Arthur Schopenhauer: Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays

 In the margin of "Psychological Observations", one of the essays in this collection, next to the sentence "It is true, indeed, that character always forms a consistent and connected whole; but the roots of all its qualities lie too deep to allow of our concluding from particular data in a given case whether certain qualities can or cannot exist together," I have scrawled angrily, "Ummm . . . then why do you do it so often?" (64).  This was neither the first nor the last time that Schopenhauer inadvertently revealed his blind spot in this collection, but it was the most suitably anecdotal.  The perceptiveness, objectivity, and rational acuity that he brings to bear resonate nicely with my own skeptical, even cold, nature.  He lacks, however, a certain quality, of which deficit he seems unaware, even as he sings its praises: perspective.  

I have written before about Schopenhauer being imprisoned in his own experience, but the irony in this collection is that he specifically praises the virtues of a broad perspective, even while failing to notice the walls of the well in which he is sulking.  He seems incapable of noticing the inconsistency of claiming that women are incapable of patience, and then on the same page proclaiming, "The course of our individual life . . . may be compared to a piece of rough mosaic.  So long as you stand right in front of it, you cannot get a right view of the objects presented.".  He proposes that "we can get a general view only from a distance," while stubbornly refusing to adopt such a distance himself (65-66).  

Thus is it that we find such glories of reason and objectivity as the titular dialogue on religion--incomparably and shockingly fair in its treatment--in the same volume as such grievously outdated items as "On Physiognomy", wherein he asserts that everything you need to know about a man is visible in his face.  When it comes to things he knows, Schopenhauer is incisive, fearless, and to my belief correct.  When he speaks of things of which he doesn't know, the results are far more mixed.  This is, of course, so normal and human as to be a solipsism, and not a problem in itself.  The problem is that Schopenhauer doesn't know what he doesn't know, and thus treats himself as an authority in areas where he is laughably oblivious.

Which fault makes me think about my own blindspots.  Both by nature and by nurture, I am pretty sympathetic to Schopenhauer.  I too look at the world, and see it as objectively evil and cruel, and furthermore especially evil and cruel to those like me who can see it clearly.  I too despair of reality, of human existence at least, and cannot keep quiet about it.  It's possible that I see one layer beyond what Schopenhauer can, that where my reasoning, education, or intelligence trail his, at least my perspective is broader.  I wonder, however, if I am falling into the same trap. Surely there is yet another exponent of this fractal that we inhabit, one beyond what I currently take into account.  What is it that I don't know I don't know?

Giacomo Leopardi: Canti

 Reality wears many faces.  Although I see it differently from Leopardi, rather as a diseased tree bearing poisonous fruit than a singing girl, the effect is the same.  We are seeing the same thing.  The void.  The unbearable pain of existence against which all we can do is wail out in the wilderness, bereft even of the hope that we will be heard.  

Which is my characteristically melodramatic way of saying, although I cannot relate to the specific triggers of Leopardi's existential angst--frustrated love, life in a dissolute world that shames the glories of the past, imprisonment in a body that will never do me credit . . . oh.  Yes, I see now.  Oh my. 

Mercifully, it is not only this despair that Leopardi and I share.  Like so many who face the void, we both can see something inside of it.  There is peace to be had, as he says, in helping others, in seeing our place, in drifting anonymously in a meaningless sea, and, although he mentions it surprisingly little, there is also peace to be had in writing something wonderfully melodramatic and throwing it to the wind.

Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks

 "But little Hanno saw more than he was meant to see, and his eyes, those shy golden brown eyes ringed with bluish shadows. observed things only too well."

Little Hanno.  What could have happened if he had lived?  What would his life have been?  It's such folly to ask what happens after the final act of a play, after the curtain has drawn for the final time at night.  The answer is, of course, "The actors go home."  And yet we cannot but wonder what could have been for Hanno, if another life was possible for him, or for any of them.  If perhaps Tony could have been happy with her doctor, of Thomas with his flower girl.  We are even programmed to expect such an ending, to see in the gentle foreshadowing the possibility of some small happiness--in spite of the subtitle's warning: "The Decline of a Family".  No, happiness was not possible.  The world, and the book,  that they lived in would not allow it.

And yet, suppose it was possible for Hanno to escape.  I do not propose another ending of the book, but rather that Hanno escaped the pages of the book, the doomed story that was written for him.  If he were trapped, not in the pages of a novel, but rather in the real world, it's entirely possible that after his father's death, and the liquidation of the family business, his mother whisked him away to Munich.  There, safe from the pressures of business and the keeping up of burgher appearances, he could pursue work in a field more suited to his sensitive nature, perhaps studying writing or journalism.  Perhaps at the Technical University of Munich.  

