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Books for Living
Let me say that it was not my intention to dump all this on you all at once, but my book club meeting is tomorrow and I need to go over it all now. This is too much to read at once but I'll leave it to you to determine how much you want to break it down.I started out commenting on chapters without giving much indication of what I'm commenting on (sorry) but eventually slipped into a style more comprehensible to people besides me. Here goes nothing... or rather, too much.
Books for Living - WIll Schwalbe
P8 Aschenbach - I’m running into this all the time now, doddering characters or even historical personages who were only in their 50s or 60s. I also have to mention that The Magic Mountain was originally intended as a companion to Death In Venice but got out of hand.
I would like to add an appeal for reading slowly. A book of any weight, or of exceptional quality, should be savored rather than raced through. This may be the thing I’m most happy about in my reading since I turned 60. That and re-reading. With either fiction or nonfiction, if the book is at all good it needs to be read at least twice.
I would be more tempted to assemble a list of books that shaped my mind. Maybe this comes down to the same thing? But when I look to my shelves the books that stand out are the titles that made me the person I am. These are more likely to be nonfiction, but that isn’t entirely the case. There are actually a surprising number of novels and even SciFi titles I would point to.
Schwalbe makes a particular point of praising Henry Green, a writer I had never heard of.
The Importance of Living - Lin Yutang
For me, riding public transit (and waiting for transit) takes the place of lying in bed. I think it’s much better since you are less likely to just fall asleep and there are almost always things of interest around you to think about.
Stuart Little - E.B. White
I haven’t read the book and don't really have any thoughts on what Schwalbe says here.
The Girl on the Train - Hawkins
So this is about unreliable narrators and trust. Though what interested me was the reference to Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as another instance of unreliable narrator -- I’ve been putting off reading that because I feel I’m still working on Parade’s End.
And of course the concept of the unreliable narrator takes me back to phenomenology and skepticism. Are our own perceptions reliable? How do we know? Also this brings up my uncertainty about meaning in fiction: What does a character really mean when he uses a particular word? Is he using it correctly? And if not, is that revealing about the character or the author?
The Odyssey - Embracing Mediocrity
I loved this for the classics, and I take his point and agree with it to a large extent, but my never bothering to learn either Latin or Greek points to my slightly different take on this. There are many things that I agree are worth doing badly. And certainly many people who do well by spending their times doing things they don’t do particularly well. But, is this always the best use of one’s time? I’m less than mediocre at learning languages, but maybe I could have struggled for years and gotten good enough to produce mediocre translations of some of my favorite classical writers. Maybe. Instead, I chose to read a great deal more in translations by people who almost certainly had a better grasp on the languages than I would have had. What would I have had to give up in books read for the satisfaction of reading some in their original languages? And of course this applies to French and German and Spanish as well... languages I did spend years “learning.”
Most people have things they are naturally good at and things they are not naturally good at. It’s probably a good idea for everyone to tackle one of those not-good-at things at some point, if only to give us perspective and make us aware of our limitations. But isn’t it more productive, and more satisfying, to spend the bulk of our time doing the things we are reasonably good at.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
Schwalbe chooses to take a book about running marathons and writing to talk about napping. There are few things in life as sweet as an early afternoon nap. I had two favorite places to take naps when I was at ASU -- a lounge in the Memorial Union with delightfully comfortable chairs, and the carrels placed next to the windows around some floors of the library -- and I still think back on those naps with fondness. (Often, in the library, my head would be resting on a volume of philosophy.)
I am not a runner. My feelings against running are similar to, but more extreme than, my feelings against learning languages. Murakami apparently goes into a sort of fugue state when he runs -- and it would be interesting to have Oliver Sacks tell us what his brain was actually doing while, from Murakami’s perspective, “Clouds [his thoughts] of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always.” I suspect that his brain is doing some of the same things as he runs that our brains usually do as we sleep.
But not what our brains do when we nap, or even when we ride the elliptical for 25 minutes. Either of those activities are more economical of my (not particularly precious) time. And my mind is usually doing something useful while I exercise. Though I suspect I also spend more time spaced out than I realize.
Schwalbe also mentions the way naps can put you in the book you were reading before you fell asleep. I don’t recall ever finding myself participating in a work of Scholastic Philosophy (thank Goat!) but I am familiar with this phenomenon from falling back to sleep while listening to the morning news/weather/sports radio in bed. These are some of my favorite dreams as they draw on the radio input (in particular the traffic reports, some from planes) but add fancifully visuals that I long for when I return to full consciousness and realize that the Bay and bridges of my imagination don’t really exist.
I don’t get to share Schwalbe’s immersion in books (or TV) since I can’t fall asleep while reading or watching something. (After lunch is something of an exception to this but I do have to decide to put down the book.)
Anyway, Murakami does sound like an interesting author. This book could turn out to be quite frustrating in adding so many authors and titles to my already long list of things to read.
