The Progress of Other Gods' Pilgrims

My children have for a few years now been slowly working through a best of list of literature for children, broken down by age group. My eldest is in a group of books now that has what I found to be a curious choice: John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Not to say the book is inappropriate for children. Its not, it is, in fact, probably throughout history one of the books children read, depending on the time period and nation. Historical New England comes to mind. Its just that... well, its an allegory. We don't really read allegory anymore - or when we do, its been swallowed almost entirely by the self-help genre. 

Which is, after all, not so strange a thing. Pilgrim's Progress is, more or less, a self-help book, the old Protestant equivalent of, say, The Alchemist, a book that is meant to tell a story mostly only in order to keep you from being bored long enough that it can tell you what to think. I say that, and it sounds like I hate Pilgrim's Progress - I don't. I thought it was more ridiculous when I was younger. I don't know. 

The difference, I suppose, is very simple - Bunyan is so terribly, terribly earnest. I don't agree with him, no, but I think when a soul is that earnestly seeking something, its able to tell you something very interesting about the thing sought. The seeker, in some ways, knows the object of his search must better than the possessor, and honestly, I don't think Bunyan thought of himself as a possessor, yet (though he was a Calvinist, so predestination would come into play, I suppose, but I could write a whole other post on how fatalistic philosophies and individual freedom are strange but copiously affectionate bedfellows sometimes). 

I am the opposite of Bunyan in so many ways. There's the obvious ways, of course: Bunyan is a devoted Protestant, I'm not entirely sure there is a god, or if there is, if he's a loving one that I want to identify with. Bunyan was a social conservative, I tend to connect morals with the individual and their inner life, rather than society and the outer life. Bunyan, for all his idiosyncrasies, was a literary genius (and no, I'm not the only one who thinks so). And, he wore a mustache. 

But more than this, there is a fundamental difference: Bunyan was a preacher. I don't lean on the religious aspect of this, I think Lenin was a preacher in much the same way, or Malcolm X, as much as Martin Luther King. He is a declaimer. I'm not. I cannot imagine being sure of anything emotional/spiritual/political/social, so much that I could teach it. Discussing it is difficult enough, sometimes, and I'm frequently disgusted with myself enough after that enterprise. And, Christian, the Pilgrim that is Progressing in the book, is a preacher, too. So, following him is a maddening flip-flop, for my morally soft brain. 

I learned the trick of reading it, though - to stop wondering if I agree. This is a double-edged trick, and hard to wield sometimes - you're obliged to ignore both those moments when you agree and when you disagree. But for me, at least, taking approval and disapproval out of the question (as much as possible), leaves bare something purer than dogma and direction - it leaves the simple story of a man pursuing an idea to exclusion.  It hardly matters why he believes what he does, or even what he believes. The thing is simpler than that - it is a little testimony that says "Yes, a soul can follow its ideals, completely. A soul can be faithful to truth itself." With that testimony, there is, for me from hundreds of years later, a little question though: "Is that virtue?" 

Again, I mean to separate this question from the particularities of Christian. It DOES NOT MATTER what ideal he is following. In fact, just the other night my wife and I were talking about Lord Byron, and how, contrary to the idea we front of a man who was dissipate and  amoral, Lord Byron had an ideal, and whether or not you agree with it or not,  he followed it, in earnest, with greater faith and steadiness, in many ways, than some of the best of Christians followed theirs. Call the book "The Radical Romantics Progress." Enjorlas, in Victor Hugo's 'Les Miserables' is another great example - a man capable of being precisely one thing, all the time. And, if you want to read a stirring, inspiring, horrifying statement of the muddled observation I'm making here, read Enjorlas and his journey from the back room of a cafe to the top of a barricade to a pool of his own blood - and then think of other men's blood he pooled into his own to get there. And realize that he meant it, every word. 

And there's the problem with being in earnest (and perhaps the fault in Pilgrim's Progress) - can you live life entirely honestly, earnestly, directly, surely, and not hurt anyone else in the process? Christian, in the progress leaves his wife and children - and the scene in which he weeps over their not listening to him and following him on the path to heaven is, for me, one of the most heartbreaking in the book. The best of earnest men, I think, are destined to fall, because at some point, they realize that their desire for purity and direction will involve someone else. Truth is a harsh lover, and at some point, always makes you choose between her and the other ones you love.

People make such an effort, of course - that's the root of monasticism, I think, in many ways. What is a monastery but a group of people who have promised each other to be glad to all suffer for the same end? Or a hermit. When I hear about the desert fathers of early Christianity, wandering into the sands of Egypt to take up abode in some broken hulk of of stone, and there to live alone, calling God, that fear of impurity is I think, as much a fear of burning up the impurity, as having it extinguish the fire. 

