly, it's not surprising that Idris wound up jailed for the political views in some of his writings, given how much of a focus his writing places on the realities of poverty in Egypt.  It's very well-written, very powerful stuff, of a kind with Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or John Steinbeck.

But powerful doesn't mean pleasant.  And like I said before, I can't say I enjoyed reading this.

Doesn't mean it doesn't belong on my shelf, though.  Or that I would pass up reading more of Idris's writings.

A-Z 2021 H: Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse, 1922)

 

You know, I've encountered this book before.  I hadn't read it before, mind; rather, a class on world religions that I was going to take years and years ago but ended up dropping before the end of the first week had it on the syllabus.

So, the book on the table today is Hermann Hesse's novella, Siddhartha.  This is an incredible book, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it does actually do a good job of bringing the concepts of samsara and nirvana into very clear view for someone not familiar with them.  There's a general sense in Western culture as a whole for what Buddhism is teaching about nirvana, but very few who don't actively practice Eastern religions have a solid idea of what the actual nature of that state is, which does give some good value to this read.

The book itself is about the life of Siddhartha, a member of the Brahmin caste, who decides early on that the religious life that has been set out for him by his father doesn't interest him and that instead, he wants to give up the comfortable life that exists for him and go into the wilderness, to become an ascetic and search for enlightenment in other ways.  This leads him to encounter the Gautama Buddha (not-coincidentally also one whose original name was Siddhartha, though the text of the book doesn't mention this), an experience which sends him into a life of learning from everything, trying the lives of a rich merchant and a poor ferryman before finally reaching his own enlightenment and, presumably, escape from the cycle of samsara.

It's a beautifully-written book, and Joachim Neugroschel's translation retains the lyrical quality of the work.  The language is almost dream-like at times, flowing like a river and pulling the reader along on Siddhartha's journey to enlightenment.  While Siddhartha is really the only character who is fully built out into three dimensions, the supporting cast, drifting in and out of his journey, are all making their own similar journeys, though perhaps not all with as much success as his own spiritual awakening.

So, with the book review part of this post done, let's look a little more at what's actually going on in this work.  The overall theme seems to be that you can teach knowledge, but you cannot teach wisdom, and any attempt to do so will just sound foolish.  Wisdom must be learned from the self, through experience with the world, and can only be found when you're not looking for it.  As long as you actively search, the search itself will keep you from finding enlightenment.

The key concept to be aware of here is, again, samsara.  Generally, those of us in the Western world have an understanding of the Eastern religions in question here, Buddhism and Hinduism, that really begins and ends with reincarnation and possibly karma if you look a bit deeper.  Coming from a primarily Abrahamic cultural background, these aren't concepts that are easy to really understand properly, simply because that background gives an idea that you get one pass at life, and how you conduct yourself will determine what your afterlife will be.  This isn't the understanding of life that Eastern religions have, where everything is instead seen as cyclical, with the eternal return to life and traversal of the world as a core aspect of the soul's existence.  The world is seen as illusory, as a source of suffering, and the escape from that world into enlightenment and peace, the nirvana state, is the only way out of the endless cycle.  Everything, every action, every encounter, everything around us, is all part of samsara, the constant metempsychosis shaped in each cycle by karma, the return of all good and ill that you created in the world being brought back around to you in the next life, that all are trapped within, for better or worse.

This is where the message of searching being counterproductive comes into play.  Nirvana is a state of being free from desire, pain, and guilt; the act of searching for it, therefore, is succumbing to a desire.  Siddhartha only reaches his enlightenment when he gives up even the search for it, releases himself from the pain that comes of his life experiences and the path he has taken by understanding that his life has, itself, come in a cycle, and discovers the underlying oneness of everything.  He exists in a simple life, in the end, simply ferrying travelers across the river that has become his world, that is the source of his final escape from samsara even as he realizes that water itself is fundamentally caught in its own eternal cycle.

The river is everything, and everything is contained in the river.