[Here’s a little digression, since this is also the Oliver Sacks Book Club. Here’s an O quote “I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life.” This is from a piece about Bill Hayes’s book which is largely about Sacks but also New York City. Here. Perhaps because I’m currently rereading my blog of Goethe's Faust, I see in this, common and very understandable, fear of wasting life something of Faust’s endless striving. Lin Yutang is arguing for the opposite of this constant striving -- for being at rest. The terms of Faust’s bargain with Mephisto (in Goethe’s version) is a virtual definition of what Yutang dislikes about the West. It looks like I really have to read Bill Hayes’s Insomniac City.]
Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin
This section is about Schwalbe’s high school reading so he could have focused on any of a half dozen titles and authors but chose this one. More interesting to me, he also mentioned the assassination of Harvey Milk as having occurred at this time so now I know how we mesh in time -- I was working in a typewriter shop in San Francisco that year having left university a few years previously. And the next year I would be a clerk in a bookstore in the Castro.
Giovanni’s Room is one of those books I’ve sold lots of copies of but never read myself. There are just too many books. Schwalbe also mentions Gore Vidal (who we had in the store to sign his latest book) but I can’t recall now what I read of his, not The City and the Pillar, though.
I certainly spent my share of time hanging out in libraries (though without the dream librarian Schwalbe writes about here), but working in a bookstore was even better. Not only was I paid to be there eight hours a day, but you couldn’t help seeing all the latest books and running into staff or customers enthusiastic about their latest read. And being responsible for certain sections encouraged you to read more widely so you would be more knowledgeable -- I read a great deal of SciFi then, including Norman Spinrad.
But you can’t read everything. Just today I was sent a link to a piece about Susan Sontag describing how she often read as much as eight hours a day and -- like me -- loved rereading books. I’ve come to believe it’s very important to read slowly. Unless your mind works very differently than mine, reading eight hours a day doesn’t give you time to process what you read. And, of course, rereading cuts down the time you have to read new titles. But it doesn’t matter in the end because even if you read new books 16 hours a day you still couldn’t read everything. It’s like knowing the universe... wait, this is such a weird idea it deserves a fresh paragraph.
It’s believed we currently can “see” 46 billion light-years in all directions and that “observable” universe is shrinking because space is expanding at an accelerating rate. So there’s more out there that we will never see, no matter how good our telescopes get and in a thousand years some of the galaxies we can see today will have disappeared because that part of the universe will have expanded beyond our observable boundary. Similarly (he claims) there are books that you might find today that will be almost impossible to find in 10 years. Though in those 10 years an unimaginable number of new books will have been published, so there’s still no chance of your catching up.
The best we can do is to learn as much as we can (by reading carefully) the books that happen to come our way. I haven’t gotten to this in Books For Living, but when Schwalbe spoke here he told a story about a friend who, as he grew elderly, reduced his library to a single bookcase of carefully curated titles. Books that came to represent him as a person. I have an ever growing list of books I want to read for the first time, but I can also see myself at some point editing my collection down to just the essential titles. Books that I know and love. Books that I know will be worth my time to read once again. It would be interesting to see how much I could edit.
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
This was the most emotional chapter yet as it is mostly about a close friend of his from college, also named David, who died young in a biking accident. So the chapter is about the part of living that involves grieving and remembering your dead.
And yes, Dickens is another author I’ve hardly read. I think I read A Tale of Two Cities for a high school class and at least some of Great Expectations, but I was not a fan at that stage of my life.
Wonder - R.J. Palacio
A book about choosing kindness. Being kinder than necessary. Seems a good book for what’s shaping up to be an unkind era.
Lateral Thinking - Edward de Bono
The opening of this chapter, before he even gets to the book, reveals a surprising amount about the author (Schwalbe.) He has a problem with “perseverating” and he has no idea how computers work. Let me tackle that last item first.
He describe working on a Kaypro II computer in the mid-80s. I recall coveting these machines but I never used one. From his brief description of his problem with using this early computer, it’s clear to me that it had very limited RAM (as was true of all computers at that time) so it wrote your work to disc (floppy) as you worked. My Timex-Sinclair kept everything in RAM until I forced it to write to tape, so if anything went wrong before I wrote to tape, all my work would be lost. So the Kaypro method was safer -- essentially the same thing blogger and Google Docs does only they save to the cloud. The problem that Schwalbe seems to have no clue about, is that as he worked, the floppy being saved to would fill up and likely get fragmented meaning that it took longer and longer to save anything as the machine was spending more and more time shifting data around to find a space for new data. The solution to this is simple enough: Either switch to a blank disc or defragment the disc in use. (Also, don’t put so much data on one disc. The closer to full the disc is the harder it is to add more data... just like a closet.)
Now for the perseverating. My personal philosophy (or my natural bent) is that the path I take, regardless what it is, is the path. Once I’m on the path, for whatever reason, you can’t speak of it being the right or wrong path, it is simply my natural path. I may be curious about what other paths might have been like, but I rarely (if ever) second guess myself. Schwalbe seems to spend a lot of his time trying to decide and then second guessing.