Perhaps his writing would be well-regarded.  He might even publish a novel in his twenties that would later be cited as a reason for his being given the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Ah, dare we suppose that his sensitive nature might even find liberty in romance?  That his apparent love for the young Count Kai might find its adult expression?  No, this would be too much, even for the real world.  He would likely meet the external pressures of society and the internal pressure of his forbidden desires by marrying, perhaps a Jewish woman from an educated, well-regarded family.  Even this would likely not give little Hanno any rest, however.  A marriage of escape and denial is happy for neither party.  Besides which, the world would soon be at war.  

If not in marriage, perhaps there would be joy in parenthood, then.  As many as six children, what a joy!  And all of them marvelous, writers, actors, scholars, and one marine biologist who would go on to be known as The Mother of the Oceans for her tireless work in their behalf.  What joy this would bring, unless the world once again went to war.  Hanno's Jewish wife, and his refusal to compromise his morals, would surely make this period difficult as well.  They would have to escape, perhaps to America.

Finally, in America little Hanno would be free of the cruel European world that had held him under its thumb for 65 years.  That is, if it were not for the rise of McCarthyism.  He would be so many of the things they would hate, fearless, staunch, sensitive, and egalitarian.  No, this new world would offer no peace to a boy like Hanno.  He would have to return to Europe.  No doubt he would die there, aged 80.  

And so it was that Thomas Mann died twice.  He sealed himself in a book at the age of 25, and stayed there until his body caught up 55 years later.  His extensive journals reveal the upsetting ways his heart stayed, and will stay, forever in Lubeck, aged 15, holding the hand of his young friend the count, seeing more than he was meant to, and in the only small solace, finding a way to write it down.

Octavia E. Butler: Parable of the Sower

 I really wanted to like this book.  The characters were so vivid, the writing so fluid and honest, and the main character in particular so relatable. 

Like her, all I really want is to be heard.  My ideas make perfect sense to me, and I have devoted a lifetime to thinking them out, writing them down, and testing them in the brutal laboratory of life.  I'm not even attached to the idea that they are True or Right.  I would just love for someone to hear them without laughing or scoffing or backing away slowly, as though from a madman.  This world is terrifying and cruel, and at times seems to be teetering on the brink of exactly to the sort of collapse Butler describes.  In fact, her account of the fall of America seems entirely plausible.  The only thing that keeps me going most days is the possibility that I understand something real, something to which others are blind, and that I may have not entirely wasted my time here.  In so many ways, I am Lauren.  I feel her pain, her drive, and her clarity.  I would even be her if it were not for one thing:

Her ideas are sooooo stuuuuupid.

If there were any ring of truth in the ideas of Earthseed, which Butler presumably means to be taken in earnest, I would convert right now.  I'd change my official religion from Bokononist right this moment.  Where the book succeeds on every other level, however, it fails in this: to provide a philosophy any deeper than a flimsy NYT self help book.    I wanted so badly to get on board, to form an Earthseed cult and start recruiting.  At the very least, I wanted to enjoy this book.  But I  . . . seriously, I just can't.

Dances With Wolves

 I still remember the awe with which this movie was received when it was released, and being specifically struck with the gumption it must have taken for Kevin Costner to reveal his own bare buttocks (gasp!) on screen.  Some years after its release, I sat down to watch it with some friends on a battered VHS tape.  I fell asleep a quarter of the way through.

At least twenty-five years later, I can appreciate what I was unable to at the time.  The slow, vaguely European way the camera makes love to the scenery, in particular, was probably what put me to sleep at that first viewing, but finds a sympathetic audience in me now.  Unfamiliar as I was with the way indigenous people were usually treated in film, the novelty of a respectful treatment that gave agency to its subjects was also lost on me at that time.  

But I have missed the sweet spot where I might have truly appreciated this film.  I am too old and jaded to accept lovely cinematography as a justification for a film;  to me it is now merely frosting.  Likewise, I have become far too aware of the realities of Native American life to accept what was, at the time, rather a progressive approach.  The film is not as deplorable in its treatment as its predecessors, but still bears the marks of the white gaze, the noble savage trope, and the sanitization of complex issues. This film probably earned its accolades at the time, but while I am now prepared to stay awake for it, I cannot bring myself to bestow laurels today.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El Hablador

 When I last visited Llosa--has it really been over a decade?--I was tickled by the way I allowed myself to be confused by the identities and names of the different characters.  Was I an obtuse reader, who missed obvious markers early in the book and labored under an unintended misconception?  Was it a trick of language and/or translation?  Or was Llosa really clever enough not only to trick me, but to leave me wondering if I had actually tricked myself?