That's the thing about heroic journeys, though - they always end up alone. We tend to focus on the heroes, and so we feel the great stoic pain of solitude in that - Odysseus struggling against the sea alone, Harry Potter walking through the woods alone. And think of that, in Harry Potter, how hard she had to work to convince us, the audience, that yes, yes, Harry is virtuous to walk alone into the wood. Why must she spend so long in the book showing us that its the only alternative? Why must it be utterly clear that it is a choice between killing his friends or killing himself? Because we want it to be NOBLE that he's going to leave aching, bleeding holes in the supporting cast we've come to love: Ginny, Ron, Hermione, everyone. They are the ones who will suffer if he dies. It takes courage to die, but it is, at least a choice. Suffering you did not choose is, somehow, worse, at least to me. And the dying has an end. The aching doesn't. 

At one point I thought, int his vein, how wonderful it would be to be a Buddhist. The perfect Buddhist is the one who relinquishes everything - the Buddha himself stayed on earth rather than immediately ascending to Nirvana because he felt he had to fulfill duty first, to teach what he had learned. So in some sense, his whole life is no more than a long noble search for the freedom to cease being. But, at some level, I have to ask - is that, really, noble? Buddhism itself, to my understanding has grappled with this idea. The tradition of the Boddhisatva in some strains, is that these are souls who have achieved Buddhahood, but had such compassion for the world, that they choose to be the last living souls to enter Nirvana, to continue returning and returning and returning to the world to hope the rest of us on. There is an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question there, though, that has an interesting ramification: if ten Boddhisatvas have all promised to be the last to enter Nirvana, which of them enters first when they are all that is left? In a sense, perhaps the implication here is that there will never be the opportunity for the question to be answered - that is, the answer hardly matters, because the question will never be asked. The world is composed of suffering, so there will always be more men suffering, awaiting help to free themselves from it. 

This is the sadness and beauty of the Quixotic hero - the Pilgrim travels because there is a destination, the Boddhisatva travels because there is a road, and if the road is a circle, there is always another place to step forward into. Hopeless infinity is the only hope so grand that it can consume a noble life beyond the limits of human imagination. The only quests, in some sense, worth pursuing, are those in which you're sure to fail. 

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Ulysses (10:30, St. Patrick's Day)

It's late in the evening of St. Patrick's. What a strange holiday it is, here in the states! I was at work today, and heard a tongue in cheek conversation in which someone stated that they don't celebrate St. Patrick's Day, because they don't drink, and someone else who followed up by saying they didn't understand why we celebrated St. Patrick's anyway - why not just have a 'British People Day'? (a slight shudder chased my spine for the Irish of the world on that one) I don't know why we do - or I do know why we STARTED to, but let's start there.

The celebration of St. Patrick's Day in America is actually very old, in some ways - all the way to George Washington, in fact. In 1780, on St. Patrick's, Washington gave all his troops a holiday, in solidarity with the Irish, who struggled for freedom in much the same way, even against the same imperial power (it probably helped, as well, that a good sized contingent of his troops were of Irish extraction). The holiday pops up here and there in American history afterwards. It doesn't become the great spectacle we know today until the age of immigration - the St Patrick's Parade in New York, for instnace, began before the First World War, and even then was traceable back to the celebrations of the regiments of Irish cannon fodder that fought in the Union army during the Civil War (for a chilling image of that particular aspect of Irish history, I recommend some of the scenes from 'Gangs of New York', a film full of strange and disturbing visuals). It's interesting, because the holiday didn't become a national holiday in Ireland itself until 1905. In part, of course, this was simply because Ireland was still a colony of Great Britain (colony, protectorate, whatever, call it what you will), and displays of Irish patriotism were frankly frowned upon. 

In part I think there is more to it than that - the Irish in New York were an interesting sort of immigrant, in many ways like, say, a Palestinian today. The Irish were refugees, nominal citizens of a nation that treated them as either amusing comics or terrifying beasts - Catholics in Ireland were, until the 19th century, not even allowed to learn to read and write. So where, say, a German immigrant had chosen to leave his nation behind, the Irish immigrants to America were still looking for their country - not for America, but for Ireland. Sinn Fein and other Irish revolutionary bodies had considerable financial backing from American Irish, and much of their leadership ended up New York for extended periods of time. So the Irish, in many ways, found Ireland wherever they went - and there thick cultural cohesivity showed this. 

In good and bad ways. The reputation for St. Patrick's now as a drunken revel with no religious or cultural significance whatsoever is, in most of the states, not entirely undeserved. The only Irish products most Americans come into contact with, now, or Bushmills, Baileys, Jamesons, and Guinness. The only Irish stories they know are vague, highly distorted versions of the Leprachaun - a story which, in Ireland, was never even terribly significant really. This is completely acceptable in most of our minds, and jokes about Irish culture as being essentially concerned with alcohol are common and well-accepted - amongst those of Irish extraction even. Guinness puts up signs every year saying 'On March 17th, everyone is Irish', and that's not because they're encouraging people to read Lady Gregory. 

