A-Z 2021 E: Praise of Folly (Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1512)

Everyone needs to take a break from serious writing once in a while.  It's just a healthy way to let off a bit of steam, exercise your sense of whimsy a bit...  basically not be an old stick in the mud.  The danger arises when you write something that is taken the wrong way.

This issue of misinterpretation is something that Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam ran into when he published Praise of Folly, a satirical essay that, in the voice of Folly herself (positioned here as a sort of ur-goddess of happiness and frivolity), lays out the argument that all that is good and right in the world is, at its most basic level, due to foolishness and not anything resembling seriousness.  This is then followed by a point-by-point explanation of how this relates to every field from commoners all the way up to kings, then moves on to the field of theology and works up that hierarchy as well, from churchgoers all the way to the Pope.

The argument is perhaps less important in this case than the effects of making that argument.  The book is in three parts, essentially; before and after the central essay, there are two letters.  The first, before the essay itself begins, was written by Erasmus to his friend Thomas More (author of Utopia), explaining that the Praise of Folly is intended as a tribute of sorts, based on some ideas that came to Erasmus after a visit with More, and asking him to claim some credit and defend the work from criticism (a request that More gladly accepted).  The second, written to Maarten van Dorp, one of Erasmus's colleagues who wrote to advise Erasmus of the criticisms that were beginning to appear in relation to Folly, is kind of the 16th-century version of a comedian having to explain the joke.

It's hard to say exactly what those who criticized Folly at the time thought they were doing; Erasmus goes out of his way through the entire piece to avoid naming anyone or anything specifically (other than himself), simply saying 'these are the qualities of a bad member of this group,' so that anyone who raised criticisms on the basis of themselves being attacked, well...  it would seem that they're drawing attention to themselves.  The letter to van Dorp spells this out, and I have to admit that I didn't even notice that the only individual specifically called out was, well... Erasmus himself.

The essay itself is surprisingly readable, given the philosophical and theological subject matter.  It helps somewhat that in this particular edition, Penguin went with footnotes rather than endnotes, so that any context that needs to be provided is available right there on the same page, rather than requiring you to flip back and forth to the back of the book.  Most of the context is in the form of explaining references to classical literature; Erasmus's central argument when it comes to what makes a bad theologist is that not knowing how to read scripture in the original languages leads to a fundamental lack of understanding of what was meant; he himself wrote in Latin in this work, but Greek and Hebrew are peppered throughout, and even in the English translation I read, some of both were still in place.  He knows the audience he's writing for, and it just adds to his argument.

Yes, I know I'm saying that as someone who only has a functional ability to read English and its derivatives.

I don't know how likely I am to return to Erasmus for his other works; this particular volume's nature as a satire is unique in his bibliography, with his other works largely being serious theology, in many cases critiquing the Church in ways that are similar but separate from what would appear when Martin Luther published his own critiques in 1517.  As much as that might interest me, I'm far from familiar enough with the nature of religion in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance to be able to get a proper understanding of what's on display there.  That said, this was a fun read, and a good wrap-up to the first leg on my little marathon here.

A-Z 2021 D: A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe, 1722)

 

There's a tendency among many people to think that modern culture is more knowledgable about how to handle disasters.  That we've learned from the past, and won't repeat it.  We've got modern technology, we won't have the same kinds of problems arising that were around in the past.  Technology, however, can only go so far.  It doesn't get you past human nature, or sheer bullheadedness, and certainly won't get you around misinformation.  And so, we have a book about the 1665 plague epidemic in London that just... keeps... looking like what the last year looked like.  And thus, we get what we just lived through.

Let's address the nature of this book, first.  A Journal of the Plague Year is not precisely what it claims to be.  It's a work of fiction, and yet manages to be possibly the most authoritative book on the realities of urban life during a plague epidemic.  It was written as a warning of sorts, trying to give the people of London a heads-up as to what it would look like if the plague epidemic that was active at the time in Marseilles were to take hold there, and Daniel Defoe went out of his way to do a vast amount of research.  However, a nonfiction work wouldn't have necessarily gotten to the masses the way he needed; it had to be formatted as a novel instead.

What Defoe crafted here is, ostensibly, a document that relates the experiences of a Londoner who lived through the epidemic, combining statistics and primary documents with anecdotes and narration to create what is less a journal and more a long-form history of the titular plague year, beginning with the first deaths from the plague in early 1665 and finishing with the return to something resembling normalcy at the end of the year.  It's formatted as something akin to the narrator writing down a remembrance after everything has ended; several times the Great Fire of London is alluded to in a religious context.  The narrator (a "Dissenter", as Defoe himself was) posits that the "Visitation" (itself rather a telling word) of the plague is God punishing the sinners of London, and that the Great Fire the following year is a follow-up when everything returns to the old ways so quickly afterward.

Defoe's narrator often goes on tangents, breaking midway through discussing one topic to go to another, but manages to always come back and finish the thought.  This is most obvious in the case of an extended anecdote he delivers, making up close to 1/10 of the book, about several men making their way about the countryside over the months of the epidemic while trying to find somewhere safe to ride it out.  The story, which functions largely as a way to describe the effects of the plague outside of London, is introduced about 60 pages in, but then gets left aside almost immediately, and isn't returned to for another 60 pages.  There aren't any loose ends left of this nature; if something is brought up and left unfinished, it is always returned to.

So, how is this all relevant now?  Well, let me give a quick summary of the overall narrative we see in the book:

• News of the pandemic appearing overseas happens
• A couple of overseas travelers die of the plague in London
  
• Trade and travel from the location where the initial outbreak was occurring is shut down.
• The plague starts to gain a foothold in London
• Numbers are manipulated by those in power to make it look like everything is under control until the point where it's impossible to pretend otherwise
• People start to engage in social distancing, doing everything they can to not breathe near anyone who might be sick
• Most of the people with the means to isolate themselves effectively (e.g. clergy, rich folks) skip town, while poor folks have to take the crappy high-infection-risk jobs to make sure everything keeps working and they have food to eat, and largely get sick as a result
• Everything shuts down
• Quacks start peddling sure-fire remedies for the illness
• Everyone starts looking at everyone else suspiciously, nobody wants to let anyone from out of town into any village
• Death tolls rise, then begin to fall again
• Everyone decides that the numbers falling means it's all over, stop behaving intelligently while the disease is still present
• Numbers go up briefly but then resume downward trend
• Everything's fine, we can go back to normal now, everyone back into London and let's proceed without having learned anything from all this
• Next year, everything burns

So... in the current pandemic, I believe we're at the 'Everyone decides that...' step right now.  And unfortunately, looking outside, I get the sense that we're facing another year of 'everything burns', too.  I could write a lot more about the parallels here, but...  welcome to pandemic fatigue, I just don't want to.

It's no surprise that this book was one of the top classics sold last year.  At least once, UK sellers actually ran out of copies of Penguin's edition.  It's basically a blueprint for... well... exactly what we saw happen this time around.  What's that thing where you don't learn from history?  Oh yeah, you repeat it.

But we're definitely a more advanced society now than in the 1600s.  I mean, they didn't even have cell phones or antibiotics or social media to tell them what to believe!

A-Z 2021 - A: Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)

 

Is this a kissing book?

        -The Grandson, The Princess Bride

I don't really know why it took me so long to get around to reading Pride and Prejudice.  Somehow, even with being very much a reader and focusing quite heavily on literature in my schooling in recent years, the only Austen I had read before now was minor works, and never any of the full-length novels.  At least in part, it's likely because I've traditionally had a preference toward reading sci-fi and fantasy, and perhaps away from romance novels, even ones considered major works of literature, such as Austen.

This is not to say that Austen is precisely what would be suggested by that simple genre label.  There is, after all, a big difference between the social satire that her novels contain and the Harlequin and Silhouette novels that are present in any bookstore and in most grocery stores, and it's rather doubtful that any of the latter are going to still be read 200 years after their initial publishing.  But what is it that makes Austen have such staying power?