It is edifying to be able to report that not only is Llosa that clever (and correspondingly that I am not hopelessly obtuse), but that this cleverness has a theme, one that I merely suspected was intentional in La Ciudad y Los Perros, but occupies the very heart of El Hablador. It is, in fact, taken even further.  "Who is a person in relation to their name?" is broadened until the reader asks along with the various Habladores of the book, the writer, the narrator, and the eponymous speaker, "What is reality in relation to what is said about it?"

Llosa's answer, to the extent that he can be said to offer such a thing, is from a certain perspective, "Reality is what we say it is."  The stories that we tell about ourselves, our family, our culture, or reality itself, become real by virtue of the speaking.  Coy as ever, though, Llosa also allows himself a certain amount of wiggle room by offering multiple viewpoints and variations on the stories he tells here.  The central figure in the matroyshka of speakers, Saul, even peppers his stories with "Eso es, lo menos, lo que yo he sabido," a hedge that acknowledges the implicit fuzziness of the reality we create by speaking.  Which version is correct?  Which speaker is telling the truth?  And, as an important substrate, which view of important cultural and political issues is right and just?  It is no surprise that Llosa's answer is a non-answer, an irresolution, a return of the reader's gaze inward to ask "What has been said, Escuchador, what did it create for you?"

Italo Calvino: The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount

"Books are my religion," I said to a friend today.  He is not of a particularly literary bent, so he thought I meant that I just really, really, like them.  I do not like them; at least, I don't particularly enjoy reading as an activity.  I don't read for pleasure.  I read for understanding, and on rare occasion reading leads not only to understanding, but to being understood.  These moments are the equivalent of getting the Holy Ghost in church.  They are the moments where the divine is suddenly accessible to me personally.  I thought Italo Calvino understood me before these novellae.  The Baron in the Trees spoke to myself as a child.  His Italian Folktales (which some digging has revealed are far more his than not) spoke to myself as a scholar and a lover of stories.  But these two.  Man.

It is as though he is writing to me retroactively from the grave.  How did he know that I would be reading "The Nonexistent Knight" at exactly the moment I was struggling to believe that I even exist?  And even more startling, how did he arrange for me to read "The Cloven Viscount" after my own left side had been torn away in an accident?  This latter is far too specific.

I view my own religion, that of Books, with the same skepticism I apply to all religions:  it's fine unless you believe it.  I know very well that it is in my nature as a human to see myself in places that perhaps it is not.  And I know that it was possible for Calvino . . . no, for my friend Italo to have written what he did--not because it's specific to me, but because it is common to all humans.  But I can perhaps be forgiven for taking these moments of religious experience to heart, and allowing myself to be reassured that I not only exist and am whole, but that someone, even if he's been dead for thirty years, cares.

Meredith Talusan: Fairest

During the still incomplete process of trying not to be a trash human, there has been a certain amount of tension between my highly visible privileges (white, cis, and male), and my more subtle membership in less privileged groups (my disability is not obvious, and I can theoretically tone down the queerness if necessary).  The fact that my privileged aspects are the first thing one knows about me means that, even though I am technically disadvantaged, I largely navigate the world as though I were not.

Like any thinking privileged person, I am a vocal ally for trans people, women, and people who experience racial discrimination ("people of color", as some would say).  And like any self-aware ally, I am pained by the realization that my allyship is constantly corrupted by my concern with how I am perceived.  Perhaps I feel the danger of "performative wokeness" so keenly because I am such a performative person by nature that every action is in danger of being insincere.  I actually don't even know if it's possible for me to totally decenter myself.  Even this admission is itself somewhat performative, in spite of the fact that no one I know personally is ever likely to read this.  Everything I do is corrupted by the instinct to center myself, based on decades of being told by society that I am important.  Every action I take on the behalf of others, if I am not careful, could easily turn me into a micro-aggressor, a micro-oppressor even.

And there is a specific variety of performative allyship that pains me: the expression of rightly monnikered "white liberal guilt".  It hurts because it's so very true.  I do feel guilty.  I feel guilty that the black friends I grew up with didn't have access to the same things I did.  I feel guilty that I didn't see it clearly enough at the time to do anything about it.  I feel guilty that my family is comfortable from, in reverse chronological order, blindly accepted advantage, the enslavement of black people, and the theft of native land.  This guilt sometimes grabs the steering wheel and forces kneejerk answers to questions of inequality.  Its instinct is to always take the side of an oppressed group, sometimes thoughtlessly. 