I finished James Joyce's Ulysses today. Joyce himself was not shy about pointing about the more irritating edges of Irish culture. Drinking, in fact, is not a small part of Ulysses, and in Finnegan's Wake, Whisky is elevated to it's celtic etymological roots: usquebaugh, literally the 'water of life. Joyce, in fact, exiled himself from Ireland in large part because of his frustration with it's culture, and said many rather unpleasant things about Ireland over the years. At the same time, I mentioned in my review of Finnegan's Wake last year, I had a friend at Pearson who was born in Dublin, and she read Ulysses because it felt so much like home. In a sense, this is the forgotten context of St. Patrick's, and perhaps, in some little ways, it's redeeming message (I wonder, sometimes, if this is how Mardi Gras feels for New Orleansers) - that yes, there is a lot of faults in a culture, any culture, but that's because it's human - to make a holiday that only celebrates an idealized, sanitized vision of identity is just as pointless. You can do either on St. Patricks, you can elegize Ireland, or treat it as an excuse to get drunk and tell dirty limericks. Either will get you a host of sympathizers. And Ireland - or what we call Ireland, which is much more, and much less, than a country, is both of these things.

I am somewhat infamous for being dubious of holidays. But, I suppose, more than anything, this is what I learned from Joyce this time around - that Ulysses, like the real, three dimensional mundanity of every-day life that it seeks to enshrine, is messy. It is neither one thing or the other, it doesn't come to any conclusions. Real life doesn't have tidy stories and pretty characters - it has people. Which is so wonderful, and so terrible all at the same time. Real history does not have heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys. The sublime is ridiculous, but it's still sacred. The ribald is fun in the most wonderful, needful way, but it's also self-indulgetnt and ugly. Holidays are the same way - we mean them to celebrate these beautiful, grand ideas, btu they don't - in spite of us, they celebrate us exactly as we are. In some ways, that's very sad, and ugly. But in some ways - why celebrate angels that don't exist? Human beings are messy, but they're so, so beautiful.

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Human Dignity in Joyce's Ulysses

More than one description of Joyce - and particularly the one I'm reading by Declan Kiberd - focus on Ulysses as a glorification of the human spirit, a sort of paean to real people in parallel to the paeans to idealized men that were to be found in books like, well, The Odyssey. (One could have some strong words of difference about whether Odysseus is an idealized man, of course. Perhaps that's the point). Stephen is a normal man attempting to be an idealized man, and in many way, Bloom is simply a normal man trying to be what he is.

This sort of story is a difficult one to grapple on to, of course. IT is, in many ways, the biggest sacrilege in the book - our culture, through a thousand ways, builds itself around the idea that all of us should be struggling to move up from our current position. This is the definition of the American dream, and while slightly different historically, was certainly at least the stuff of fairy tales. Great souls rise above their circumstances, the words say, and become great through sheer force of will. I don't necessarily disagree with this, I do sometimes wonder at the teaching that is inextricably attached as a verso - that those who do not struggle towards our, frankly narrow, definition greatness have failed, wasted their lives. Normalcy is mediocrity - or in an odd,  twist of fate, even sub-normalcy. People who are not 'smart' are 'stupid'. People who are not 'driven' are 'lazy'.

I don't think this is the disease, per se, I think, rather, that it is a symptom. I don't know that Bloom (or necessarily even Joyce?) would agree, but reading sections four through six, where Bloom is introduced, the power he has in my eyes is that he is never struggling for primacy. The person who need not struggle for greatness is a pretty common trope, but usually this is on, say, the Mr. Miyagi vein of heroism : one has attained such mastery that struggle is no longer necessary (I will interject here as a side note that I remain dubious that this state exists in real life). Bloom, on the other hand, simply seems apart from greatness - he sees people struggling for it, just as he sees, say religion, but in both cases, he simply watches from afar. I find this, in my own brain, inconceivable, but I so WISH I didn't.

In a sense, though, this is also the troubling aspect of Joyce - Bloom is, decidedly, not great. He is not an ideal (I think Kiberd sometimes wishes to make him one, but I think Joyce is fairly realistic about his heroes limitations). This is both the horrifying and fascinating side of Joyce. Modern stories I have read frequently have these nasty, grey-moraled heroes, but one is supposed to either bitterly accept that this is the best we can get, or roll our eyes at the awful people that sit behind the masks we worship, or simply to laugh at the vanity of human pursuit of greatness. With Joyce, there is no irony, really, in his Bloom. Bloom is, simply, who he is. And so when Joyce makes him the hero of the novel, and plots his life as a parallel of the Odyssey, it's not to mock the Odyssey, and it's not to mock Bloom. Bloom is the bona fide hero. Which puts me, as a reader in an uncomfortable position. I want to, at some level, force Bloom to start 'acting heroic', I want to have a reason to admire him. And then, I'm reminded, this is the HARD work, this is the work of actually looking to discover what basic human dignity is. It's very easy to find dignity in the classic hero (though sometimes easy to find flaws as well). I would argue that it is often even fairly easy to find dignity in the extremes that are held up as the laboratories of dignity: poverty has a rich, powerful dignity much like heroism, even crime can have dignity. Homeless people in dire suffering or starving masses in third world countries, we have learned as a society, by and large, to look for dignity here (though not necessarily to do anyhting about it, sadly, or to go looking for it).  But normal, bourgeois humanity, the lifeblood of most of our day to day interactions, we have been taught is low, callous, cultureless, personalityless. A middle class advertising man in early 19th century Dublin had the same totemic soullessness in some ways that a suburban soccer mom has in a hip, trendy book today. And we ARE in love with talking about the soullessness of 'normal' people - American Beauty, the middle section of The Hours, Pleasantville, even kid's movies like Over the Hedge make no bones about making this broad generalization, for instance.