Pride and Prejudice comes at this in several ways that give it some literary heft.  The first, quite simply, is that the first half of the book doesn't seem to be acknowledging that the protagonist is actually in a romance novel.  Elizabeth Bennet is quick-thinking, rational-minded, with an acerbic wit, and quite willing to express herself, even to those who exist on a different social stratum.  Fitzwilliam Darcy, the male lead in the piece, makes himself decidedly unlikable in his first introduction, acting aloofly toward anyone he doesnt already know and refusing any invitations to dance when it's rather a social faux-pas to not take part.  Lizzy pretty much hates him immediately, and this remains her position for much of the story.

The book was originally published in three volumes, and these actually function remarkably well as dividing lines for the action, as the first covers Darcy's initial visit to Lizzy's home township of Meryton, the second covers events when Lizzy runs into him again while staying in Kent, and the last detailing her brief visit to his home of Pemberley and the aftermath of that encounter.  We see how Darcy is slowly won over by Lizzy's charm, and how the mutual misunderstandings of the people around them both has brought about unfortunate consequences for Darcy's actions, to the point that he surprises her with a wedding proposal that she very firmly declines.  And yet, this mutual misunderstanding can be fixed, the actions remedied, and in fact Lizzy's hatred can be turned to admiration, and his essential good nature brought forward to counter his pride, letting him admit that he misread situations and is able to forgive past injury when it's best for all involved.

There is kissing in this book (sorry, young Fred Savage), but not between the characters that might be expected; this isn't a "kissing book".  In fact, all of the kissing is either familial in nature, or one case of a brother-in-law kissing Lizzy's hand.  Notably, not only is no physical affection between Lizzy and Darcy shown, but in fact anything more than walks in the country or organized ballroom dancing is kept out of sight; even the four marriages that happen are all 'off-screen', either happening far from Elizabeth's sight or between chapters.  It's not what I suspect most readers would expect out of a romance novel.

Perhaps my favorite set of interactions in the book, truly, were the verbal sparring that happened between Elizabeth and Darcy's aunt, Lady Catherine.  I had a sort of mental image, though both characters in the book are younger than this, of the way that Lady Violet and Isobel Crawley reacted toward each other on Downton Abbey.  Lady Catherine is quite open about her disapproval of the very idea of a man marrying "beneath" himself, and is very much set on trying to force a match between Darcy and her daughter.  This goes so far as to have Lady Catherine visit the Bennet household purely to threaten Elizabeth with societal ostracization if she doesn't decline an impending second proposal from Darcy.  She is quite unprepared to handle Lizzy's utter lack of fear of her threats, and Darcy's own response to her subsequent attempt at interfering directly with him only results in, well...  The very proposal that she didn't want to happen.  Oops.

The general, overall theme underlying the comedy of manners that makes up the book is that people shouldn't trust their first impressions of others.  This seems to have been the original intention; Austen's original title when she first wrote this novel in the 1790s was to be First Impressions, though there is evidence that it was substantially rewritten over a decade later.  It is difficult to say what that earlier manuscript might have looked like, as there is no evidence of its continued existence; perhaps that is in some ways for the best, however, as what was published is an excellent read that I honestly wish I had picked up a lot sooner than I did.

Passing (Nella Larsen, 1929)

...wow.

For a thin volume like Passing, which is all over in a mere 120 pages, there's a lot of stuff to chew on, and I know from the start that I'm probably not especially qualified to talk about much of what's going on here.  There's this thing called white privilege, you see, and, well...  Yeah.

It's probably best to start with the title, "Passing".  I became most familiar with this particular definition of the verb through the trans* context, where it refers to the act of looking enough like your correct gender that a stranger wouldn't know you're trans*; the term is used here in the earlier racial context, specifically in terms of pale-skinned Black folk who are able to "pass" as being White.  Even people like me, who have no experience of being on the receiving end of racism, can see what the point of that would be, especially in the 1920s, but also, well...  motions at the need for the Black Lives Matter movement to exist

The lead characters in Passing are Irene, a pale Black woman (her skin is described as "olive") who grew up in Chicago but now lives in Harlem; and Clare, similarly pale-skinned, who grew up alongside Irene until her father died, then was shuffled off to live with a couple of White aunts until she got herself married to get out from under their thumbs.  Her husband has no idea she's not pure White, which seems to be rather playing with fire on Clare's part, given that he is incredibly racist.

The book follows a three-act structure, with sections titled "Encounter", "Re-Encounter", and "Finale".  The first is largely a flashback to Irene and Clare's first time encountering each other as adults.  Irene is in Chicago to visit her father and old family friends, and happens to encounter Clare while taking tea at one of the higher-class hotels (choosing to "pass" for that moment).  Clare is so far into her façade that Irene doesn't recognize her, while the reverse is anything but true; it takes a minute of trying to figure out where she might have met this White woman who knows her childhood nickname, and in fact Clare laughing, for Irene to figure it out.

Clare's separation from the Chicago neighborhood (and in fact all of Black culture) is so complete that it has become a sort of forbidden desire to get news, to attend gatherings, to surround herself with the Blackness that she very intentionally left behind.  This becomes particularly problematic when Irene is introduced to Clare's husband, a truly unlikable character who makes it clear that he so proud to have no N-----s in his family and he knows the whole race better than they know themselves because he only believes the negative things he's heard or read.  Irene holds her tongue, but only barely, and decides to cut off contact with Clare altogether.

This would work fine, right up until Clare shows up at her door in Harlem.

The second half of the book deals with Clare's increasing insertion of herself into every Black cultural event she can manage while hiding it from her husband, and the increasing irritation and outright anger that this causes Irene to feel.  Everything builds to a breaking point as Clare's intrusions start to appear to include an illicit romance with Irene's husband... And then Clare's husband encounters and recognises Irene shopping with another Black woman, and, well...  Things do not end well.

Clare is almost a sort of Icarus figure, here.  She has, through a combination of happenstance and pluck, a way to escape the racism inherent in the system; she's unable to resist the temptation to go beyond the safe limits of that escape, though, to try to safely get back the heritage that she has left behind. Ultimately, that hubris, her playing with fire and disregard of the warnings that Irene initially gives her, ends up destroying her.

Irene, meanwhile, knows her limits.  She's playing a somewhat dangerous game of her own, using her children as a way to hold back some of her husband's ambitions, but she's much more careful about it, keeping within her means and only starting to act in less than well-thought-out ways than Clare has pushed her to the breaking point.  The growing resentment in Irene is quite obvious in the narration; while the novel is told in the third person, everything is through Irene's point of view, her head the only one we ever inhabit.

I'm going to admit, there is a lot that I'm sure I missed here.  Even with the usual Penguin Classics introduction and endnotes, I'm about as far from having an understanding of the cultural politics here as it's possible to be.  I can look at what's in the text, and draw my own conclusions, and it does give me some understanding of the author's own viewpoint (Larsen herself being pale-skinned Black), but I'm ultimately not going to be able to appreciate this in the way that a Black reader, or indeed a reader from any outwardly visible minority group, is going to be able to.

My own first-hand experiences as far as "passing" goes are limited to situations where my neurodivergent mind has gotten in the way of what might be considered "normal," and that's usually situations where I'm failing to "pass".  Not having even realized that I'm not neurotypical until relatively recently didn't help, of course.  It does give me at least a little insight into why someone would want to hide aspects of themselves for the sake of making life easier, but it's still not the same experience.

I'm glad that I read this, though.  All too often, the "classics" are overwhelmingly things written by white guys in Europe, and this was a marvelous change of pace, even if it's nowhere near a "feel-good" book.  But then, how many of the books that are really worth reading are?

The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories (H.G. Wells, 1894-1915)

A man spontaneously has his visual perception relocated to a site on the opposite side of the planet, but none of his other senses are affected. 

There are four books that are sort of considered the 'core' H.G. Wells works: the novels The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man, and the novella The Time Machine.  This collection, The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories, includes precisely zero of those, but I think it might be more interesting exactly because of that.

An object from deep space crashes into Neptune, ignites into a small star, and plunges through the inner solar system on its way to the Sun, causing global disasters and devastation.

What's on display here is a sort of a cross-section of the range of fiction writing that Wells produced, showing just how far beyond his well-known science fiction works he actually went.  The stories aren't designed to have a lengthy or high-stakes plot, for the most part; the general construction of most seems to be that Wells came up with an idea that seemed impossible, then went through the thought of how to make that seem reasonable, and explores it and the ramifications.