As I read this book, my white liberal guilt kept grabbing for the wheel.  It kept looking for ways to root for the author, a trans woman of Asian descent.  It gave her the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, made excuses for her, and fought tooth and claw against the instinct that she was perhaps not a victim in her story.  How could she possibly be the villain, an oppressor even?  WLG would not allow the consideration of such a possibility.

This battle continued until the point at which she leveraged her white-passing beauty to try and steal her best friend's lover.  It was at that point that my WLG lost.  It wasn't just this grotesque betrayal, a villainy so profound and clear that in a fiction we would criticize it as a caricature, but also the offhandedness with which the author seemed to view it.  There was no glimmer of remorse, of self-reflection in the way she presented the story, and it stunned my WLG long enough for it to become clear what I had been trying not to see all along: this woman is a sociopath.

Nor was I disabused of this notion as I finished the book.  The scales dropped from my eyes, and the deficiency of her narrative popped into focus.  Until that point, I had only been vaguely aware of a general insincerity in her style.  Afterward, it became clear that what I was really feeling was an absence of human warmth.  What had before seemed like an overedited concern with the way she was portraying herself, was suddenly seen for the incapacity for empathy that it truly was. This white-passing trans woman had, seemingly without remorse, become that which I am terrified of becoming,which fear led me to give her the benefit of the doubt for 3/4 of the book: a member of an oppressed group who overcomes that oppression only to become the oppressor.   

Italo Calvino: Italian Folktales

What a lovely gem to have stumbled across in the bargain bin.  I love Calvino already, and have several of his books on my shelf, and even though not technically his original composition, this one definitely can stand happily next to them.  Discovering it was not unlike unearthing a chest of jewels in your garden when you were only intending to plant potatoes.  Each tale has its own charm, though some of them are charming merely in the familiarity of a new spin on a tale we've already heard in some other form.  Others, however, are entirely original, while maintaining the familiar flavor and tropes of a folk tale--at once sparkling new and  comfortably old.

I know people who collect trifles on a particular theme.  Some collect elephants, ducks, or cows.  Others Star Wars or Lord of the Rings memorabilia.  The feeling this book inspires is that of finding a new, previously unimagined item that fits right in with the thing you were already collecting.  The tropes are so familiar, and the stories so new, that I even set about to categorize them a bit.

Trope	Stories
Princess prisoner of a creature	2, 3, 6
Taking the place of the rightful heir/beloved	2, 3, 12, 16, 32
Prepare three unlikely bribes	3,11, 38
Three impossible tasks	3, 5, 27
Water/grass of life	3, 48
Tricked into suicide	3, 24, 29, 37
Three sisters	4, 9, 12, 19, 24, 26, 29, 35, 50
Omnipotent ring	4, 42
Stave off assault with clever delay	4, 24
Youngest child bravest/cleverest	4,9, 12, 19, 24, 26, 31, 45, 47
Young man sets off to seek his fortune	1, 6, 13, 27, 43
Jealous courtiers’ plot backfires	6, 11, 15
Smuggled into the maiden’s presence	7, 33 45
Ugly, jealous servant/stepmother etc.	8, 18, 31
Jealous older siblings’ treachery	12, 50
Giving birth to an animal	12, 19, 31
Regional characteristics	10, 21
Love beneath its station	13, 22, 31
Three brothers	14, 46, 47
Nuts filled with treasure	14, 19
The frog/snake/parrot etc. prince/ss	14, 15, 18, 19, 30
Sequestered beauty	15, 18, 33, 36
Treacherous old woman intermediary enables insidious royalty	15, 50
Reward for curing the the prince/princess	15, 18, 39, 41
“my son/husband/daughter will eat you if he finds you!”	19, 45
The boy is clever, but the girl is more clever and has her revenge!	21, 36
The comb becomes an obstacle	8, 22
Servants don’t have the heart to kill	23, 31
Maybe unique?	25, 40, 44, 49
Failing to fulfill a simple requirement	27, 35, 45, 50
Laughter is rewarded	29, 38
Maiden dressed as a man	18, 21, 31
Stealing from thieves	13, 31
Seemingly abandoned, enchanted palace	32, 35, 43, 48
Hollow animal that plays music	7, 33

I only went through the first 50 in this way, but one can see the pattern.  What a joy, one that I have already recommended to others.

박경리: 뱁새족

이와 같은 고급 책 읽으면 아직 문학으로 분석할 힘이 없다.  아쉽네.  아직 토지를 읽으면 안 되네.  그러나 문학에 대해서 배운 게 별로 없어도 내 자기 한국어 습득에 대한 걸 배웠다.  읽으면서 단어, 표현, 속담 다 노력하면 이해가 됐지만 책을 전체적으로 이해가 안 되는 것을 보니 나의 다음으로 극복해야하는 장벽을 알게 되었다.  다행이다.  앞길이 보이네.