But, that's just it - this is the sort of person Bloom is, on the outside (and in some ways, inside) level - a completely unromantic hero, undistinguished, unspecial, unimportant. If he were alive today, he'd work a vaguely roled job in HR or Marketing, maybe lower middle management in some soulless corporation (see how easy it is to say that?) and live in a little McHouse in the burbs of a mid-sized city, sometimes going in to see a show, but mostly just (somewhat awkwardly) talking to his fellows about the latest action flick, ogling girls at the office, and driving his SUV home at the end of the day. But, none of this makes him less human (even though I do love movies like the middle section of the Hours, and think there's a lesson there, too). None of this makes him less deserving of human dignity - and he does not have to break that mold to merit dignity. The protagonist in 'Fight Club' is a human being, and deserves our respect as such -- but so did his boss, or the spineless coworkers he left behind (Fight Club, in some ways (and I think in some ways purposefully) actually has a great deal to say about this demonization of the mundane).

And this is what's troubling. This is what, at some level, is the deeper part of the complaints about having to read a scene where he's sitting down for his morning poop, or worrying about the soap that he left in his hip pocket that's jabbing into him, while simultaneously not wanting to be seen moving it. Yes, these things are ridiculous. They're also part of what being human is. But it's harder than one would expect to keep that in mind while reading. At least for me - hey, I was raised on Victor Hugo, remember?

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Proteus Chapter of Ulysses

Before I get into this post, oh my friends, I must apologize ahead of time. I'm currently reading three different books: Ulysses, Ulysses Annotated (a book of annotations on the text of Ulysses), and Ulysses and Us (a book discussing why and how Ulysses is intended for the common man, instead of intellectual highbrows) I blame this on my friends who have organized Jousting With Joyce this month. But I'm having a LOT of fun. I read the book a few years ago, and I will not link to the review - it was so awful that it's the only review I've ever actually gone back and deleted content from. But I'm understanding it much better the second time. So, the short of it is: for the next month and a half, much of this channel will be devoted to Ulysses. Which I know makes some of us cringe in terror or hatred. So, I'm sorry.

But that's just the way it is.

So, before we began the book, Jill over at Fizzy Thoughts mentioned something interesting about chapter 3 of Ulysses, a chapter which Joyce titled, after the fact, Proteus - namely that this is the chapter that most people turn away at and never finish the book. And I will confess now, the first time I read Ulysses, this chapter took me, I kid you not, a month and a half. For fifteen pages. And I didn't understand a thing in it.

Well, that's not really true. I did understand something: I understood that the chapter was in stream of consciousness, and that the consciousness being streamed was confusing and... eh... just a little obnoxious. Pretentious, snotty, and a little full of itself.  Declan Kiberd in Ulysses and Us admits this up front:

Many readers drop Ulysses at this point, finding themselves unable to keep up with Stephen's remorseless and obscure pedantry...

Yeah, that pretty much gives my initial feeling of the chapter. It's what he says afterwards that really captures how I felt reading it the second time:

...but the truth is that Joyce is laughing at the pitiful pretentiousness of the youth he once was. Nobody could understand all that Stephen says or thinks. Nobody could take all of his ideas with utter seriousness. 

No, seriously. The closing words of the chapter, dramatic and stirring:

Behind. Perhaps there is someone. He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

The 'behind, perhaps there is someone'? It's because Stephen just picked his nose and wiped it on a rock because he doesn't have a handkerchief, and he's afraid someone may have caught him at it.  So, he looks over his shoulder, to see the great silent ship, deep and powerful symbol of the child Telemachus waiting for a father to come home who he has never met, silent and forboding, is all because he didn't want someone to catch him picking his nose.

This may seem facetious, or pretentious in and of itself, to write some grand sweeping complex chapter that is essentially about a stupid college kid wandering along the beach and killing time for an hour. Maybe it is, but I don't think so. It would have been much easier to just write a snarky satire of a chapter, talking about how stupid college kids are. The power of James Joyce is that he doesn't do this - instead he simply records what it feels like to be that person. There are parts of the mind that just find this bewildering, or course, let me address that first. In some sense, like Kiberd said, it is meant to be confusing. Part of Stephen's problem is his education. If you took this chapter apart, probably half of it would be a quote, an allusion, a lampoon, or a paraphrase of the words of someone else, and Joyce argues (in a different way in the previous chapter) that education, sometimes, aims for htis goal: to make people who are good at spouting at the correct bit of information at the correct time. It's a problem that is different now from Joyce's time, where rote learning was a huge measure of academic prowess, but it is a bigger problem now, perhaps, in our time when education's purpose has been narrowed to the point where it's largely presented as nothing more than a way to ensure you get a good job someday. Even so, though, part of the problem is, I would argue, intrinsic to this sort of free association thought. Some of the things in Stephen's mind are not academic esoterica: there's lyrics to pub ditties and popular songs, there's references to Hamlet in plenty, which isn't exactly obscure, there's references to the CAtholic Mass, which most of the people around Stephen would have been intimately familiar with. The problem is, anytime you enter someone else's mind, you will find that there are places foreign to you. This is perhaps amplified by the difference in time and space between Stephen and us, and by the differences in our respective educations. But at the same time I think it's partly simply the uncrossable chasm between two souls, the fact that we can peek inside someone else's head, but never truly climb in.