A successful politician is haunted by a magical door that he passed through once as a young boy, then passes by every time he encountered it again, despite a desire to return to the mysterious garden beyond the portal.

The most stunning thing about this collection may be the specific variety selected.  We get examples of what seems to be almost pre-figuring many later sub-genres within science fiction, showing just how much the genre as a whole owes to him.  While space travel and the parts of sci-fi that are associated with that are quite outside of what's on display here (the two stories featuring Martians in any context leave them quite contentedly on Mars), we get stories that work with hard science, stories that attempt to prefigure future technology, stories that imagine a culture and investigate how it might interact with others.

A man under the influence of anaesthesia for a surgical procedure, convinced he is going to die while under the knife, experiences Cosmic Zoom.

It's clear that Wells is anything but uninformed, as well.  Perhaps that's not surprising; I have a 1930s  biology textbook that was primarily written by him, in fact the second such textbook that he wrote during his life, which perhaps shows just how studied the man was.  The science at work always feels believable, within Newtonian physics models, and even a story that completely misses the mark on how powered heavier-than-air flight is going to work manages to be a fun read, building up to a giant mechanical bird crashing into and destroying the Royal College of Science in London.

A mountaineer stumbles upon a hidden village of people born for generations without eyes, and learns quickly that the old adage 'In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king' is inaccurate in every possible way.

None of the stories outstay their welcome; each establishes its situation quickly, then progresses through exploring it until the logical endpoint, at which point the story ends.  In cases where further elaboration might be possible, as with a story involving a drug that speeds the taker's body and mind up to a speed one thousand times that of everything around them, future implications are alluded to but left to the reader's imagination, rather than Wells trying to create an encyclopedic examination of the possible effects.

A trip up the Amazon River leads to the verified discovery of a species of oversized, intensely venomous ants with abnormally high intelligence, which are engaging in an actively genocidal invasion of human settlements within the rainforest, and seem to be on the verge of successfully figuring out boats.

This collection honestly has a bit of everything in it.  There are several stories that seem to prefigure themes that H.P. Lovecraft would eventually deal with, alongside rather chilling, entirely-mundane-in-setting crime fiction.  There are visions of the future on display, but the longest story is about a particularly clever Neanderthal in the stone age.  For the most part, Wells always writes with a certain academic voice to his writing, which establishes The story that concludes the book is a rather humorous little tale of an author crossing paths with a devil who was cast out of Hell for abandoning his post at the wrong time, and has no science-fiction content to it at all, but all the same, it's a delightful yarn.  And that's really what one has to look for in a collection like this; a wide range of topics and genres, ending on a somewhat silly note, seems just the way to allow readers to discover how much more than 'just' a science-fiction writer H.G. Wells actually was.

Thankfully, Penguin Classics has 17 books by Wells, both fiction and nonfiction in nature, so I expect I'll be well-served in exploring his other works later on.

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas père, 1844)

 

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. 

 --Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" 

Revenge is one of those things that shows up a lot in literature.  Character is wronged, character doesn't feel justice can be served without retribution, character exacts revenge.  It's a common plot, and what determines how worthy of a story it is comes down to the execution.  Thankfully, Alexandre Dumas père did an excellent job of building an incredible revenge plot in The Count of Monte Cristo, enough so that despite the sizable tome (Penguin's edition, without counting the introduction and cultural notes, is 1243 pages long), you would be hard-pressed to find a list of the best revenge novels that doesn't include it.

So, what is it that makes this particular classic stand out so effectively?  I would argue that its secret may be the level of mastery on display in the vengeance exacted by Edmond Dantés upon the men responsible for his life being ruined.  The Count of Monte Cristo is largely taken up with the description of an elaborately-planned plot, designed to force those men past a despair event horizon so that they might know what it's like to have their lives destroyed so utterly... and even beyond that, it's important to him that in the end, those who are destroyed by him are aware of who has brought about their downfalls.

Edmond Dantés is introduced to us as an innocent sailor, caught up in machinations that he is completely ignorant of.  He's on the verge of being made captain of the trading ship he serves on, and he's about to propose to the woman he loves.  However, he has been entrusted with a letter, which he intends to deliver as an honoring of the dead captain's final wishes, unaware that the captain was a devoted Bonapartist and that the message involves the impending return of Napoleon to France.  Unfortunately for Dantés, an attempt by one of his shipmates and a romantic rival to knock him down a peg combines with the intended recipient of that letter being the father of a crown prosecutor, and the end result is the hapless sailor being locked away in a dungeon, with his friends and loved ones unable to find out what has happened to him.

Dantés reaches his despair event horizon roughly four years into his imprisonment; on the verge of killing himself to end the monotonous suffering, he only stops when he hears the telltale sounds of a neighboring prisoner on the verge of tunneling into his cell.  This brings him into a long friendship with Abbé Faria, a well-learned priest who is thought to be mad because of his insistence on knowing the location of a hidden treasure of immense value.  Faria was trying to dig a tunnel out of the prison, but misjudged, instead finding another chamber in the dungeon.

Over the following ten years, teaches Dantés foreign languages, science, mathematics, history... essentially giving him a thorough education in all topics.  They plot an escape together, but this is halted by Faria suffering a stroke, which leaves him half-paralyzed and unable to participate in the escape.  Dantés uses the further tragedy of Faria's death from another stroke to escape from the island prison, switching places with Faria's body and, though surprised to discover that the Chateau d'If has no graveyard (the fate of the bodies of those who die instead being 'tie a cannonball to the feet and throw the body into the deep'), he manages to free himself from the situation and quickly gets himself well away from the island prison, pretending to be a shipwreck survivor and getting himself a position on a passing ship.

At the first chance he gets, Dantés manipulates things to get himself left alone on the volcanic island of Monte Cristo, off the coast of Tuscany.  While there, he searches for, and finds, the vast treasure that Faria told him about, which gives him all the resources he needs to remake himself, and to ensure that his friends, several of whom are in dire straits, are saved from the edge of disaster.  In doing so, he discovers the identities of those who caused the destruction of his old life, and determines that, having done the good he wished to do, it's time to shift toward destroying his enemies.

At this point, we're less than a quarter of the way into the book.  What then ensues over the remaining pages is a long-game revenge, in which Dantés, primarily in the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo but also in at least two other identities through the use of disguises and faked accents, works the kind of exquisite plot that one might expect from a Sherlock Holmes with no scruples, using the past sins of his foes against them, in order to destroy them as thoroughly as possible.  As the story progresses, it becomes clear that two of his targets have enough skeletons in their proverbial closets to utterly destroy them when those skeletons are revealed; the third requires rather more specific efforts, working to siphon off his wealth through market manipulations and carefully-manipulated news reports to bring him to make poor investments.  And in each case, the Count is able to be present at the moment of deepest despair, in order to make sure that they know exactly who was behind their downfalls.

This is a long book.  Part of that is an artifact of the way that Dumas was paid for it; when the work was originally serialized, he was paid by the line.  Of course in a situation like that, one wants to stretch it as far as possible.  But Dumas doesn't use the extra space offered by the length to simply pad things out; while certain parts of the narrative may seem out of place initially, the end result is an intricately woven tapestry of character interactions where very little is extraneous, always instead revealing some important facet of each character's past, personality, or motivations.  A long section in which several characters attend Carnivale in Rome, which initially seems like simply a long digression from the plot, ends up being referred back to later in the novel in a rather delightful way; characters who initially seem like they are simply involved due to random whims by the Count later end up being the linchpins of his plots.

That said, there is much to be said for the translation by Robin Buss.  The Penguin Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo is the only English translation available that is completely unabridged and unadulterated, but this doesn't mean that the added material in this edition makes it a harder read; rather, it serves to give a wonderfully-detailed portrait of the locales that the characters are in, and to show the education levels of the characters.  Aspects of character growth that might not be present in an edition that comes from eras where works were modified during translation to remove 'objectionable' content are quite evident here, so that even some of the minor characters are well-developed.

