148. Kafka and memory

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Candide

"Voltaire and Candide" by I.O. Wade 1959
...

p151 Candide is thus in its substance not wholly optimistic, or pessimistic, or skeptical, or cynical: it is all of these things at the same time. Since every created thing resembles its creator and the moment of its creation, it is precisely what Voltaire and his time were: optimistic, pessimistic, skeptical, and cynical, a veritable "moment de la crise" {moment of crisis}. Facts had produced ideas, it is true, but ideas had not yet produced ideals, and no one knew what to do.
...

...The world had become a paradox and Voltaire responded with a revolt.

p152 It is imperative to understand the nature of this revolt, since the whole eighteenth century and subsequent centuries have derived from it. Voltaire's response was born of both anger and despair. He was "fâché" {angry with kings}... with earthquakes... with God...

Voltaire's attitude toward Providence must be considered very carefully if we are to grasp the meaning of Candide...

If to be specific, Voltaire felt that Pope's arguments no longer "justified the ways of God to man," and Leibniz's were equally deficient, did he thing that he had better ones, or that he could find better ones elsewhere? In other words, was his quarrel with the optimists whose arguments could not justify Gods ways or with God whose way could not be rationally justified? ... It is undoubtedly true that his act was not a critique but a revolt, a titanic revolt [that's nice as it is a revolt against the Gods] brought about by a breakdown in the power of critique... he could only attack the irrationality, the ambiguity of the universe by annihilating rationally all rationality. In that respect his wit is a spiritual, not a rational, instrument for assailing the ambiguity, the clandestinity of a universe which refuses to make itself known. 

This would make him de Sade's precursor.

p153 This state of things explains why one never knows in reading Candide whether to laugh with Voltaire or at him, whether to laugh with the philosophers or at them, whether indeed to laugh with or at Providence... 

Vertigo

Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva

I assumed this was Kafka, but it's hard to find anything about him being in Italy through an online search. I did find this interesting (to anyone obsessed with The Magic Mountain) quote in Wiki,

Around 1915 Kafka received his draft notice for military service in World War I, but his employers at the insurance institute arranged for a deferment because his work was considered essential government service. Later he attempted to join the military but was prevented from doing so by medical problems associated with tuberculosis,^[54] with which he was diagnosed in 1917.^[55] In 1918 the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute put Kafka on a pension due to his illness, for which there was no cure at the time, and he spent most of the rest of his life in sanatoriums.^[5]

One can almost imagine a novel in which Hans Castorp's place at the Berghof is taken by Kafka when Hans rushes off to the war.

On the cover of my copy of this book is the following quote, "Think of W.G. Sebald as memory's Einstein." -Richard Eder, The New York Times". Yes, I'm procrastinating getting back into this book, but what can he mean by that. What would a General Theory of the Relativity of Memory be? What is "space" to "time" here? 

The Proust chapter in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, did establish the relativity of memory in that what we recall is not absolute or unchanging. Perhaps it's "time" and "memory" that combine, at least in Lehrer's view. But Sebald -- at least some of the time -- is imagining the memories of other people. 

And, to reference the chapters in that book on music and painting, what engages me about this book is that, as with Stravinsky's music or a canvas by Cezanne, I struggle to make sense of what the author is doing and it's that struggle that attracts me.


Perhaps I should have my head looked at, I now see that Part II, All'estero is the account of the author gathering the material for Part III, Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva. This is amusing as Part III is so much shorter than either Part II or Part IV. The author travels (twice) through central Europe and northern Italy to research an extremely un-dramatic episode in the life of Kafka, and then pads his tale with a much longer account of his own un-dramatic travels, and only slightly more dramatic childhood.  
 

Almost Easter so time for a resurrection of my blog

I'm going to keep this one short as the next will be quite long.

Next - 149. Candide, God, and evil

129. Travelers

Previous - 128. Well, Everything Is Well

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Vertigo

P53 ...when I am travelling I often feel as Grillparzer did on his journeys. Nothing pleases me, any more than it did him; the sights I find infinitely disappointing, one and all; and I sometimes think that I would have done far better to stay at home with my maps and timetables...

Now I'm thinking of Sebald not in the tradition of novelist but in the tradition of travel writers. He's not Bill Bryson. Bryson has referenced Paul Theroux in the past, but it's been too long since I've read Theroux to recall his style. 