Apart from the bewildering nature of Stephen's head, though, there is the pretentiousness of it. And make no mistake, it is a chapter, stuffed to the gills, with pretentious. It is very easy to dislike Stephen, here. But at the same time, I don't think that is Joyce's point - in fact, I think it says a lot about us as readers, willing to seek out clues about whether to like or dislike a person so easily. Every person is a person at some level. Stephen is  young, he makes mistakes, he can be annoying, but he's a person, and in the midst of all his wandering, there are some real, powerful, and beautiful emotions. The problem is that he does not how to pick them out of the mire. He doesn't realize that as much of the beauty comes in the 'low' as the 'high' parts of his thought, that his work scribbling a poem is far less powerful and human than his yearning for someone to love him as he thinks about the shopgirl he saw the day before, or the brooding loneliness he feels as he watches the dog running along the beach. Stephen is, simply, who he is. One may dislike him, but to hate him, that takes a special force. It is easy for me to hate some characters, because there are characters. I would present that authors construct them so that they can be hated or loved, as often as not. But Stephen is not a character in the same sense - to hate him is to hate a human - a ficitonal one, yes, but we do not have the luxury in Ulysses of having simlpy a hateable side of a person before us. If we are to love or hate anyone in Ulysses, we must hate them the way we would hate another person - which reflects and teaches the reader something about how it is that they really DO love and hate, teaches them where the line lies for them.

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A Sense of Place in Lagerlof and Cather

Alright, slight raving side note: The Story of Gosta Berling, by Selma Lagerlof is one of the most beautiful novels I've read in a very long time. I could do a month of posts on this book. I may do one or two more, and make you all so sick of this book I'll ruin your opportunity to discover the beauty of Selma Lagerlof's beautiful vision. So, I'm trying to restrain myself here.

One of the things I loved about this novel (and there are several others) was the powerful feeling of place - I commented to a few people while reading it that it reminded me of Willa Cather's sweeping powerful Nebraska and New Mexico, and the farther I got into the book, the more I felt this - both Cather and Lagerlof leave me with a deep nostalgia for a place I've never been. Thomas Hardy has this feeling for me in his books somewhat, as well, but I don't feel his love for the place he's talking about as much as his horror at the absence of the place. Victor Hugo makes me feel this way about Paris - but in Paris, he is in love with the city, and a city is in many ways just an expression of human beings (another book that feels this way to me is Moby Dick, but with a ship instead of a city). Lagerlof and Cather make you feel in love with something much bigger than you, with the earth itself, I suppose. In Cather, they are these wild places that humans are trying to find an uncomfortable toehold in - in Lagerlof it is a country that has been settled for thousands of years, but where nature and the man-less world lives just outside the edges of day-to-day life. And in both, you see the country exhibit itself in the souls of the people who live there - but not as a sort of clumsy allegory, but rather in the way that we really that people really DO entwine themselves with their native land.

This is particularly powerful to me, because I don't HAVE a 'native soil.' I love my upbringing in this sense, I love that I could see so many places as a child, I think it was good for me. But, at the same time, I would love to truly know and love a place, to be married to the soil in the consummated way that some people are (less so in America, these days, which I think is interesting). That feeling of deep intimacy with a place makes one feel, in some ways, like a perpetual outsider.

It's strange, because the closest I can come to this feeling of deep and powerful intimacy with a place is with the internet itself (ah, yes, insert laughs here, it's okay). I've lived in the soil of the internet now for almost two decades, at some level, and for most of the time, the internet has been a deep and intimate part of my life. Like Cather knew the sweep of the blank prairie, and the way the earth grows beneath it, the way it bites back angrily at the plow, I know the ether of the web, I know the way an empty palette gnaws at a new piece of code, the way that a refugee can stare at it and hunger for their native land, but also dream deep and strong of what they can make of their new home. The way that Lagerlof knows the wolves, the winter wind, the water that comes in the spring floods, I know the angry rises and falls of this pseudo-landscape, the way worlds will form and dissolve with the impartial fury of a decimating blizzard. I know the way that this land can take a person and gnaw them until it leaps one day to devour them whole, and the way that it can cradle up someone lost and yield a little hole for them to make into a home. I've seen it in people I love, in stories that already feel so strange and elemental to be like folklore, I've seen it in myself - like a land, the internet proves it's veracity by being a place where one can be all the selves one is, at the same time.