It's not a difficult read, it's just long.  The length may seem daunting, but with relatively short chapters (the average length of a chapter being about 11 pages), there are plenty of places to stop and take a break, and most of the allusions made in the text are noted in the back, in order to make sure that even someone who isn't familiar with 19th century European politics or French drama that might not have ever been translated into any language besides French can have some appreciation for what Dumas is doing.  And the ending is wonderful, with the one major character who the Count least wanted to hurt yet brought closest to the point of no return in his despair having all made right, before the Count makes his disappearance from the stage, going into an unknown future where he might find happiness himself, ending the narrative on a moment of hope and grace.  We don't know where the Count will go or what he will turn his attentions toward, but one can only hope that his open reclaiming of his original name on the final page means that his long turn toward darkness is at an end.

The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 3/3)

 

And here we come to the third of Kenneth Grahame's major works, the one that he's perhaps best-known for now (and unfortunately the only one that Penguin currently publishes), The Wind in the Willows.  I was rather looking forward to reaching this, actually, I have a lot of vague memories of watching the 1980s television series, and of course Disney's take on the novel.  I know I attempted to read this once as a child, though I kind of bounced off of it.  Reading it now as an adult, I can see what went wrong at the time; I was looking for Mr. Toad's Wacky Adventures, and that's absolutely not what this is (mostly).

This is a decidedly different sort of work entirely from Grahame's two previous works, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its departure from the realism, albeit wonder-tinged, of The Golden Age and Dream Days.  Instead, we're in a world where certain animals dress and act in the same manner as people do, where the size of those animals in relation to humans seems to be based purely on what the narrative requires at that moment, and where an amphibian in a rather poor disguise can be easily mistaken for a human.

The first place to look for differences is simply in the nature of the work.  During the ten-year gap between Dream Days and this work, Grahame became a father, which significantly changed the shape of his audience.  Rather than writing for an ostensibly adult audience, as his newspaper columns were, The Wind in the Willows began as a series of tales that he was telling to his son.  This doesn't change his diction or his writing voice, but it does make this work rather less introspective.  Instead, it allows a shifting of perspectives between the characters to match the tone of each story.

There are three primary characters here, who are used as 'narrators' (though the whole work is told in the third person), though a fourth is generally considered a main character and has been included as a major character in all of the various adaptations over the years.  The character we spend the most time in the mind of is Mole, a simple but determined fellow who follows through on anything he's set to doing and tends to be easily drawn into other folks' activities.  Mole feels a sudden urge at the start of the book to leave his underground home, digs up to the surface, and is immediately overwhelmed by everything that is Springtime.  We're in a similarly pastoral setting to what was seen in The Golden Age and Dream Days, though without any time spent interacting with the nearby village.  Instead, the world of the animals is the wilds, with meadows, a river, a nearby forest, and beyond, the world of humans, which the animals prefer to steer clear of.  Mole quickly discovers the River, which is mindboggling to him, given that he's never seen anything of the sort.  At the same time, he meets Water Rat, a relaxed sort of fellow with a love of everything that has to do with the river and a taste for poetry.  Mole quickly decides to move in with Water Rat after the two share a picnic; the two will rarely be apart for the rest of the book.

Toad appears as a minor character, just spoken of, in the first chapter; he doesn't become a primary character until the second chapter, where a visit to Toad Hall results in him dragging Mole and Rat into his latest fixation, a horse-drawn caravan which he intends to go traveling the countryside in.  The characters are hesitant to get too involved, because Toad has a tendency to fixate on one thing until it loses some degree of charm for him, before moving on to something else; his exuberance for the idea of life on the road is able to push through his friends' reticence so that they end up going on his journey with him.  This goes well until the two rodents force Toad to actually do some of the work involved in this sort of travels, which quickly sours him on the prospect, aided by the caravan being run off the road and wrecked by a motor-car driving by at speed.  This sets up Toad's overall plotline (and the only actual ongoing plotline for the book), as he becomes obsessed by cars instead, and by the following morning has placed an order for one of his own.

We next meet Badger, a gruff sort of country gentleman of the sort who doesn't particularly care for society but is most welcoming to those in distress, who lives in the middle of the Wild Wood.  Mole and Rat come to his home during a snowstorm that leaves them stranded in the forest, and he gladly lets them in to stay the night and warm up.  He's a kind but stern fellow, whose biggest desire seems to be for there to be a certain degree of civility and stability to the countryside.  He's the sort that nobody particularly wants to cross, as well; Mole and Rat were somewhat threatened by the weasels and stoats who also live in the forest when they were caught after dark, and Badger makes it clear that they'll not see any further issues once it's known that they're his friends; after all, a badger is rather larger than most other mustelids.  At the same time, we learn that the Wild Wood is in a place where humans used to have a village; Badger's home is built in what is apparently a former basement.  This doesn't mean humans are gone, just they're not in that particular spot right now.

The small plotlines that continue in the book are similar small pastoral adventures, with Rat and Mole encountering a forest god (implied to be Pan) in one chapter (though they promptly forget, a gift from the god stated as being a way to ensure that their lives won't be seen as never reaching that peak again), and another having Rat be tempted toward running off to sea, until Mole returns him to his sanity.

The largest plotline, though, is Toad's misadventures as his arrogance and lack of common sense gets him in trouble, repeatedly; this is what the Disney film dealt with, and what the youthful me was expecting.  His fixation with motor-cars refuses to be sated even after he has wrecked six of them, and landed in the hospital three times; when Rat, Mole, and Badger attempt a forced intervention, he flees out the window, runs halfway to the human village nearby, steals a car, gets himself arrested, and winds up thrown into jail.  The subsequent escape (thanks to the warden's daughter who takes some pity on him because he's an animal) involves cross-dressing, sneaking aboard a train under false pretenses, stealing a horse, hijacking the same car again and driving it into a lake, and finally being swept up in the River's currents and delivered to Rat's door, across several chapters.  This leads to the revelation that the weasels, stoats, and ferrets from the Wild Wood have taken over Toad Hall, and finally a nighttime raid by the four friends to retake the manor from the invaders, and Toad finally learning a little bit of humility in the process.

It's obvious just why Toad is so beloved; children are obviously going to be amused by a goofy character who gets into all manner of slapstick scrapes.  But while his plotline may be the lion's share of the novel (six of the novel's twelve chapters deal with the Motor-Car fixation and its results, from beginning to end), the overall feel of the piece is far more in line with the lifestyles of Mole, Rat, and Badger.  These three are content with their lots in life; Mole may get homesick for his burrow, but he knows where it is and can easily stop by, and in fact does, and a more dependable fellow simply can't be found.  Rat may be swayed easily by a bit of storytelling, but the small pleasures of riverside life are more than enough for him if he just spends a bit of time writing.  And Badger stands by his friends, even if he's a bit of a scary old codger at times.  They serve to ground things against the rampaging id that is Toad, and where Toad is apt to give up at a small setback and rarely seems to think beyond a few moments ahead, the three of them together are more than able to offset Toad's shortcomings.

The one thing that is perhaps the most perplexing about this piece as a whole is the question of just what an 'animal' is within this context.  There are a number of characters who are apparently of similar size to one another despite being far differently-sized in nature (particularly Badger alongside everyone else), and Toad in particular interacts with a number of clearly human artifacts, including his motor-cars and the washerwoman's outfit that he 'borrows' in order to escape from jail, and that's leaving aside the question of the manor-house that is Toad Hall, and, well, the success of the washerwoman disguise.  On the other hand, Rat's temptation toward the seas comes from encountering a Sea Rat on the road, who has apparently made a habit of sneaking aboard ships by climbing into rowboats or up ropes, and likes to bunk in the captain's cabin, which implies that he's, well... rat-sized.  Songbirds are kept in cages by both people and animals alike, but Rat is able to have conversations with migratory avians on the subject of why they go south for the Winter rather than sticking around closeby.  Toad's caravan is pulled by a horse, who clearly isn't the same kind of animal as the other folk; the horse he steals during his escape from the law is likewise little more than a pack beast.  And the warden's daughter apparently likes animals as pets, but knows better than to mention that to the captive Toad.