Sebald curtailed his 1980 trip after he had a vaguely unsettling experience in a deserted Verona restaurant. Seven years later he is attempting to repeat and complete his trip but is transfixed by the view of Verona from the train and can't get off, and so continues on to Limone. 

(The young woman sitting next to me at this counter -- having a meeting with another woman sitting next to her -- has a magnificent mane of hair which she habitually flips back so that it hits me. I can't identify her accent.)

Bryson doesn't always end up where he intends, and sometimes changes his plans due to, for example, the birth of a grandchild. But it's hard to imagine him being chased from Europe by a thoughtless restaurant proprietor, or being so transfixed by contemplating something that he misses his stop. 

Who does Sebald remind me of? Mary Elliott from Persuasion? Marianne Dashwood (in the novel version of Sense and Sensibility)? Cousin Charlotte from Room With a View? Not sure.

P57 I hadn’t noticed before that Casanova’s confinement in Venice overlapped with the Lisbon earthquake that was so shocking to Voltaire. The account here gives no indication of why Casanova was detained, but his situation seems to me to be of more moral interest than the earthquake. 

At least twice in this volume, our narrator "sees" a historical figure during the course of his travels. He recently saw King Ludwig II of Bavaria in Venice, and near the end he sees some queen (Elizabeth, the Winter Queen) on a train on his way home to England. This is pushing the unreliable narrator idea rather far.

Candide

"Voltaire at Les Delices and at Ferney" - Gustave Lanson

p98 On the propaganda that flowed out of Voltaire's estate at Ferney ...These "little pot-pies," these portable scandal-sheets easy to read, and continuously exciting, came out of the factory at Ferney for twenty-three years; they emerged in all forms, on all subjects, in verse, in prose, dictionaries, stories, tragedies, diatribes, extracts on history, literature metaphysics, religion, the sciences politics legislation, Moses, snails, Shakespeare, and notes written by a gentleman... they became nothing more for him than a means to an end. Tragedies and verses served to hasten the spread of his ideas.

He repeated himself, he went over the same ground again and again... For he knew that ideas enter the public mind only by dint of repetition. But the seasoning must be varied, to prevent disgust; and at that art he was a past master.

He has all the qualities, with many of the faults, of the journalist...

This passage caught my eye because, just today, I commented to one of the teachers of science I follow on YouTube that nothing was more important to teaching difficult subjects (quantum mechanics, for example) than repetition. I even used a painting analogy... you need to brush or roll multiple times from a variety of angles before you can finally cover the surface. 

Also, wasn't Voltaire trying to create, hundreds of years in advance, what can be done so easily today with Twitter and social media in general? He was propagating facts "alternative" to those of the Church -- both in Rome but also in Geneva. Breitbart can be viewed as trying to undo his Enlightenment using the latest version of the very tools he mastered. 


"Gestation: Candide Assembling Itself" - Hayden Mason

Reading page 100 got me interested in the history of Portugal during Voltaire's life and I ran into the very interesting account of the life of Sebastião de Melo (Count of Oeiras after 1759.) He's certainly a mixed bag. On the one hand he seems to be almost a puppet of Voltaire, and yet also an autocrat. Now I'm curious what Voltaire had to say about him.

p100 ...He tells Elie Bertrand (another of the Genevan clergy)... that the myth of the Fall of Man... is more reasonable in human terms than the Optimism of Leibniz and Pope, which beneath the disguise of a consoling name simply removes all hope: 'if all is well, how do the Leibnizians admit of a better?'... It is the fatalistic quality of Optimism that is so cruel, for it invites man to acquiesce and therefore give up all striving for improvement... To Thieriot he makes a touching confession that he is writing about the sufferings of his fellow-men out of pure altruism, for 'I am so happy that I am ashamed of it' (D6875, 27 May {1756}).

I admit that it is something of a problem, if you believe in God, that life can smash you like a bug at any time. And not just you but entire ant hills of people, like Lisbon. But then again, from a devoutly religious position This Life if nothing special in any case. The victims of Lisbon just meet their maker a little quicker and in a large party.