The strangeness of this realization was that it feels, to me, more like Cather than Hugo - the internet feels like a land, not like a city. IT's inhabitants feel like they are connected to the earth, not cooped into metropolitan finality. It's the sort of place where I can imagine stories living of their own power, instead of simply as currents in a river of human existence (This is not to say that a city isn't just as beautiful, in it's own way). Sadly, I can't WRITE like Lagerlof or like Cather, but I've wondered how long it is until the Cather of the internet is born, telling the story not of the heroes of the land, but of the land itself, the writer who will see this ether plucked from ourselves almost unwilling as a character instead of a setting.

The power of Lagerlof is that she loves her land so much that she loves it's sins and horrors. Her Gods and Heroes are of the ancient cast, the kind that are equal measures of good and evil - how do you tell that story in a world where opinion is, in some sense, the root of identity?

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Hippocrates, and How Science is Born

(Short Summary for those who do not know: Hippocrates is widely considered a forefather of medicine. His collected writings include the Hippocratic Oath, variations of which are still administered by pretty much every medical institution on earth, but also include a broad array of observations and advice on a wide variety of topics of health. Hippocrates was usually thought of as a sort of wise, practical country doctor, who did not get cauhgt in esoterics, but who nonetheless laid the groundwork for medicine and medical theory)

I entered reading Hippocrates fully expecting a laugh. This medicine is OLD. This is before there was germ theory, before there was an understanding of the circulation of blood, before the advent of sanitization, and still in the depths of the four humors theory of physical health, sort of one step above magic.

And in many ways the book did not let me down. A few choice exerts:

• "A woman does not become ambidextrous" (but men do!)
• "If you wish to ascertain if a woman be with child, give her hydromel (mead) to drink when she is going to sleep, and has not taken supper, and if she be seized with tormina (acute pain) in the belly, she is with child, but otherwise, she is not pregnant"
• "A woman with child, if it be a male, has a good color, but if a female, she has a bad color."
• "[Delirium and tumors] more frequently occur on odd than on even days"

I'm guessing here, but I'm not sure these statements were rigorously tested before being accepted as fact. Other things were just horrifying - though possibly effective treatments given the constraints of the times. And the long descriptions of the various colors, textures, smells, consistencies, etc of urine, bile, feces, sweat, and mucus were, if certainly indicative of a highly observant mind, not the most exciting way to spend one's evening.

But, I DID learn things from Hippocrates, this is what really surprised me. In the first case, he says a number of extremely keen-minded things, things we forgot often today:

1. Many physicians seem to me to be in the same plights as bad pilots, who, if they commit mistakes while conducting the ship in a calm do not expose themselves, but when a storm and violent hurrican overtake them, they then, from their ignorance and mistakes, are discovered to be what they are, by all men, namely, in losing their ship. 
2. The vulgar, indeed, do not recognize the difference between [charlatans] and their common attendants, and are rather disposted commend extraordinary remedies
3. The [medical] art consists in three things: the disease, the patient, and the physician. The physician is the servant of nature, and the patient must combat the disease along with the physician.
4. I look upon it as being a great part of the art to be able to judge properly of that which has been written (good advice, in fact, for those reading Hippocrates...)

My favorite quote, though, and the one that sums up how I felt about the book is this: 

I say we ought not to reject the ancient medicine as if it were not and had not been properly foudned because it did attain accuracy in all things, but rather... to receive it and admire its discoveries, made from a state of great ignorance, and as having been well and properly made.

What was really awe-inspiring about Hippocrates was to realize how like a scientist he really DID try to be with so very little. Hippocrates throughout the book is basically making up the scientific method out of his head (making mistakes, of course along the way), when it was quite easy to make a living in his field by simply making stuff up, lying, and making excuses for your failures (he even acknowledges this last to be the case, and offers a very compelling argument for both education and for the institution of laws against malpractice - what doctor is doing THAT today?). Some of his observations, from the vantage point of a society that has many, many giants upon whose shoulders we stand, are really very clever: He notices, for instance, that eunuchs do not tend to go bald, or that sneezing can cure hiccups (I had never noticed it, but it really is true!), or that obesity tends to reduce life-span. He goes into great detail not only about how one ought to relocate almost any dislocated joint in the body, but also why his method will work better than others of the time. And all of this he points out with only Aristotles vague, ethereal theory of humors and elements, and a history of glorified magicians to back his practice up.

One thing this DID point out to me that I thoguht interesting is that we (quite rightly) do not use Hippocrates as a medical reference anymore. He's simply out of date. He wouldn't be upset about this (and the mistake of much of the middle ages in fact was to assume that these proto writers were writing inspired things that must be followed to the letter, that wisdom is immutable). However, we still think of, for instance, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle as being immutably, eternally valuable, and not simply as a building block. Reading Hippocrates, one is naturally led to see his mistakes. But when we are taught ancient philosophers or literary writers, we are taught to gloss over or contextualize their out-of-date parts and respect the underlying wisdom of what they were saying - the same, but more extreme, could be applied to scripture and it's study in modern religion. I'm still mulling over what this difference means - is 'progress' shaped differently in fields that are not science? OR is it simply that we want to believe people then knew something we don't know now? I don't know.