It's a strange dichotomy that is far from clearly-delineated, and serves to give a sort of dream-like quality to the work, that makes it a wonderful chaser for Grahame's other two major works.  It's the only one of the three that really felt like it had a fully-satisfying ending, though; where The Golden Age and Dream Days both ended with a sort of eulogy for childhood, The Wind in the Willows wraps up with the promise that while Toad may be a little less conceited and devoted to his impulses, the four of them are going to continue in their lives with the status quo re-established.  All has been brought back to the way it should be, and the pastoral life remains, a little slice of Arcady within the English countryside, complete with the god who mythologically lived in the Greek region.  It's a version of the world seen in Grahame's earlier works that can go on in adulthood, where there may be some strife between residents but existence is largely harmonious, and where the line between nature and 'civilized' life is blurred to the point of nonexistence.

Dream Days (Kenneth Grahame, 1898) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 2/3)

There's something to be said for sequels.  While they might be seen by some as derivative, and there's always the sideways glance and comment that "it's not as good as the first one", the best sequels build on the groundwork laid by their predecessors and use it as a springboard to explore different grounds.

Kenneth Grahame's first 'big hit' work, The Golden Age, was a meditation on his own childhood, raised by "The Olympians" who took him and his siblings in after his mother's death.  It explored the childhood mindsets and world that he had grown up in, giving anecdotes of how that childhood life of whimsy and indifference toward adult concerns manifested itself, though without any particular degree of sentimentality; the narrator is quite aware of the things he does that get him in trouble, he simply didn't understand at the time that they were going to be problems.

The second of the pieces collected in The Penguin Kenneth Grahame is the follow-up, Dream Days.  This work shares the setting and characters with its predecessor (though the oldest brother, sent off to boarding school at the end of the previous work, only appears from afar, mentioned in flashback and in the form of letters sent home from school), but takes an altogether different approach to the childhood events, for much of the piece.

This work has longer chapters than The Golden Age, allowing each flight of fancy to be given more room to breathe, and Grahame uses this space to engage in a rather focused way on the realm of daydreams.  This brings along with it an entirely different sense to the work, where each story, rather than being about the little encroachments of whimsy on the reality of a child's life, instead goes so far as to override everything about the world, and engage entirely in that fantasy world.  Several stories actively seek to ignore the world outside of this imaginary space entirely, building to a chapter featuring an entire original fairy-tale, not featuring any of the known characters at all, before coming back to harsh reality in the final story.

The largest theme, then, is the place of imaginary landscapes and settings in the child's world.  The second chapter, for example, begins within reality; the narrator explains how, on this particular day, everyone around him was in a bad mood and that put him in a bad mood as well, so he decided to just start walking outside and let his mind wander.  From there, it jumps into a series of brief fantasies, where the narrator is considering what he might run away and do to make those around him realize how much he means, through his absence.  These are all examples of the sort of adventure yarns that might be seen in children's adventure stories; he imagines running off to join the army and become a great general, or becoming a cabin boy and working his way up to be a pirate captain, or even going to a monastery and becoming a monk, just to spite them.  This obviously misses the deeper, more spiritual reasons behind someone taking up the monastic life, but much of the depth involved in these fantasy-minded escapes is missed in the childhood whims, shaped as they are by what books he has read and stories he has heard but little else besides.

From this establishment of the realms of imagination as a focus, Grahame begins to explore the various ways that the imagination can be shaped, used as both a way to bridge two minds together and to simply add to what one has at their disposal, and how it can serve as an escape when necessary.  The following chapter features the narrator discovering the dangers of inviting someone you don't know into your imaginary world without considering how their own imagination and desires might shape that world.  While some of the daydreamscapes explored in Dream Days are shared with the narrator's siblings, this one instance where an outsider is invited in is almost devastating, given just how different the thought processes of the girl in question are.

Each chapter, then, focuses on a new sort of exploration of this general theme.  One chapter features the thought of using artwork as a window into a whole imaginary world of what happens in the background, then leads from there into the narrator encountering an illuminated manuscript with new wonders on every page, allowing him to venture deeper and deeper into an imagined setting.  Another details an instance where, after offending a guest with his childish behavior, he is sent into the nursery to keep out of everyone's hair, and imagines an entire high-seas adventure for himself while sitting in a child's bath placed atop a towel-horse (thus able to emulate the sense of swaying on the seas as it wobbles).

The longest chapter, and perhaps the best-known piece out of these two books about this somewhat-idealized English childhood, is the aforementioned fairy tale, "The Reluctant Dragon," perhaps best-known now for the short-subject contained within the same-titled Disney 'behind the scenes' film from the 1940s.  This chapter starts out looking much like any other, firmly within reality; the children are playing in the garden, find what one of them is sure must be dragon tracks, and they follow the tracks until they end in a neighbor's garden.  Upon explaining their intrusion to the neighbor, he offers to walk them back home, and tells them the fairy tale during their walk.

And what a delightful fairy tale it is, too!  Written with the same combination of childish whimsy and erudite sensibility that is displayed elsewhere in this pair of books, the story turns everything that might be understood about the typical tale of an English dragon in the countryside, complete with St. George on hand to fight it, on its head.  The dragon has never been in a fight in his life, always letting the other dragons do that; he's rather more an aesthete, preferring to laze about and compose poetry and appreciate the countryside for what it is.  Of course, the nearby townsfolk, with the exception of one boy who befriends the dragon, don't want to have anything to do with it; after all, dragons are "a pestilential scourge" and don't belong near civilized towns at all, so they send for help to remove it, in the form of St. George himself.  It comes down to the boy to act as a negotiator and talk some sense into both sides of the impending fight, and reach an end result that makes everyone happy without any particular bloodshed.

All good things must eventually end, though, and the final story in the book, after the particular high point of the dragon's mock battle with the knight, seems almost more of a eulogy to childhood than anything else.  This story deals with the day where the youngest of the children is deemed by The Olympians to be 'too big for those kind of toys any longer', and the resultant nighttime mission by the two youngest, along with the narrator, to recover just a few particularly cherished keepsakes from the crate due to be shipped to a children's hospital in faraway London.

Even after the rescue goes without a hitch, though, the children have an altogether different intention than keeping the toys for themselves.  Rather than bringing the toys back to the house, where they would likely be quickly found and subjected to the same fate they were rescued from, the three children instead go to a spot they're particularly fond of escaping to when they need some time to just be children, and dig a grave to bury the toys, acknowledging that their days of being played with are over, but also feeling that it's better for their most cherished toys to have never ended up in the hands of children who wouldn't have the same built-up sense of value for them, and that their continued future play on the same spot would let those toys remain as part of the proceedings in spirit, if not as participants.

This ends up being the note on which we leave Grahame's childhood memories and meditations; after Dream Days, he didn't return to these characters, instead moving to other topics.  And so, we must also move on from these children being raised in their Arcadian surroundings, but even in this final act of solemnity, so different from the rest of these two books, there's something important being stated.  Even when we grow up, it's important to hang onto those fragments of innocence and fancy, lest we become as ill-humored and unable to engage with anything but the most serious and purely rational topics as The Olympians; we have to keep that little bit of childhood whimsy buried inside ourselves, always there to draw on, even into adulthood, to help us to take a step back from the real world when we need it.

The Pillow Book (Sei Shōnagon, ca.995-1010)

 

There's a reputation that particularly old literature starts to gain, to the effect of 'It wouldn't have staying power if it wasn't dry and serious and somewhat socially-conscious of its time.'  And it's true, many of the examples of ancient works that we have fit that to a certain extent.  There are, after all, rather a lot of histories and biographies that have come to us from Greece and Rome.  Shakespeare has some remarkably fun comedies, but with the classics, he's considered something of an outlier.  He's the Bard of Avon, of course he's something special.

So let's just push that thought aside, right now.  There's plenty of lighter fare available in literature, even if it's centuries old, and I found one example, right here.  The Pillow Book is witty, light-hearted, and... well, social consciousness doesn't seem quite the intention here, but it's an utterly delightful read.