And finally, knowing this about his lack of understanding of computers and his natural tendency to second guess, I have to reevaluate everything he’s written and the books he’s chosen with this new insight in mind. Just as a hospital is not the place to go to find healthy people; self-help books (especially spiritually oriented ones) are a sign not of spiritual health but of a desire for spiritual health. I should have gotten this from a recent chapter where he wrote about diet and exercise books, but I missed it. Now I see that his fondness for Lin Yutang does not express a natural affinity for his ideas, but rather a natural dis-affinity. He wishes he could be like Yutang in the same way he wishes he could follow diet and exercise plans.
Schwalbe’s topic in this chapter is Lateral Thinking -- when offered the options of A or B, choose C,
p105 “Which flight should I take? The 6:00 a.m. that gets me up too early but assures my being there on time, even though I’ll be exhausted? Or the 8:00 a.m., which is cutting it way too close? How about neither -- how about I fly in late the night before, stay with a friend so I can catch up with her over breakfast (nice!), and be assured of arriving at my event well rested and on time?”
I agree this sounds like a great solution to the problem, I’d probably choose it myself, but I would be aware that unexpected circumstances at the friend’s could mean that I could end up arriving late or frazzled or both. And I would wonder what I had lost by not taking those other flights. As a writer, it isn’t hard to imagine a plot where each of these three options is the best or (seemingly) the “worst.” I say “seemingly” because the disastrous option would probably be the most interesting.
Schwalbe’s perseverating indicates to me that he’s afraid he’s going to make a mistake, miss something important (not live life to the fullest). I think that’s impossible. “Impossible” isn’t the right word, really. I’ll admit that I live too quietly. I’m not taking advantage of what is (probably) my only chance at life and I give credit to people who live more actively, more boldly. I think it would be smart, under the circumstances, to be different, while acknowledging that I am the way I am. This is what I’m likely to regret on my death bed, though I hope I will be able to laugh even then at this regret.
Gift from the Sea - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
This (again) is about simplifying and decluttering your life. Besides Anne Morrow Lindbergh, we get the sage advice of an editor at a book publisher in the late ‘80s (actually 30 years ago, the same time I was transitioning to the computer world) and Marie Kondo (of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up fame). And (again) this sage advice is as useless for some people as it is “Life-Changing” for others. Hitler’s book (which I haven’t read) could probably be re-titled, "The Life-Changing Magic of Embracing Your Racist Tendencies." Or possible "It’s Never Your Fault"-- which, now I’m writing this, is probably a can’t fail self-help book title.
I know I’ve read something by Lindbergh, and it may well have been Gift from the Sea. From Schwalbe’s description the book sounds like a snapshot from the ‘50s -- something you should read with those hits-of-the-year 195_ YouTube videos playing in the background. I was going to compare it to Cheaper by the Dozen, even though that was published at the end of the previous decade.
The Taste of Country Cooking - Edna Lewis
A book about cooking, food, and life from a woman who grew up in a farm community of freed slaves. Sounds wonderful, though I doubt I could eat much of the food... my usual problem with Southern (or French) cuisine.
Eating -- but also cooking -- is another aspect of being “present.” So are people who make a cult and affectation of food (I’m thinking of the compulsive meal photographers) signaling their need to be present? And, as I’ve alluded to before when blogging The Brothers Karamazov, an ascetic, monastic diet of bread and mushrooms has the same result as Lucullanism in forcing you to appreciate your sustenance (and without the bilious aftertaste of the vomitorium.)
One difference between the home cooking described in Lewis’s book and dining at the French Laundry, is that with the former you probably enjoy taking part in the preparation as well as the consumption of the meal. My cousins and I still recall with fondness helping our grandmother in the kitchen. In part this is because she was both our grandmother and the best cook in the family, but it was also in part the satisfaction of helping and being a part of the process that ended with wonderful food on the plate. Not only were our mothers not as good a cook as their mother, but they were not as good at organizing their kitchens and the “help” that we provided.
Schwalbe talks about how reading about food makes him hungry and now I’m at Bun Mee (where I had no intention of going today) because he made me think about good food. Also, my cold is better and we’re finally having some sunny weather, so how can I not?
Bartleby, the Scrivener - Herman Melville
This chapter is about quitting. About not “perseverating.” I think this is a valid point to raise, though I don’t see Bartleby as a good example. Schwalbe starts with a commencement speech by a Navy SEAL officer who wants us to not ring the bell and give up (on our dreams, presumably.) Like Schwalbe, I’m a pretty enthusiastic quitter. If you can quit a thing, I think it’s usually a good idea to get it over quickly.
Since Schwalbe starts with a SEAL officer, I’m going to counter him with General Patton. Patton would seem to be a poor exemplar for quitting, but the idea I most associate with him is “stone soup.” (I’m not repeating the story, so follow that link if you don’t know it.) Patton was extremely fond of this story and, from my limited reading about him, told it all the time. What is important is not the original story but his military interpretation of that story.