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'Magical Disadvantaged'

So, I finished reading Dune recently, and I want to emphasize that this is not a review of Dune. I love Dune, it's a fascinating, complex book, full of strange considerations of the nature of human history, the relationship between state and faith, and the mixture of banality and magic that goes into making someone a hero-messiah. So there.

But, reading it now, as I'm older, some of the issues in it arise (this happened when I reread Lord of the Rings now that I'm older, too), and one of these issues is something that I've heard talk of elsewhere, when someone referred in a movie review (maybe it was was Roger Ebert?) to the 'Magic Negro'. The Magic Negro or the Wise Old Negro is the stereotypical old black man that appears in many movies, films, etc, and whose main purpose is to say wise and itnelligent things, despite being poor, undeducated, usually a janitor or something. Well Dune doesn't have any African Americans in it (there's no America anymore, either, mind you, though some of the characters I suppose may very well be black). But there are magical women, and magical (future approximates of) arabs, and magical arab women, and etc, etc, etc. Dune has a taste for the isn't-it-awesomeness of the exotic, and when the exotic are rather close parallels to actual human groups, this can get tiresome and feel a bit stereotypical. Like the 'Magical Negro' thing.

But, if I were only venting about this, I wouldn't write a post - I still love this book, remember, and I do think he lays out an interesting case (though one I don't agree with) for the magicalness of these groups. But more than this, beause it bothered me, I wanted to think about why these characters get written.

The reason this interests me, in fact, is because there is a part of me that feels bad for hating the magical minority writers - because, in some part of me, I know the feeling. It's a natural reaction, and in some ways even a positive one. When you have a disadvantaged group, members of the privileged group are taught largely to take the inferiority and disadvanatage of these groups for granted. So, when one does the work of stepping out of one's shell to examine the relationship with the disadvantaged group more honesttly, there is a natural tendency to become fascinated. I've done this, for instance, with the Romany - growing up, the tacit message is that Romany aren't, like, REAL people, they're just gypsies, characters in films that do spooky things and make for good villains. So, at one point, a part of me said 'you know, this seems to convenient, that there would be a group that acts like this' (of course this oversimplifies the process of facing one's inbron biases, but I hope you won't think my parents just taught me to be a raging bigot), and so the easiest way to love a group is to study it. So I did some reading, and of course, the Roma are FASCINATING as a people, historically, culturally, all of that.

At this point, one is tempted to lionize and make up stories about the group - not because one is trying to put them in a 'wise old negro' box, but simply because one has just learned how fascinating a group is - one has learned as it were the wisdom that one MIGHT have from living the life of a poor african american, or a Roma, or a woman, or whatever the disadvantaged group. And so one assumes this sort of sageness on everyone.

A good example of this would be Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn. It's HORRIBLY racist, with it's crude word-drawings of a 'noble savage' African prince, with a fancy sounding exotic name, and with all the amazing and inhumanly extrmee characteristics of his nobility. But. It's also one of the least racist books of it's time, or at any rate, the most anti-racist. To an extent, in the attempt to learn about a new culture, mistakes were made. A perfect knowledge (in Behn's case, even a functional knowledge) of a group that is traditionally separate from you involves forming a narrative of that people, and forming a single narrative of an entire people by definition gives a fairly skewed idea of what individuals in that race might look like. This is why, for instance, people discussing the Old TEstament can say things like 'You know, the Jews in Sinai under Moses could just be so stupid and selfish'. Consciously, of course, one knows that these Jews were individuals, and that there was variety in these individuals. But it's the story of a race, and so the individual humans just become drops in a sea - and looking at individuals as drops in a sea makes one predisposed to forget their humanity in one way or the other.

So, yes, it's very frustrating to look at these magic negro, or magic woman, or magic arab, or magic gypsy narratives - but it is a sign that people VERY IMPERFECTLY are TRYING to grapple with the idea that there is something beautiful in the group their culture is ignoring or opressing, something is there worth preserving. PErhaps, sometimes the effort towards telling this blinds the teller. It's difficult to tell stories about a group to which one does not belong. But does that mean we should fault people for trying?

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Vindicating Rights is Messy Business

I began writing this post in my cold little academic tone, and I stopped. It would be very easy. Ms Wollstonecraft was alive a very long time ago, and some of the things she said in her book, in retrospect, feel pretty out of date, even wrong-headed. Some of them even bothered me. But, writing a post about the ways we've grown as a culture since then wouldn't have been possible for me - it would have ended up being a post about how clever I am.

And it wouldn't have done much good. There are a lot of people doing the Feminist Classics readalong, right now, and I suppose the direct analysis of what Wollstonecraft said will be done far better by someone else. And to be honest, the thing that strikes me most powerfully about Wollstonecraft has nothing directly to do with her ideas.

