recent acquisitions

My to read stack has been growing at far too rapid a pace.

Aeshylus: The Oresteia

I had read Agamemnon halfheartedly in college, so I didn't realize just how rich it is. Even in what is no doubt an imperfect translation, Aeschylus' thematic unity and imagery is thickly layered and the very model of what I call "Literary". If I was still in college, I would probably be inspired to write my paper on the symbolical use of raiment, but I'm not, so pbblt.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Memories of my Melancholy Whores

This book took me for a ride in more than one way. It was, as expected, an adventure in characterization as only Marquez can do it. After "One Hundred Years of Solitude", I wondered whether he could ever create men as memorable as the women in that book. Here is the proof. But the ride was also one of expectation postponed. The book is umistakably leading up to the main character's death. It opens on his ninetieth birthday, and winds up on his niety-first. As he ages another year, the world falls apart around him--his cat, his house, his workplace--seemingly in preparation for his death. It is characteristically appropriate that the year's adventure revolves around his courtship of a fourteen-year-old virgin, whom sleeps with only literally, never taking her virginity, while the man himself is born on August 29,th a Virgo. Anyone who has reada books could see the signs: the man is journeying inevitably to his death. It almost becomes another "Chronicle of a Death Foretold".

But it turns out to be a Chronicle of a Death Forestalled. I had to reread the last page several times to assure myself that the man had not died after all. He didn't die. Miraculously, in the last paragraph, the house was restored, the cat recovered, and he set out looking forward to his one hunderedth birthday. Why? Why Had Marquez not done what every other author would have done (except that every other author would have done it)? Why had he spent an entire book preparing the reader for a death that never happened?

"I . . . measure my life, not in years, but in decades," he says at one point. Every tenth birthday, beginning with his fiftieth, he has been struck by a deep sense of his mortality. The book, then becomes, not a chronicle of death, but of mortality--a subtle distinction--the mortality of birthdays. Each decade is indeed, as Marquez observes, a moment of pause, of recognition. And it is that pause which Marquez is chronicling, although he doesn't tip his hand until the last page.

The Way of Chuang Tzu (Edited by Thomas Merton)

Hui Chi said to Chuang Tzu:
"All your teaching is centered on what has no use" (153).

Herein lies the charm of this book. How useful it is to be useless indeed.