In part of that paragraph I didn't quote, Mason shows that Voltaire quickly moved from Lisbon to the greater evil of war. (I was going to say that the 18th century was a good time to consider war, but then what century isn't?) So Voltaire quickly returns to the evil in man, where I think his opposition to the Optimists is on a surer footing.

p105 Pennsylvania is the model for Eldorado?!

p108 Unless Candide were virtually finished before Voltaire's visit to Schwetzingen, which appears unlikely, one must view it as written not simply in a state of ambivalent feelings about Paris and Geneva nor as a work of detached irony by a happy man but as a composition of someone who was once more plunged into despairing gloom. When he returned to Geneva he received definitive news from d'Argental that Mme. de Pompadour had declared him persona non grata at Court. Besterman rightly notes: 'it is from this moment that can be dated his spiritual severance from his fatherland'...

p109 ...Voltaire is disheartened by the decline of French prestige and influence in the world. Concern is often expressed about cultural and military affairs together... since the battle of Rossbach 'everything has been in decline in our armies, as in the fine arts in Paris'... The philosophe has long been persuaded that belles-lettre in France were degenerating and that the French were living on past credit...

...He has taken a new decision, to renounce urban life... [after buying his estates at Tournay and Ferney] 'I do not know of any situation preferable to mine'... and that he can now cultivate his garden in tranquility.... 

Finally

After over a month -- and almost a week longer than I can quite justify -- I returned to the gym today. I expect to be sore tomorrow, even though I reduced all my weights. Early on, I heard someone coughing and was happy I waited until I was completely over my illness, but then I found myself struggling with even some reduced weights and wished I had come back a bit sooner. I have my work cut out for me to get in shape by mid-April. The problem now is the weather which continues to be colder than normal (though not today) and there is still more rain forecast.

Next - 130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

123. Drifting off

Previous - 122. Venice

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TV

Here's one that suggests the most pathetic Venn diagram of all time. I'm currently re-watching Wonderfalls and season one of Eureka and I would be watching season one of Warehouse 13 except no one has managed to get it on YouTube (or I haven't found it). (Incidentally, this may mean that Alison is considered to be hotter than Myka -- a judgement I wouldn't dispute.) 

There is only one overlap of these three 'verses -- and for Warehouse 13 it doesn't happen until a later season -- but somewhere in the potential (though not actual) audience for my blog there are a few people who would know what actor these three shows share.

What's more interesting is why I'm re-watching these programs (including the one I can't access). Surprisingly, the obvious appeal of Jaye, Alison, and Myka is not the answer. (Though I can't say for sure that I would have watched these shows without them.) It seems to be some sort of comfort food thing.  

Vertigo

We've moved on to another chapter and another narrator -- this time in Austria (the Tyrol). All the narrators are similarly uncomfortable and yet avid travelers. One wonders why they go to the trouble. They are also all writers/journalists. 

There's a pleasantly dreamlike quality to this confused progression from point of view to point of view with no particular purpose in view. Rather like peeking in on someone else's dreams. For the most part, the settings overlap in featuring the Italian Po valley and then north through the Alps to Vienna. The first one might have wandered further than this, but I don't think any of the subsequent ones have. 


Well, it seems that I'm even slower on the uptake then I realized. Just now, walking home, I was pondering what it was about these narrations that appealed to me when it suddenly struck me that it was that the narrators (except for Stendhal) are all solitary travelers using public transit and often writing in public places. Aside from the neurotic problems sleeping or leaving their lodgings or leaving a particular neighborhood, these accounts could be mine. 

And why would you travel if you are constantly beset by these problems? Are they trying to escape problems that are even worse at home? Or is taking their neuroses on the road a welcome diversion from their normal lives? 

In any case, I've always thought accounts from this point of view would be too dull to find an audience, but apparently that isn't quite true. Since Stendhal, there has been no sex that I can recall and scarcely any plot. And the Stendhal chapter (not unlike Doctor Faustus) had just enough sex to give the narrator syphilis. At one point there seemed to be people following a narrator at the same time a rash of murders were taking place, but it was never clear if this was reality or in the narrator's imagination. 


Same Tyrolian chapter and there has just been a reference to a family ancestor who died at Marengo. So there's that.

In a sort of branching out of a story in which almost nothing happens, we're now getting the family history of some childhood neighbors of the narrator. Here's the bit I really like (no idea why): 

p215 ...Whether it was Babett and Bina who had the idea of opening the cafe, or whether Baptist thought that it would support his unmarried sisters, was a part of the story that nobody could recall anymore. At all events, there had been a Cafe Alpenrose, and it had continued until the deaths of Babett and Bina, although nobody had ever set foot in it...