Written by a member of the court of the Empress Taishi, the first consort of Emperor Ichijō, this is a somewhat rambling work, happy to change directions with little warning, relate humorous anecdotes in whatever order they happened to come to mind, and generally acts like, well...  sort of a Heian miscellany, really.  There are lists of things that Sei Shōnagon finds to be beautiful, things that she finds distasteful, names of places and flowers and birds that are of poetic significance, and numerous incidents within the tiny, insular world of the Empress's court, all of which are positive in some way.

From the very start, Sei intended this to be anything but a serious work.  The story related in the text is that Taishi received a gift of paper similar to that being used by the Emperor's court engaging in the copying of a Chinese manuscript, and while debating over what to write on such fine paper, Sei suggested, "a pillow," at which point the stack of paper was passed to her to do just that.  There's some lost-in-translation-and-time pun work going on here, but the translator suggests that because the specific work being copied in the Emperor's court was "Shiki" (The Records of the Grand Historian, Shiji in Chinese), and "shiki" also refers to the 'mattress' part of a futon setup, the obvious pairing with that would be a pillow.

There's a lot of this stuff in here, homophones and poetry making reference to other poetry and...  I genuinely wish I was in a position to be able to appreciate all of what's going on in the poetry, because there's a lot of context that is lost simply because English can't elegantly do some of the things that classical Japanese could.  There's just over 100 pages of notes and appendices in the back to help with cultural and lost-in-translation things; it's actually very helpful, given the sheer cultural distance between the author and myself, across 1000 years and an ocean.

All that said, the combination of what was provided as the appendices and the sheer skill in Meredith McKinney's translation brings the images forward marvelously.  Sei has a particular affinity in describing clothing, focusing on the colors, patterns, and combinations thereof in the outfits worn by everyone around her.  There's a whole appendix devoted to giving illustrations of what courtly wear looked like (which was very useful for me; the Heian era predates the ubiquitous kimono so often seen in depictions of Japanese culture, which would have led me to very different mental images) and what the various poetically-named combinations given in the text actually mean in terms of the colors involved.

There are also a number of frankly splendid passages written in the second person, translated in present-tense (the implication being that the original was doing the same thing), describing a particular event in great detail.  This has the effect of letting a suitably-receptive reader experience the setting mentally, and I found these sections to be one of the best uses of second-person narration that I've encountered outside of interactive fiction.

What stands out for me the most in having read this, though, isn't the lists, or the descriptions (as delightful as the anecdotes are), or even the intimate descriptions of Sei's life within the court and her time as one of Taishi's favorite companions, and the entertainments that they devise for themselves.  Rather, it's the way that literature, and waka poetry specifically, is the very lifeblood of interactions between members of the nobility in this time.  If a gentleman spends the night with a lady, when he returns home afterward, he immediately sends a messenger with a poem, and the expectation that she will send a poem in return.  Poetry competitions are a recurring aspect of courtly life, both in structured situations and simply as a way for members of the Palace bureaucracy to engage in small flirtations with the cloistered women of Taishi's court.  Received poetry is shared between friends, responses carefully considered... it's almost like poetry in the Heian period was a spectator sport.

It's directly suggested in the text that Sei's position in Taishi's court is directly related to this literary sport.  She came from a family of poets, and her quick wit is brought up repeatedly as a great asset, often able to craft responses to poetic challenges that are difficult for the gentlemen on the other side of the exchange to top.  She's well-read, and knows her way around the Chinese classics that were essential reading for gentlemen of the courts, but as that kind of knowledge was considered somewhat uncouth for a lady, she has to come up with ways to subtly allude to the stories in conversation without making it clear that she's referring to them specifically.

This doesn't mean she's perfect, however.  There are multiple times that she tells about her difficulties in writing in more structured ways, and several times she brings up times that she worded things poorly, and was suitably chastised as a result.  She's also very much a product of her specific culture; there are numerous times where she writes that she's not fond of commoners, for a variety of reasons, and several times where she does things that seem downright mean (in one particularly cold-hearted passage, she describes how, in response to a commoner who was audibly depressed that his house had burned down as part of a huge blaze that destroyed an Imperial grain storage house, she gave the illiterate man a poem, implied that it was a promissory note, and told him go off to find someone who could tell him what it said as she was just too busy at that moment and was being called by the Empress).  Several times, her wit results in friendships and relationships being destroyed, as well; it may not be a huge surprise that Sei's literary rival, Murasaki Shikibu (who served in the court of Empress Shōshi, Ichijō's second consort), wrote in a decidedly unflattering way about Sei in her own diaries, albeit while respecting her wit and writing skills.

All in all, I'm glad to have read this.  It made for a very cozy read during a power outage, and I find myself rather wishing that I knew of anything else quite like it for me to keep on hand for when I need a bit of a cooldown after other, decidedly heavier tomes.

The largest book on my shelf, and one that's very much impending on my 'The Longing' reading list, is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père.  I don't know how heavy of a read that one is going to be prose-wise, but it's over 1300 pages and I know I'm going to need some lighter, shorter fare after that.  I think I'm going to stay light-hearted for the moment and go read some children's literature first, though.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883-1885)

Nietzsche. It’s one of those names that gets thrown around whenever someone wants to ‘explain’ a particularly potent case of sociopathy, someone who thinks they can get away with doing things with impunity. The two murderers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, inspired by real-life murderers Leopold and Loeb, use his writings as an excuse for why they choose to hold a dinner party for their victim’s family, with the body in a trunk in the same room. It’s proof that they’re übermenschen, Supermen, they say. They even invite the professor who introduced them to Nietzsche’s writings because they think he’ll be impressed that they’ve taken to his teachings so well.

That… really isn’t what Thus Spoke Zarathustra is trying to do, though.

Admittedly, I’m not certain precisely what it actually is trying to do, but I think I’ve at least managed to suss out the general shape of it. This might be the toughest read I’ve yet encountered in here, just from a sheer ideaspace standpoint.

---

A good starting place might be to address the writing style. Nietzsche is generally known for a certain succinct quality to his writing, choosing words to make his thoughts as plain as possible. This is very much not that; rather, we’re looking at something akin to the writer channeling Walt Whitman’s mindset and “sounding [his] barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Zarathustra is exuberant in his desire to sound his ideas and opinions, to teach his philosophy to the people, to make sure that everyone knows that “God is dead,” and that the age to come will be the age of the Superman.

That Zarathustra’s ideals are laughed down by the masses, saying that they would rather become like Zarathustra’s “Ultimate Man,” who lives a life of luxury and relaxation without any strife or anything to trouble them, and which stands opposed to the Superman. Despairing, he goes in search of people who will be more receptive to his ideas.

Reading this right after The Time Machine, I couldn’t help but think that the Ultimate Man feels like the predecessor to the Eloi, but I doubt the two are related. However, the idea that the Ultimate Man represents the, well… ultimate endpoint of human desires for comfort and relaxation, leads directly in that direction.

The work as a whole is separated into four sections, each being one of the four volumes that Nietzsche published in the 1880s. The first gives the initial explanations of the Superman/Ultimate Man dichotomy, explains the differences and gives the general shape of the Superman; the second features Zarathustra expanding on his teachings to his disciples; the third is Zarathustra’s journey to return home after leaving the disciples, and commentary on the world and cultures as he travels; and the fourth concerns a group of pilgrims searching for Zarathustra because they are ‘Higher Men’ who believe themselves to be in a position to become somehow better.

The most important takeaway may be the specific way that Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, suggests that we get to the world in which the Superman can exist. Multiple times throughout the book, he describes Man as being a bridge of sorts, between the animal and the Superman. Man has, through sheer force of will, what is described as will to power, ascended to be the pinnacle of what animals can be. This will to power is defined as one of the primary characteristics of the Superman, that he is more interested in shaping his world than in even his own life. The Superman has no fear of self-injury, no outside influence shaping what he wants to create, nothing stopping him from pursuing the challenges he desires, or what he wants to do with himself. He is above all but his own desire to rule himself, living selfishly above all else.