Patton’s goal was to make something out of nothing. Where Montgomery would plan a massive offensive in great detail ensuring he had overwhelming advantage over the enemy (except for Market Garden), Patton’s scheme was to test his front with a number of small attacking units. Where these units met strong resistance they would fall back -- quit, as it were. But when they hit a weak spot in the enemy line Patton would reinforce that attack. As long as the reinforced attack continued to make progress, he would throw more and more forces (ingredients) into it. This is a brilliant approach to tactical military victory based on avoiding resistance.
(There can be a strategic level of reality in which this technique is not so successful. But that’s not our topic at the moment.)
Business people and academics frequently use similar tactics. They go after ignored markets. They produce products that do something other products don’t do. They study areas that other academics are ignoring. Quitting is always a part of the process of determining what you are going to decide to spend your time and money on.
But what was Bartleby doing? If anything he was refusing to quit half the time, when he refused to leave the office after being fired. When he refused to do anything but his copying he was persisting, he was refusing to quit what he was doing to do something else. I haven’t read the book so I have no idea what Melville had in mind here. Bartleby sounds almost like a James Thurber comic character.
The Gifts of the Body - Rebecca Brown
This chapter starts out talking about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. It also contains the funniest story I’ve ever heard about those years (a woman called the hotline where Schwalbe was working because she thought her hairdresser might have given her AIDS by washing her hair. Schwalbe was about to tell her to write goodbye notes to everyone and turn herself in to an ER for her final days when his supervisor sent him home.)
As I was reading this description from the early ‘80s, it suddenly occurred to me that my ambivalent attitude then -- given the obvious risks of the commonplace sexual behavior of the time and place -- is quite similar to my ambivalent attitude to the current outrage against Trump and oil pipelines and Islamic fundamentalism and the like. “Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind” comes to mind. Just because you don’t want to think about the consequences of what you do doesn’t mean there will not be consequences. I’ll say this for Foucault, he at least was actively courting disaster and embraced the consequences -- as nuts as that is.
Okay, here’s the root of my ambivalence about the AIDS epidemic: If people had merely taken the normal precautions to avoid other STDs there would not have been an epidemic. By ignoring commonplace public and personal health practises people created the disaster that consumed them.
The Little Prince - de Saint-Exupery
This chapter is subtitled “Finding Friends” but is also about losing friends to death. I think I still have a copy of The Little Prince somewhere. I read it a little later (high school) than Schwalbe and that’s probably why I liked it more at first. I remembered the “taming” but not the flower. What most people really like most about falling in love (idiotic theory to follow) is more the taming than the flower. Some people -- both women and men -- are serial tamers because the process is so satisfying. It’s both learning about another person but just as, or more importantly, about making someone else really see you. There’s some of that scent marking behavior that cats are so fond of. Everyone you’ve ever tamed, regardless of how the relationship worked out in the end, continues to bear your scent to some extent. (This is also true for writers, or at least for many of them. Publishing and reading are means of scent sharing. Pretty good ones, actually.)
I also have a problem with this aspect of the book. Taming wild -- rather than metaphorical -- animals can be dangerous to the animal. There’s always a temptation to befriend animals and The Little Prince does, in fact give you some useful pointers for doing this. But that doesn’t mean you should do it.
In the chapter, the link between The Little Prince and Schwalbe’s school friend who died so young is pretty tenuous, but the book is about death. At my high school there was a delightful young woman who also died of cancer, though after graduation. She wasn’t a close friend of mine, just someone everyone knew and liked. I can’t really imagine anyone not liking her. There should have been guys in my graduating class who went to and died in Vietnam, but if there were I never heard about it. Instead there was Terry.)
I’ve puzzled before about the importance of TV shows and movies set in high school. Why are these years so important? I was in the same elementary school for four full years, but I only really saw and associated with one classroom of students each year. In my three and a half years of high school I was exposed to a larger group of people during very important years for personal development. I can’t recall how many classes I shared with Terry over that period, but I know we overlapped a fair amount. Terry was someone you were always happy to see in your class at the start of a semester. I don’t think my view of her has been warped by the finale of her story (I just looked up her senior photo and she looks as cheerful there as I recall her in person -- pretty amazing for a senior class photo. Also, we were both on the school newspaper, so I did see a lot of her our senior year). When I think of her I think of how alive she always seemed. It’s hard to think of her as a tragic figure. I hope she had time to find her flower (and I have mixed feelings about how that sounds, as I do in fact mean it both ways.)
1984 - Orwell
Schwalbe talked about this chapter when I heard him speak. He’s writing about how we use our smartphones and social media to do the work of the Thought Police. Not a new idea for me, and one of the reasons I don’t own a device with GPS and why I prevent people from tracking me as much as I can. I rarely volunteer the information that I’m away from home (so it would be a good time to search or burgle the place.)