Every week they bake a new cake and place it under glass for customers who never arrive. Every two weeks, they split the stale cake between them. In the same large house there is also a doctor's "surgery" that is almost as unattended since almost everyone in the community depends on the elderly local doctor and not the stranger doctor from Moravia.

This place makes Martha Grimes's Hotel Paradise seem thriving by comparison. Perhaps the cafe is even more like the little shops run by Emma's spinster friends with the hair chewing cat?

Why does this appeal to me when I get so bored when I'm not busy at work? Spending my days in a cafe without customers would drive me insane. Yet the idea is quite charming.

OMG! There was a sex act and a suspicious death. I need a moment...


The book wraps up... well, it ends rather abruptly after the narrator decides to leave his hometown and sets off across Europe and then England by train. The last we know of him he has nodded off while reading Samuel Pepy's diary and is dreaming Pepy's account of the Great Fire of London.

Off hand, I can't think of a stranger novel I've actually read. (And no, we never learn any more about the suspicious death.) I can't think who I would recommend this to or how I would go about recommending it. None the less, I probably will re-read it. And W.G. Sebald has certainly given me something new to think about when it comes to fiction.

Next - 124. Cultivating our garden

114. The age of Supers

Previous - 113. Books For Living

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"We hold these truths...

...to be self-evident: that all men are created equal...." The last time I quoted this I was interested in slaves and Native Americans -- the individuals who were not "self-evidently" equal at the time of the American Revolution. Now I'm interested in the "supers."

Super heroes, super stars, super models. All the individuals our culture places not below the "equal" but above. This train of thought left the station as I was riding the elliptical this morning at the gym. (The inclusion of "at the gym" there hints at my fantasy of some day having an elliptical machine in my apartment. This would be after I discover the extra room I never realized I had.)

Film and TV are currently obsessed with super heroes. The DC 'verse has Superman and Supergirl and "Metas" who are humans but with special powers -- I can't really explain "metas," because DC. The Marvel 'verse, my home, has mutants who are also humans with special powers. Then there's my other home, the Whedon 'verse.

Buffy also falls into the superhero category since she is mostly human but part demon -- as we learn late in the series. Season four of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (BtVS) is one of the weakest, but one of the few things that season I liked was when Buffy tries to team up with a secret government anti-demon force called The Initiative. They are para-military with fancy weapons and technology. But Buffy is in another league. We, the fans, know she is special just as the fans of the Harry Potter films knew he was special. Buffy thrives (to the extent that she does thrive) because of her relationships with her merely human friends, just as Harry thrives, in part, due to his mudblood friends. But "we" understand that in the end Buffy and Harry are the "special" ones. 

The Lord of the Rings, especially The Return of the King, and countless other books and popular movies, extend this superness to nobility of blood. Even Neo in The Matrix is "The One." 

Sports is all about superstars, those rare individuals who excel at some particular activity. (If only Barry Bonds had been bitten by a radioactive spider instead of doing whatever he did to "augment" his natural abilities, we wouldn't be having a debate about his belonging in the baseball Hall of Fame.) Joe Montana is still just shy of a god here because he excelled at activities, and in situations, that even other superstars struggle in. You'd think people would pull for the more average guy, but it's the thrill of seeing the exceptional person soar above the rest that draws people to these events. Mediocrity isn't that interesting to see. 

I suppose the gods were the original superheroes and you have to wonder if the same desire wasn't, at least in part, behind their creation. Inventing powers we wish we had, or at least that we would like to see.

Bringing this around to government, you could say, in favor of Napoleon, that at least he was exceptionally good at something, and so more deserving of imperium than the average Bourbon. (Though I would insist on making Berthier co-Emperor if we're going to base this on his military reputation.) Of course democracy is (or should be) more about compromise than excellence. But, then again, LBJ should have been the perfect leader -- and maybe would have been, except for the Vietnam War.

BRT

If you go to Google Earth and search on "Van Ness Avenue" you will probably still see a street with a median lined with large and small trees, but not for long. All the trees around the intersection with Sutter Street are already cut down, with more trees now destined for destruction.

Not only is this bad news for the trees -- and those of us who breath oxygen -- but this would seem to be an unfortunate time to cut the trees as I imagine birds have already built nests in some of these trees in anticipation of spring. And all of this is to make way for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lanes that I really doubt will make that much of a difference. I do hope I'm wrong about this.