The aphorisms offered as ways of explaining what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for the Superman’s world are perhaps a little hard to wrap one’s mind around, on first glance. We are told that pride is a great sin, but vanity isn’t. Charity is bad, because it is giving in to other people’s desires; in the world of the Superman, there are no beggars, even if some might be wealthier in certain ways than others. Chastity is bad, because it in fact inflames lusts. Conventional wisdom as to what are Good and Evil are turned on their heads, because those ideas are tied in with religion and, after all, “God is dead.” He brings this up repeatedly. God is dead, and will be replaced with the new Superman, who makes his own choices about what is right and what is wrong.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Nietzsche’s Superman, though, is the concept of what happens after life. Zarathustra very openly decries any belief in an afterlife, instead preaching the concept of the eternal recurrence, where one’s entire life repeats infinitely, forever, such that if one hopes for a particular moment to come repeatedly, they must accept the entirety of their life doing such. The Superman, by Zarathustra’s explanation, lives a life such that every second of their life, both the high points and the low points, is a moment that they would gladly experience again, eternally. They have no regrets.

Zarathustra teaches that no man can become the Superman. It’s something to aspire to, to reach for, but not to attain. Rather, the goal of all people must be to create the world in which the Superman can exist, and this requires a tearing-down of religious thought, a complete rethinking of conventional morality, and apparently a great deal of solitude and living in the mountains as hermits, as any life surrounded by others invites the thoughts and desires of others, and the potential desire to submit to others’ needs. This is a big point: there is no submission of any sort for the Superman. The Superman is thus almost a sort of mythic hero, doing what he desires for the sake of doing it, rather than because he was told to. Even the powerful Hercules was not a Superman, because he feels remorse for what he did in a drunken rage and submits to complete the impossible labours assigned to him.

The one thing most explicitly described as a sin, and indeed the greatest sin in Zarathustra’s mind, is pity. Taking pity upon others is against the ideal of the Superman, because if you take pity, you are submitting your feelings to those of the misfortunate, feeling shame because of the shame they feel for themselves; this is even stated to be the cause of God’s death, that he felt pity for the entire human race and shamed himself to death. The entire fourth book is devoted to this topic; Zarathustra walks the forest because he has heard what he believes to be a cry for help, and encounters a number of “Higher Men” who have come to seek his teachings. Over the course of the book, he guides them all to his cave, where they share a meal together and listen to his teachings, an event directly compared to the biblical Last Supper. During the evening, however, these men show that even where they claim to have cast off their shackles, they are unable to maintain this mindset for even the full evening; every time Zarathustra steps outside for a little fresh air, they relapse in some way, culminating in the entire group starting to worship an ass because a proper replacement for the God would have to be someone who is slow, stupid, and never says ‘no’.

Seriously, they start worshiping a literal pack-ass, because its braying sounds like ‘Ye-a’.

That Zarathustra is disappointed in them makes for quite an understatement; he verbally tears into the whole group, until they renounce the false idol before them. The ass, for its part, doesn’t seem to much care, though someone got it drunk so when the Dionysian revelries that ensue during the night begin, it dances right along with everyone else.

The work as a whole ends on a cliffhanger; apparently Nietzsche planned it out as six volumes, but only wrote four of them. Zarathustra spends the whole work talking of the pride of his eagle and the wisdom of his serpent; they are joined in the last few pages of the book by a lion who, in the prophet’s estimation, indicates that the time to return and preside over the noontide for his followers is at hand. The book simply ends there, though; what would have come is lost to time. We can only wonder what the creation of a world that follows the ideals of Zarathustra might have been, to bring about the Superman.

In any case, by the end of reading, I had a very specific idea of what the Nietzschean Superman looks like in mind, and it’s certainly not what the Nazis were trying to create when they got done reading this book in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

I see the Superman, as described here, as being one of those off-the-grid sorts, living out in the mountains, off the land, not because it’s easy, but because it’s a perpetual challenge for them. The only rules are those they make for themselves, because nobody else is around to enforce anything. They just live a solitary existence, enjoying their life to the fullest and answerable to nobody, because they’re above everyone, figuratively but also literally, living at the high altitides offered by, well… a mountain.

Basically, what I’m getting from all of this is that Nietzsche’s ideal Superman is a doomsday prepper.

The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895)

 

This is not science fiction.

I know everyone thinks it's science fiction.  It's cited as an early entry in the genre.  H.G. Wells, it is said, is the father of modern science fiction.

(I'd point more at Mary Shelley as the mother of the genre, but Wells certainly does fit the bill, through some of his other works.)

The thing is, though...  This is barely a science fiction book.  If anything, it's a class-conscious satire, a Utopian work in a the same genre as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, but using a scientific framework based on then-current understandings of the world to hold it up and make its point.

The Metamorphoses (Publius Ovidius Naso, 8 CE)

One of the things that always stands out as a potential sticking point when dealing with any work of literature is the question of the language on display.  I don't mean the quality of the language, though that's certainly an aspect; rather, I mean the language the work was written in.

Let's take as an example the book I finished today, a 2000-year-old poem written in Caesar's Latin and focused on tracing the theme of transformation through the entirety of the Greco-Roman mythology, from the creation narrative all the way through the deification of Gaius Julius Caesar.  It's a long piece, covering both well-known and less-known stories, and including shortened and focused-in versions of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid.

There's basically two ways to go about reading this book.  Well, books; Ovid wrote it in 15 volumes, originally, but it's typically released as a single volume, now.  The option exists to read it in the original Latin, but one needs to be able to read Latin in order to do that.  There's plenty of words that look vaguely recognizable to an English-speaker, but if you're not fluent in the language, you'll be looking back and forth between The Metamorphoses, a Latin dictionary, and a guide to grammar, and all of the elegance that exists in the language is lost.

viribus absumptis expalluit illa citaeque
victa labore fugae spectans Peneidas undas
“fer, pater,” inquit “opem! sī flūmina nūmen habētis,
quā nimium placuī, mūtandō perde figūram!”
vix prece finitā torpor gravis occupat artūs,
mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro,
in frondem crinēs, in ramos bracchia crescunt,
pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret,
ora cacumen habet: remanet nitor unus in illa.

The alternative is to read it in translation.  This can be a bit of a touchy subject; there have been numerous translations of The Metamorphoses with different objectives in mind; Penguin Classics alone has three different ones that are maintained in print, with one being a prose translation by Mary Innes, another being a verse translation by David Raeburn, and the third being Arthur Golding's translation from 1567, the first translation of Ovid's work into English and certainly an influence on Shakespeare (this likely being where the Bard found the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, as depicted in A Midsummer Night's Dream and retold with a changed setting as Romeo and Juliet, and located in Ovid's Book IV).

When faced with a vast array of translations, it can be hard to choose one to read.  When I decided I wanted to read this (based on encountering it in The Longing), the version immediately on offer was the 1727 version published by Samuel Garth, and translated by... rather a team, including John Dryden, William Congreve, and Alexander Pope.  This particular translation struck me as somewhat flawed; while there is poetry to be found here, the forced rhyming schemes combined with the way that spelling in the eighteenth century was more of a set of guidelines than any kind of hard-and-fast rules made it rather difficult for me to enjoy the content while part of my brain wanted to just scribble all over it with a red pen:

The nymph grew pale, and in a mortal fright,
Spent with the labour of so long a flight;
And now despairing, cast a mournful look
Upon the streams of her paternal brook;
Oh help, she cry'd, in this extreamest need!
If water Gods are deities indeed:
Gape Earth, and this unhappy wretch intomb;
Or change my form, whence all my sorrows come.
Scarce had she finish'd, when her feet she found
Benumb'd with cold, and fasten'd to the ground:
A filmy rind about her body grows;
Her hair to leaves, her arms extend to boughs:
The nymph is all into a lawrel gone;
The smoothness of her skin remains alone.

The translation I was able to find on short notice, in a quick local search of the thrift stores and used book stores, was that of Horace Gregory, currently published by Signet Classics.  This translation came out in the 1950s, and was far more readable, perhaps less poetic but also not forcing itself to try and rhyme lines that don't rhyme in the original Latin:

The girl saw waves of a familiar river,
Her father's home, and in a trembling voice,
Called, "Father, if your waters still hold charms
To save your daughter, cover with green earth
This body I wear too well," and as she spoke
A soaring drowsiness possessed her; growing
In earth she stood, white thighs embraced by climbing
Bark, her white arms branches, her fair head swaying
In a cloud of leaves; all that was Daphne bowed
In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green
Leaf twined within her hair and she was laurel.