Even though this book was published this year and Schwalbe is a self-professed early adopter, this chapter is still a little behind the cutting edge of Big Brotherness. The latest thing is to have devices in your home that you can speak to and they can either answer your questions or do things for you. This is a part of IoT -- the Internet of things. Google or Amazon or one of the usual suspects will sell you a device that you can interact with to control other IoT devices and order things you need and all the rest. But let’s look at this another way, again with 1984 in mind. You go out and purchase a device that constantly listens to everything in your house and is connected to the Internet. It’s been awhile since I last read 1984, but I don’t think EngSoc made you buy the surveillance equipment in your house, we are doing this voluntarily and just daring them not to listen to us.
By sheer coincidence, I was last in Britain the summer of 1984. I’ve always thought that Brave New World was the more prescient of the two books, but there’s still time for me to be wrong about that. In this new Age of Trump, the slogans: WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH are looking more reasonable every day.
Epitaph of a Small Winner - Machado de Assis
P169 “During those days [after Napoleon’s first downfall in 1814], I cut an interesting figure wearing a little sword that my uncle had given me on St. Anthony’s Day, and, frankly, the sword interested me more than Napoleon’s downfall. This superior interest has never left me. I have never given up the thought that our little swords are always greater than Napoleon’s big one...
‘Do not deceive yourself, the only thing you really care about is your little sword.’”
Schwalbe here goes into some detail about our interests in our own small concerns, and I’m not disputing that reading of this passage, but... From the little he’s told be about the book I’m getting a pretty strong Tristram Shandy vibe here. I think it would be a mistake to think that the author didn’t also intend a euphemistic interpretation of “little sword.”
The other book this reminds me of is The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by Gissing -- and it was published not that long before Gissing wrote his book.
Zen in the Art of Archery - Herrigel
This chapter is subtitled “Mastering the Art of Reading.” I haven’t made this clear so far, but Schwalbe frequently returns to Lin Yutang and in this chapter he talks about him a good deal. This time I want to quote Schwalbe’s opening, “When I most enjoy reading, I’m not really conscious that I’m reading. It’s at those moments when I’m so wrapped up in a book, so engrossed, so moved, so obsessed, or so fascinated, that the part of my mind that is watching me read... has gone away.”
I would add to this that the part of your mind that is aware of time has also gone away.
Zen in the Art of Archery is a book about Zen with archery as the access point. In the same way that Levin scything was the access point in Anna Karenina (and also in The Elegance of the Hedgehog).
Later in the chapter Schwalbe talks more about reading, now focused more on Yutang than Herrigel. Here, Schwalbe is quoting Yutang quoting Chang Ch’ao: “...on reading at different times in your life: ‘Reading books in one’s youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depth of one’s own experience.’
“For Lin, reading is an act ‘consisting of two sides, the author and the reader.’ And Lin believed that choosing a favorite author is no small thing -- it’s epic, as epic as finding the right master to teach you the art of archery.
“‘I regard the discovery of one’s favorite author,’ Lin writes, ‘as the most critical event in one’s intellectual development. . . . One has to be independent and search out his masters. Who is one’s favorite author, no one can tell, probably not even the man himself. It is like love at first sight. The reader cannot be told to love this or that one, but when he has found the author he loves, he knows it himself by a kind of instinct...’”
If I think about who is my “master” when it comes to intellectual development, the sheer number of options to consider makes this task daunting. But when I simply ask myself who is my favorite writer, the answer is easy: Martha Grimes. In this respect I see reading and intellectual development as two entirely separate things. (Even my honorable mentions would not be on my list of intellectual development masters, with the possible exception of Wendell Berry. ) Does this mean that Yutang and Ch’ao require a greater level of prose artistry from their intellectual masters? Or do they not rate prose artistry as highly as I do? (I considered mentioning Edward Gibbon as another honorable mention exception, but as highly as I rate his prose style, and as much as I enjoy his history, I don’t think of him as shaping my thinking. The translations I’ve read of Fernand Braudel’s tomes are murky and tedious, but his ideas have reshaped my thought in significant ways. I’ve learned facts from Gibbon but a better way of thinking about those facts from Braudel.)
I’ve written in the past about author and reader, and reading at different stages of your life, not to mention re-reading. My (new) favorite example for this is my recent reading of Absalom, Absalom! What I took from reading that book was the role of Methodism in 19th century America. Did the author intend that or was it entirely in my mind? Did Faulkner make his characters Methodist simply because that’s what they would have been, without thinking about what it meant? It’s certainly possible that he could have made them Baptists just as easily. In this respect I could be just like those commentators on Goethe’s Faust who discover their hobby horse everywhere they look.
Song of Solomon - Morrison
This chapter is subtitled “Admiring Greatness,” and the book as a whole could be subtitles “An Exercise in Literary Guilt” since it brings up so many titles you should have, but haven’t yet, read.