더 익숙하게 만들어야하는 한국어의 특질은 바로 담화 표지다.  뱁새족을 읽으면서 누가 뭐라고 하는지 추적이 정말 안 되었다.  발언자뿐만 아니라 흔히 장면도 나 모르게 바뀌어 혼란스러워졌다.  이제 한 발짝 뒤로 물러서서 다시 아동책에 초점하겠다.

The Gold Rush

Sometimes we must, in the interest of fairness and objectivity, appreciate a movie in its context.  "Sure the camerawork, effects, writing, or structure weren't up to modern standards, but Intolerance was the first one to even try those things so give some credit", one might reason, or "It Happened One Night is even more impressive when you realize that all the movies of a similar style drew upon it for inspiration."

None of that is the case here.  How often does a movie do better with less technology and convention to draw on?  How often is the first example of something still the obvious best?  How often does a movie create practical effects that afterward have only been attempted in cartoons?  I'd say exactly once, and it is the oeuvre of Mr. Charles Chaplin.

As with City Lights, the director, lead actor, writer, and even composer?!?!?? of this movie did all of those jobs so well that if one didn't know its release date, one would be forgiven for assuming that it had just copied all of the tropes instead of having actually invented them.  At first I was in awe of how wonderfully he had captured the feel and style of a Looney Tunes cartoon.  What a marvelous feat to have reproduced all of those complicated gags without modern technology.  Imagine my surprise when I learned that I had it backward.  The Gold Rush predates Bugs Bunny by a decade.  Bugs Bunny copied Charlie Chaplin, but Chaplin did it so well that I just assumed the opposite.

After first watching this movie, I was affirmed in my opinion that Chaplin was a genius.  But further digging has revealed that I was mistaken.  He is a demigod. 

Catching Up

I don't tend to stick with things.  My attention span--for jobs, relationships, hobbies--seems to be about three years.  I have occassionally stuck with something for longer than that, but at the three year mark, the bloom inevitable fades, and, more often than not I scorch the earth and start over somewhere, something, with someone else.

Which is why it's a minor miracle that it has taken more than a decade for me to ask whether I wanted to continue writing in this blog or not. 

Clearly, I have come down on the side of yes.  But time passes, and memory degrades.  The books that I have reaad in the past few months have left relatively little trace, and I found myself unwilling to stretch them into their own individual posts.  There is precedent, of course.  At the beginning of this blog, some books barely merited a line or two. 

Liu Cixin: The Wandering Earth

Of all the books that I have read during quarantine, I had the most to say about this one at the time I completed it.  I recall wondering if the author was aware of his habits, whether he intended all the short stories in this collection to fit so neatly into the same universe.  Did he recognize as he wrote that his stories were all, in some way, weighing the vitues of being small against those of being large?  Or did he only see it after he stepped back and looked at what he had wrought, like a dinosaur seeing the pattern in a trail of ants that they themselves are unable to conceive?

Margarita Karapanou: Kassandra and the Wolf

I am beginning to sense a theme here.  I don't recall many details from these books.  Any self-styled reader can probably relate to the notion of remembering what you thought and felt about a book, rather than what it really contained.  In this case, the impression was one of a first attempt that was published by accident.  Vivid and evocative, in a way that often seemed to be testing the boundaries of what it could get away with--both in style and substance.  I felt the author reading over my shoulder, like an avid fan who introduces you to their favorite TV show and watches you watching, judging your reaction.

Hisham Matar: In the Country of Men

This item, like the previous one, betrays the weakness of the semi-autobiographical historical trauma novel.  Unlike the Karapnaou's effort, however, I find that I remember certain details, but nothing more.  It has the flavor of a book written because it could be, not because it must.  The author has a dangerous combination of a gift for language, and a vivid life from which to draw, but without a perspective on that trauma that necessitates its recording.

Anthony Jacquin: Reality is Plastic

And this is the opposite.  One gets the sense that Jacquin is struggling to convey exactly what he knows.  One could wish he was a slightly better, more organized writer, that he had a slightly more brutal editor, or that his manuscript was lost in a fire and he was forced to restart from scratch after having discovered in the final pages what he wanted to convey all along.  Nonetheless, of the four, this is the one that I will retain the best, for two reasons:  firstly, I am actually interested in what he has to say, both from a practical and a philosophical standpoint.  That reality is what I say it is--well, this idea is both seductive and compatible with what I tend to believe anyway.  Secondly, and as a result of the first,  I have actually taken the time to dig through his disorganized prose to pull out things that I can apply and, indeed, have.