When I was almost completely through, a third translation became available to me, as a copy that I had requested from the public library arrived, the 1990s translation by Allen Mandelbaum.  I really wish that this had been the one I was reading all along; from what I've perused of it, it feels like the best of the bunch (though obviously I haven't had a chance to see what any of the ones offered by Penguin look like, yet):

Exhausted, wayworn, pale, and terrified,
she sees Peneus' stream nearby; she cries:
"Help me, dear father; if the river-gods
have any power, then transform, dissolve
my gracious shape, the form that pleased too well!"
As soon as she is finished with her prayer,
a heavy numbness grips her limbs; thin bark
begins to gird her tender frame, her hair
is changed to leaves, her arms to boughs; her feet—
so keen to race before—are now held fast
by sluggish roots; the girl's head vanishes,
becoming a treetop.  All that is left
of Daphne is her radiance. 

These are all interpreting the same Latin passage, and obviously the same core meaning is there, but with somewhat different voices showing through the lens of translation.  Speaking as someone who doesn't actually have any functional knowledge of Latin beyond knowing root words that are used in English, all I have that I can base my understanding of Ovid's writing on is the translations on offer; as such, I have to go by the translation that feels the best to me, to judge which one best shows what the ancient poet's craft was actually putting forth.

With so many different ways to render the passage into English, it really ends up coming down to a question of what one wants.  With these ancient works, not just Metamorphoses but also those of Homer, Virgil, and the other ancient poets, you have your choice of old or new, verse or prose, workmanlike accuracy or lyrical flow, and this isn't even a problem that's limited to finding dead-tree books; Wikisource has two complete translations, two additional partial ones, and two more that they appear to be planning on putting up at some point.  Many more recent novels that are translated between languages only have one translation on offer, so a reader doesn't have to worry about this dilemma. But with these ancient works that have been translated repeatedly, well...  we're rather spoiled for choice now, and deciding which version to read can have some rather significant consequences for your enjoyment.

Even works originally in English are affected by this; Penguin offers both Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in prose, verse, and untranslated versions, the latter being the original unmodified text (in Beowulf's case, with a glossary and pronunciation notes provided on every page to help you with words you might not know).  I can handle Chaucer in the original, with a minimum of effort... but the last time I read Beowulf, it was an edition with side-by-side original and translated text, and...  English that far back has extra letters that we don't use anymore, and, well...

Hwæt! Wé Gárdena      in géardagum
þéodcyninga      þrym gefrúnon·
hú ðá æþelingas      ellen fremedon.

All that said, this is why I don't mind that my Penguin Classics collection has two different copies of The Epic of Gilgamesh.  But more on that on a later date.

Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (E.W. Hornung, 1899)

 

There's an old saying, 'Don't judge a book by its cover.'  That seems a reasonable way to look at things, right?  Don't assume that what you see on the outside is an indication of what's inside.  Some part of me, deep down, wonders if this is why the classic Penguin Books cover is so plain.  There's a promise that comes with that cover, that what you find within its pages is going to be worth your time, even with a bare minimum of indication from the front as to what's inside.

That was what drove me to pick this up, initially.  I saw the telltale 'Vintage Penguin' spine on the shelf at St. Vincent de Paul, on a book title and author I hadn't heard of, and reached up to take it in hand, give it a closer look, and see what I had found.  I had initially thought it was an actual vintage edition, though this quickly changed once I had it in hand; I probably should have known better, as the actual vintage Penguins often have spines that appear upside-down to a modern English-language sensibility (not to mention that the actual vintage edition of this particular book was a green cover Penguin).  In any case, my interest was further piqued by the short paragraph on the back cover telling me it's tales of a gentleman thief, and the book's dedication reading "TO A.C.D. THIS FORM OF FLATTERY".  Needless to say, that set of initials in a work of late-Victorian-era crime fiction gets my attention, so I was happy to see what Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman had to offer me.

One of the things I really enjoy about classic books being published by Penguin is that they usually include some amount of context for the reader, whether in the form of an appendix full of notes to help with cultural things that may not be clear to modern audiences (in this case, the most obvious case where I needed this was when reference to "fagging" showed up very quickly in the first story, due to the title character and the Watson-style narrator having been at school together), or an introduction that gives a sense of the context in which the work was introduced or simply a bit of a bio of the author.  In this particular book, that introduction was somewhat mind-blowing simply in the way that it gives a bit of background not only on Hornung, but even on Arthur Conan Doyle; Hornung was married to Doyle's sister, and was apparently spurred to write these stories, upon suggesting the gentleman-thief idea, at Doyle's insistence.  Indeed, this seems to be one of the first examples, if not the first, of the the gentleman-thief trope in fiction.  But it goes further; at the end of this book, the titular Raffles purposefully goes over the railing of a ship, many miles from shore, and it's not entirely clear if he has survived (this intended as a way to end the series of stories, similarly to Sherlock Holmes going over Reichenbach Falls).  Due to the popularity of the stories, Hornung was convinced to come back and write more, revealing that Raffles had indeed escaped intact; Doyle himself later made use of this same device in bringing Holmes back in later years.

There's a common view that, because of the relationship between Doyle and Hornung and the nature of these stories focusing on the criminal rather than the sleuth, these are somehow an "inversion" of Holmes.  That seems a bit of a misinterpretation of what is at work here; an inversion of Sherlock Holmes must, by necessity, be a character in the shape of Dr. James Moriarty, the sort of character who wields the same powers as Holmes but uses them for criminal gain and the material enrichment of themselves, rather than enjoying simply solving the puzzle for the greater good, as Holmes himself does.  This does not describe A.J. Raffles, at all.

So, what is it that this thin paperback actually contains, then?  Unlike most instances of the gentleman-thief archetype, A.J. Raffles is in it for profit, not for the fun of it.  While the character clearly enjoys the game, as it were, and claims he's but an amateur, he engages in his cracksmanship as much for a way of making his living as for the challenge and rush of the crime itself.  He has no apparent job outside of simply living the appearance of a proper upper-class gentleman; all of his income seems to come from either gambling (he's introduced at the end of a poor night of Baccarat for the narrator, Harry "Bunny" Manders) or his heists.  This book, the first of an eventual four dealing with Raffles and Bunny, contains nine stories, each detailing a criminal escapade.  Most of these are, as could be expected of a gentleman-thief, heists, though not all successful.  The stories are perhaps less stand-alone than might be expected of a collection like this, where most of them were previously printed in magazines; there are numerous callbacks to prior stories as you go through, with one of the stories even being a direct sequel to an earlier one.

Raffles isn't exactly a likeable character.  Admittedly, we're seeing him through Bunny's eyes, and Bunny has known him long enough that many of Raffles's less endearing traits are coming across in his view as 'Oh, that's just what he's like.'  There's a repeated plot beat of Raffles assuming that some machination of his or another as part of the heist they're involved in is just going to be obvious to Bunny, then getting huffy about it when Bunny doesn't understand what he's supposed to have done.  This comes across as rather less charming than "Elementary, my dear Watson" does; one would expect that when a heist requires two people working to pull it off, both people should necessarily be on the same page.

That said, I did enjoy the stories here, and definitely want to get my hands on the other three books.  Hornung was clearly having some fun with the concept, and did his research; apparently, some of the tactics that Raffles makes use of (particularly his way of getting through windows) actually saw a rise in their usage by real-life burglars after the stories were published.  Many of the characters and storylines also based largely on real people and events; a recurring police-detective character, Mackenzie of Scotland Yard, is directly inspired by Melville Macnaghten.  I do find myself wondering where the further books might go, however; unlike the case of Holmes, where his return would be a surprise but wouldn't likely have any significant dangers for the sleuth, Raffles goes over the railing because Mackenzie has caught him in the act and has warrants based on two other heists as well, so his return from the apparently-dead wouldn't be a case where he could keep his old identity.  That in itself suggests that the further books might have some interesting twists; if A.J. Raffles can't be A.J. Raffles, what can he do to maintain the 'gentleman' side of gentleman thief?