I’ve been anticipating this chapter since I started reading the book, as this is where he talks about an elderly family friend, a former professor with a huge private library accumulated over his life, who edited his collection down to 100 books as he entered his 80s. If he kept a new book he had to get rid of an old one to make room for it.
Schwalbe likes the “idea” of this (while making it clear that his own apartment is awash in books that can’t even find space on a shelf), and asserts that Song of Solomon would be first on his personal list of 100 books to keep. He mentioned this when he spoke here, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. My library is neither as large as his “before” nor as small as his “after,” but I do (mostly) remove a book for every new book I add to my shelves.
I already have a 10 year plan to edit down my possessions by the time I hit 75, but, so far, I’m not thinking of clearing my shelves. (How would I know what I might want to read in my dotage?) But the idea of selecting my 100 essential books is quite tempting. In a way, I’ve already done something like that with my two living room display shelves for fiction and nonfiction books respectively. Except that I ignored some of my truly essential books because they took up too much space, were too tall, or either too small or unattractive. This is something I will definitely start thinking about doing once my 10 year plan is completed.
And wouldn’t it be interesting if my 100 titles when I’m 80 didn’t include any titles currently on my shelves? As important as Braudel’s works have been for me, I have a hard time imagining rereading them -- and I know from experience that it’s impossible to find anything in them for reference purposes. Do I need to read Jane Jacobs again? Her ideas are now lodged in my bones. Gibbon might be worth keeping just for the pleasure of his prose, but I’m not even sure of that.
(It also occurs to me now that The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up doesn’t work very well for books. You can’t just hold a book in your hand to decide if it gives you pleasure, you have to start reading and then you’re most likely to find that it does give you pleasure -- or that your afternoon has suddenly vanished and you’ve gotten nothing done.)
A Little Life - Yanagihara
This is supposedly a chapter on “Hugging” and personal space, but really it’s about revealing yourself to others. Or you could say it’s about allowing yourself to be tamed, as opposed to taming others -- to connect back to The Little Prince chapter.
About the book itself, Schwalbe says, “A Little Life is one of the most engrossing books I’ve ever read, and also one of the most upsetting.” His experience reading it sounds like my experience reading Atlas Shrugged as it comes to his not being able to do anything else until he could finish it. The content of the two books are not at all similar. It sounds to me like this could be the book to read if you need to be totally distracted for a few days. (And this would be an alternate way of classifying books to read: Books for when you’re sad; when you need to put bad news in perspective....)
Schwalbe ends the chapter with the following, “Admittedly, I am a non-contact creature, and yet books have shown me time and again that you don’t need corporeality to touch someone. If you go to give me a hug, I might... [pull away or freeze] for no better reason than Lin Yutang cited when explaining his aversion to handshaking. [Germs mostly.] But if you tell me a heartfelt story, in person or in print, you can touch me.”
That is a bit of an understatement. Prose (even plays or screenplays) have the potential to touch us even more than real life people do, thanks to our “knowing” the people we read better than we know actual people (sometimes.) Fictional characters can be exactly what we need them to be in a way actual people can almost never be, since they have their own agendas. Not sure who comes out ahead when we compare fictional characters and dogs, for example. Depending on the dog.
Bird by Bird - Lamott
This is not a Lamott title I’ve read but it’s always fun to run into her, to hear her voice. I’ve always loved the title and now I know where it comes from -- and isn’t it interesting that a phrase can be engaging out of any context?
This chapter is about “Feeling Sensitive” or being “oversensitive.” This is a fraught topic these days and it’s bound to get worse. People have so many triggers it becomes exhausting to even consider them all. You want to dismiss it and then the antisemites and White Supremacists crawl out of the sewers and you realize you really can’t.
P204 In Stitches, Lamott writes, “I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. I so resent this.”
I’m glad Anne Lamott told me she resents this. I resent it, too.
In the middle of this chapter Schwalbe writes something very disturbing, “Clean our apartment (which often resembles a frat house, boxer shorts and dirty mugs strewn everywhere) because there are guests coming in an hour. How to get that done? Bird by bird. Or, rather: boxer by boxer.” An untidy gay couple! What is this world coming to? Doesn’t he know they are supposed to always be ready for their Architectural Digest closeup?
Rebecca - du Maurier
(A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is also praised in this chapter.)
This chapter is mostly about an old friend of Schwalbe’s named Terry (or not) who has died of alcoholism -- though Schwalbe shows no sign of understanding how that works, he is puzzled by Terry’s refusal to eat anything near the end. Terry is compared to Mrs Danvers in the novel but also to Eve in All About Eve and to Auntie Mame. He was a gossip, entertaining (up to a point) but not a very nice person. Schwalbe still regrets the way Terry drove him (and nearly everyone else) out of his life. He ends the chapter with this, “When I think of Terry, there’s nothing I can think of that I would have given him to read. [At the end.] I just wish I had been a better friend.”