Cantigo

These books are giving me surprisingly little to work with. My favorite thing so far in Candide is a quote from Voltaire in a footnote right after we learn that the Old Woman is the daughter of a Pope Urban the Tenth and a Princess, "Note the extreme discretion of the author; hitherto there has never been a pope named Urban X; he avoided attributing a bastard to a known pope. What circumspection! what an exquisite conscience!" Though Voltaire may seem to have been less discreet in the future as, after our current Urban IX clears the stage, it will be rather awkward for another cardinal to assume the name Urban. Either the current pope is Urban the Last, or the next Urban will be, or at least might be seen to be, a rake.

Vertigo p104 ...In this little booklet [Der Beredte Italiener], which had belonged to a maternal great-uncle of mine, who spent some time working as an office clerk in northern Italy toward the end of the last century, everything seemed arranged in the best of all possible ways... even the greatest of horrors were safely banished, as if to each dark side there were a redeeming counterpart, to every evil its good, to every pain its pleasure, and to every lie a measure of truth....

This is an overwhelmingly odd novel. I'm 116 pages in and have no idea what it's about. We just had what I would take to be a plot device, except that so far the course of the book has seemed more random than plotted. While staying in Limone sul Garda (not clear why) the protagonist's passport goes missing and has presumably been given to another departing German by mistake. He then goes to Milan to get a new passport from the German Consulate there. OK, but wouldn't you assume that Herr Doll would notice -- and probably quite soon -- that he also lacked his proper passport and would desire to retrieve it? Wouldn't the rational thing be to stay where you were for at least a day or so and see if your passport would return to you? That's what I would do.

Next - 115. Crossroads

113. Books For Living

Previous - 112. I immediately regret this...

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Some updates

Since I bought that special tool to tighten the chair screws at Peet's, they've tightened them all properly. So I only got to use the tool once. Either this is the usual thing that happens with me where I call about something or see a doctor right before the problem goes away on it's own or the package shows up in the mail; or my offering to tighten up their chair screws made them finally address this on their own. I'd like to think that it's the latter, but I doubt it.

On the other hand, recall the non-functioning cable car override switch? It's been weeks since I first noticed it wasn't functioning and tried to report it yet it still isn't working. I've finally noticed that this malfunction gives me more time to walk across Bush street -- the harder direction to cross at that intersection -- so I'm just going keep quiet and let the car traffic remain delayed. 

New books

Having finished Absalom, Absalom!, I ventured yet again to Green Apple Books to sell a bunch of books and to buy something new to read. Just as happened last time, I had a long list of books to find and couldn’t find most of them. They didn’t have A Tale of Genji, I’m sad to say, and their shelving system is so chaotic and poorly signed that if they had any of the non-fiction titles on my list I couldn’t locate them. (Granted, I would have been surprised if they had had The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach.)

What I did find was Candide by Voltaire and Vertigo by W.G. Sebald. I’ve started Candide and already found my next role in life. But is there still time for me to become an instructor in metaphysico-theologico-cosmoloonigology? 


And now Vertigo. Oh, my! The beginning is also about war in Europe -- though a century later -- and the protagonist (Beyle) already suffers, along with Pangloss, from our old friend syphilis. And Beyle starts his story as a youth in Napoleon’s army as it crosses the Great St. Bernard Pass for the first campaign in Italy. While nominally a dragoon, he doesn’t seem to take much part in the war and only visits Marengo fifteen months after the battle. His merely dropping a few names, like Kellermann and Marmont take me back to an almost unimaginable past -- since I’ve almost exclusively read about the 1815 campaign for so long. (Oh, the names... Berthier, Lannes, Desaix, Masséna, Murat, Victor. It's like recalling the 1st or 2nd 49er Superbowl teams back in the '80s. The first glimpse of people destined to become legends.) Was Napoleon crushed by the failure of his old Marshals to rally to him after he landed in France after Elba? Fifteen years of war! You could write an Iliad about Napoleon’s endless wars -- with the Marshals grousing in their tents; refusing, like Achilles, to put on their armor and fight. Only wondering if they would ever be able to retire home to rest in peace. 

Anyway, Destiny or which ever Hellenic Deity is the God of Books, mandates that I blog these two titles next, and together, apparently. 

The basics

Candide by Voltaire (originally by "Doctor Ralph")
The Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Edition, 1991

(Finally thought to look up the entire library of Norton Critical Editions... that could keep me busy for a lifetime or two.)