When Schwalbe says there’s no book he could have given him, he’s acknowledging that Terry died of being Terry and there was no way to change that outcome. Lin Yutang is only mentioned in this chapter to place the publication of Rebecca in time -- a year after The Importance of Living -- but Terry calls attention to the main problem with self-help books in general, including philosophy that urges one to realize one's nature. If you are a hateful and lonely person who can’t stand your own company you are not going to thrive on an increase in time to yourself to ponder and enjoy life. Distraction is often not an accident of life but a necessity. Yutang is urging people (including the agoraphobic and acrophobic) to climb mountains for the view.
(Interestingly, extreme sports fans like BASE jumpers and snowboarders who have themselves helicoptered to the top of nearly un-skiable peaks, are not at all dissimilar. People can be self-destructive in so many different ways.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran - Nafisi
Much of this chapter canvases the various ways a book can save a life, from stopping a bullet to teaching you to navigate, to demonstrating that you are not alone. Reading Lolita in Tehran shows how books can keep the lights on when civilization is going dark in your country. I browsed this book once and (of course) went directly to the section on Pride and Prejudice. This choice of reading matter seemed to me perfect under the circumstances. The Revolution was pushing the lives of women back to the way they had been in Austen’s time. Not only could the readers in Tehran relate to the Bennett sisters, but they could see how, even 150 years before, European women were straining against the limitations on them imposed by their society.
Nafisi justifies reading Lolita because it, “...goes ‘against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives.”’ And then she talks about how, “Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale... But the magic comes from the power of good....” And all that sounds fine, but I wonder if there isn’t even more to it. There’s nothing particularly shocking or irregular about the relationship between the adult male Humbert Humbert and the child Lolita is a “traditional” Islamic society... except that they would have been married. By having European Christians play these parts, I suspect, the inappropriateness of the behavior would be easier to see. So rather than “saving a life,” I see this as providing “new eyes” to see what has always been present.
“More More More,” Said the Baby - Williams
Perhaps the strangest chapter yet. This chapter is equally about Lives, by Plutarch. “More More More,” Said the Baby is a children’s picture book about love and our wanting ever more of it. Schwalbe’s point here is that, as charming as that is in children, as adults the desire for ever more of everything is a character flaw. Schwalbe uses Plutarch’s coverage of Sulla as an example of someone who wanted ever more power until he suddenly decided to stop and gave up his dictatorship and retired to private life -- as Cincinnatus had done, according to Livy, but Cincinnatus had not wanted the supreme power in the first place.
Sulla is one of my favorite Roman personalities. It’s doubtful that the Republic produced a better general, and he was even loyal to both his wife and his male lover, even after said lover lost his looks. I do wonder if Schwalbe doesn’t give him a little too much credit for giving up his power and retiring to private life given that he stood again for consul, was elected, and continued to intervene in public life to maintain the peace he had established. Also, he died three years later, so it’s not unreasonable to wonder if his health wasn’t already starting to fail back in 81 BC.
I hadn’t realized that Plutarch didn’t write about Cincinnatus. I thought he had. Schwalbe describes how George Washington’s fondness for Cincinnatus lead him to stop standing for President after his second term. (This became the unwritten rule until FDR, and after FDR if became the written rule, and now we have to question if that wasn’t a mistake.) I presume Plutarch couldn’t think of a Greek to pair with Cincinnatus -- and I can’t either. Power is so often a case of riding the tiger, and everyone knows the most dangerous part of that activity is the dismount.
And since someone else has brought up Sulla, I have to mention that he is a great example of Clausewitz's belief in the importance of luck when it comes to war. Sulla’s full name is Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix and that “Felix” at the end stands for “the lucky.” He even built a temple for the Roman goddess of luck. It was only about a generation later when temples were being built to honor great Romans (or their daemons). History does show how quickly things can go to pot.
A Journey Around My Room - De Maistre
I’m trying to hurry to get to the end of the book before my club meeting and the chapters seem to be getting richer and even harder to go through quickly. This one is about travel, how to do it right and how to do it ill, but also about how travel is a metaphor for life.
We start with Lin Yutang again, who had very strong opinions on travel. He dislikes the trooping about on a schedule and he dislikes the photography. At some point in the past 30 years I stopped carrying around a camera so that I would experience the world directly rather than through the camera. Unfortunately, I think there’s a lot to be said for our being more aware of our surroundings precisely because we are taking photos. I’m now trying to get back into the habit of taking pictures. I do like the kind of travel he recommends,
P236 Lin proposed a true type of travel, the goal of which is to become “lost and unknown.” In his eyes, the true traveler “is always a vagabond, with the joys, temptations, and sense of adventure of the vagabond.” He writes, “The essence of travel is to have no duties, no fixed hours, no mail, no inquisitive neighbors, no receiving delegations, and no destination. A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.”
...the true traveler has no attachments, and therefore must have compassion for everyone. He quotes a Chinese nun: “Not to care for anybody in particular is to care for mankind in general...”
In Lin’s view, you must possess the capacity to open yourself to seeing what’s in front of and around you all the time, not just when you are on a trip... seeing beauty and grace in the most majestic mountains means nothing if you can’t see beauty and grace in “a little patch of water, a village, a bridge, a tree, a hedge, or a dog. . . .”
And this is where we finally make the transition to the book in the chapter title. The book was written in 1790 by a young French officer who was placed under house arrest for dueling. De Maistre (27 years of age) spends his 42 days of confinement touring his room and writing about it.
P241 The day finally comes when de Maistre is allowed to leave his home, but he describes that day as the one to which his true imprisonment... resumes: “The yoke of business is going to weigh down on me once again; I will no longer be able to take a single step that isn’t traced out for me by propriety and duty.”
It is only in his room, with his memories and books and his window, that he feels truly free.
I’ll admit it, this makes me think of Hans Castorp and The Magic Mountain. While not confined to his room (most of the time) he is set free from “propriety and duty” and given time to take stock and appreciate his little corner of the world.
There’s also a hint of the reclusive world of some monks and Desert Fathers. Isn’t the life of a pillar saint or some walled up hermit an extreme version of de Maistre’s room?
Back to travel for a moment, what strikes me about the form of travel Yutang recommends is that it requires that you be either poor or rich. Poor enough to not mind if you can’t find a room or you go hungry on occasion, or rich enough that you can always buy what you need. Also, you can’t have any responsibilities. I would love to travel this way myself, but I tend to just stay home and try to enjoy the world about me in a new way -- the staycation. When I travel I love traveling but when I’m home I don’t really see the point of it. Probably the best reason to travel is to provide shocks to the system, to force you to notice the world around you because it is so different from what you are used to.
Death Be Not Proud - Gunther
This chapter is about prayer, which is a little odd since neither the author of this book, the subject of that book, or this reader is religious in this sense -- though Schwalbe does seem to have a fondness for prayers.
This is a book I won’t be reading, as good as it sounds, as I’ve read way too many books chronicling ill-fated “battles” with cancer. This chapter, and the book mentioned, both end with an agnostic prayer written by the young subject. It’s not a bad prayer. At first I was thinking it didn’t have anything to do with me, as I’m more on the atheist end of that spectrum, but then again, my atheist-with-pantheistic-leanings pushes me more toward the agnostic side. If I view prayer as more of a way of self-centering (as opposed to lobbying the deity) then this is not a bad prayer for doing that. Viewed in that way, it calls on us to appreciate what is and to play our part as best we can.
What the Living Do - Howe
There’s a great story here Schwalbe heard from a woman at one of his readings. Her husband had died, leaving behind a pile of partly read books. She was finishing them for him, reading books (nonfiction, which she normally didn’t read) he couldn’t finish to both be closer to him and to finish something he had started.
The title book is a collection of poetry by a woman whose younger brother had died of AIDS. The poem he includes is worth repeating,
My Dead Friends
I have begun,
When I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question
To ask my dead friends for their opinion
And the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling -- whatever leads
To joy, they always answer,
To more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were --
It’s green in there, a green vase,
And I ask Billy if I should answer the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,
Whatever he says I’ll do.
I take her meaning here, even though it goes against my own bias. I set my course for smooth sailing, to avoid storms. I seek the uneventful passage, or even better, let’s just stay comfortably here in port. But from the perspective of people who have seen their lives cut short, their chances for new adventures eliminated, what could be better than an excitingly stormy passage... what do you have to lose? Asks the people with nothing left to lose.
A Final Word
It should come as no surprise that Schwalbe returns to Lin Yutang,
P256 The Importance of Living is about the need to slow down and enjoy life. And about the importance of books and reading. But it is ultimately an impassioned plea for reason and humanity. Lin Yutang urged us to appreciate poetry and literature not just as good things in and of themselves, but also because they encourage a kind of humanized thinking that he felt was essential for the survival of our race. Lin believed that hope for our world resides in people’s adopting what he called the Spirit of Reasonableness, which he saw in the best of the Chinese traditions: “No one can be perfect; he can only aim at being a likable, reasonable human being.”
Writing this book in 1937, Lin was keenly aware of the dangers on the horizon in both Europe and Asia, and he was eager to make one thing particularly clear. “Communism and Fascism are both products of the same mind,” he warned in The Importance of Living. “Characteristic of both regimes and ideologies are, firstly, the sheer belief in force and power. . . .”
I wish I could believe, as Schwalbe does, that Yutang’s writings offer a path to reasonableness, but I don’t. Here’s something that appeared in my Facebook stream today:
The problem is that many people are not comfortable with reason. They are not being seduced by clever manipulators, the cleverness of leaders is in guessing where the people want to go. What would be helpful would be a book of advice on persuading people to be not quite so hateful, or a book of advice on surviving a reign of unreason. The diversion of books could be very helpful with the later.
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