Vertigo by W.G. Sebald 

A New Directions Book, 2nd Edition, 1990

Candigo (the shipper mashup of Candide + Vertigo)

It occurs to me that our modern optimistic liberals share a good deal with Pangloss. While many wish for a world where people are not discriminated against on the basis of their various statuses, the only thing people seem to really agree on is that they themselves would rather not be discriminated for their own statuses. While many wish for a world where young women can dress as they please and drink as they please without having to worry about being molested by Bulgars, the modern Pangloss thinks we actually live in that world, all evidence to the contrary.

Schwalbe

Last night I went to a Will Schwalbe book signing on West Portal (a posh neighborhood commercial street) with a couple people from my book club. Our Meaning Of Life Book Club was inspired by his The End of Your Life Book Club, which was also our first title. His current title is Books For Living in which he talks about books that he feels he read at just the right time and that taught him important lessons.

He's an interesting writer and possibly a better public speaker. He brought up a number of points I wanted to go into more detail about, but, unfortunately, the signing was very well attended, so I couldn't really get into it with him. 

I haven't yet read this book, so all I have to go on is what he said last night. It seems to me that to do this right, you would have to first lay out the proper circumstances under which you should read the titles he's selected. Some of these are easy: After the death of someone very close to you; or When you realize that the path you are on in life isn't that satisfying. But others are more challenging. It would be interesting to describe the perfect circumstances for ones reading the books you yourself have found most important. Sometimes this would include having already read prerequisite books. Sometimes you might have to be at the right age or level of maturity. 

(And of course there is the reverse of this idea: Books you should not read at certain times -- either because of what you're dealing with or because of what you haven't yet experienced or learned. I'm now imagining "trigger warnings" on books. For Metamorphosis, "Avoid this title when your residence is experiencing an insect infestation.") 

Someone in the audience brought up the lack of books in translation on his list, which he loved since in his other life he is a publisher of books in translation -- mostly from the Far East. 

He also made what may be the most frightening comment I've ever heard, I brought up my question about the possible existence of books that are better in translation than in the original, and he said he had heard from German speakers that some English translations of German philosophy are actually better because the translator had to struggle to make sense of, and then translate, ideas that were even more puzzling in the original German. I have always assumed Kant and Heidegger and the rest must be at least a little more understandable in German. I even tried to tackle Kant in German back in the late '70s... no wonder I didn't have any luck (as if that was the real problem).

It turns out he has dreams of a type I also have, but had never heard mentioned before. The kind of dream where you suddenly discover your house has rooms (or sometimes just storage areas) that you had previously been unaware of. I love these dreams. A variation on the genre are dreams where you discover you still have things you haven't had for decades. I recall a dream where I discovered my old P-38 automatic had simple been stored in an unlikely place (since high school, I guess.) 

Troy, 4?

p72 Schliemann began his search for Troy after retiring from his business enterprises as a millionaire at age forty-five or so...

Schliemann made his money as a successful businessman, who earned one fortune selling indigo, tea, coffee, and sugar in the Crimea, and another during the California gold rush in 1851-52. It was in California that he served as a banker/middleman in Sacramento, buying gold dust from the miners and selling it to the Rothschild banking family, via its representative in San Francisco. He bought low and sold high -- and, some say, kept his thumb on the scales while doing so. He may well have left California one step ahead of the law, perhaps with as much as $2 million in profits, amid charges concerning the amount of gold dust that he was shipping....

I had no idea he had a local connection. I'm not going to go into any detail about Schliemann (since I don't really care) but I will say that the account of him here reminds me a great deal of Donald Trump -- though Schliemann may have been more deceiving than delusional. Well, maybe a few more details,

p75 Upon his return [to the Eastern Med.] from the United Sates, in September 1869, just a few months after procuring both his American citizenship and divorce through unorthodox and possibly illegal means, Schliemann married Sophia Engastromenos in Athens. He was forty-seven; she was sixteen. They had two children, whom they named Andromache and Agamemnon -- but that would come later...

Schliemann was in such a rush to get down to Troy II, which he believed to be the Troy Homer wrote about, that his workers dug through and dumped the more recent layers of Troy on the mound -- the remains of cities more recent in time -- including Troy VI and VII, which are now believed to be the actual levels of interest. He literally destroyed what he had been so desperate to find.

Next - 114. The age of Supers