The thing that's most haunting to me about Mary is how ideals can betray you.

All of us are children of our time, all of us, no matter how much genius we might possess. Everything we think is, in this sense, trapped inside a time, it is impossible to say anything that is completely 'timeless.' There's no such thing. This feels like a strange thing for me to say, because I read classic literature, after all, I sit and read books that are advertised as 'timeless classics'. IT's a lie. Shakespeare, if we drop our reverence for a moment, is terrifically dated. Look at, say, how all the women  in his plays fit a short list of basic types. Look at his fawning adoration of kings and aristocracy. And as beautiful as the language is - there's a reason we don't enjoy it until we learn it - because, it's dated. Or the Odyssey: as grand and sweeping and epic as it is, to be perfectly frank, if it were published today, it wouldn't be terribly successful. I honestly don't think it would even be published, and at some level, this is because it isn't really that great for our time in some ways. IT is an artifact. Mary was, too.

And the great pain of literature and poetry is that, after all, for a lot of writers it is a sort of search for immortality. For some this is simple arrogance, they want to continue to be praised, even after they are dead. But not always. There is something innately human in a desire to find absolute truths, to find those things which can be relied on and really truly 'known'. Mythology was born this way, science was born this way, literature was born this way, most great human endeavors are part of this search for pure, incontrovertible truth.

In mathematics, perhaps, this is possible. Euclidean Geometry is as true now as it was when Euclid wrote it. Even in the less 'pure' sciences, perhaps there is some shadow of personality. I'm reading Hippocrates now, and one can feel in his writing, for all that it's largely guesswork and incorrect correspondences, at least the birth of a way of looking at health and medicine, that does continue on today, in some form. But in literature? No. There is no absolute literary truth. There is no provable conception of beauty. Philosophy has this fault, too, so does political science.

But, despite all this, more souls through history have stood and declared in defense of unprovable ideals than will ever stand in defense of Euclidean geometry. More souls have willingly died at the flag of the vague and misinterpreted than will die defending Newton's laws (this is not to attack the power and passion of science mind you). This is why we keep having Wollstonecrafts, and Shakespeares, and Virginia Woolfs, all in retrospect perhaps wrong in some ways, but nonetheless awe-inspiring in their defense sometimes of their very wrongness.

And who knows? Underneath all the veneer of wrongness (I do not think that modesty, for instance, is some great ideal of feminism that should be a measure of the success of women's liberation), there are germs that FEEL so incontrovertibly true, that you want to think there is something absolutely true to them. But, the moment you verbalize or systemize it, it will betray you.

This is what happened, after all, to Mary herself. Her husband, William Godwin, was himself a starry-eyed idealist, one of the early forerunners of the anarchist movement, which was for many years, the gold standard of wild idealism - at it's core, after all, anarchism seems to rely on the supposition that people, when left to their own devices, will do good instead of ill. And Godwin believed this, right down to the middle. So, when his wife died, he wrote a book, telling the truth about her life, because he genuinely and honestly believe his wife was the heroine of her life.

Was Godwin naive? Did he really think this book would not tarnish his wife's reputation? He had to have known. Godwin was an idealist, but he wasn't stupid. He had to have known that what he saw as a heroine, the world's standards saw as a a villainess, or even worse in the world's view, as a despicable, whorish, hysterical woman. At some level, it's difficult for me to grapple with this. His wife was dead, and he sacrificed her public memory to his own ideals. People, his reasoning went, SHOULD like her story, and to lie about it would be to betray the things he believed in. It was a quixotic joust at a windmill - only his used his wife as the lance. Quixote may be knocked off his horse in that situation, but the lance gets snapped in half.

But then, maybe that's how it should be. Mary was herself an idealist, after all, and the idealist is infamous for being willing to give up everything for the cause - everything. Even things that maybe are harder to give up than life. What would Mary think? Would she have been ashamed, if she were alive? Would she have been angry? Angry at her husband, or at the world that wouldn't accept that she acted as bravely as she could under the circumstance? She after all, acted similarly with a sister, who she encouraged to leave her husband, plunging her afterwards into horrible poverty. She was no stranger to the grand gesture.

I know this isn't the same for everyone, but this part of what I love in classic literature: seeing the grand gesture, the grand, quixotic leap towards the unreachable. Every single author falls - when you leap toward the sun, after all, the best you can hope for is that you stay in the air as long as possible. The sun will. not. catch. you. And there is something morbid and discouraging at seeing the places where these great lost souls fall to the rocks, the shapes and texture of their broken bodies. But, before they hit the ground - before that, you see the arc of the flight, the twist of the limbs, the thrust forward of the breast, as if that extra centimeter might be just enough to carry you... somewhere. And that curve, that twist, that sturggling hopelessness, there's no beauty quite like it. IT almost makes my own, tiny worthless little twists and arcs and thrusts seem, in dim reflection, perhaps to have their own traces of dignity

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Romantic Friendship in the 19th Century

I just recently finished the book "Cold Mountain", a book concerning several people in the South during the Civil War (as a side note, I found the storyline about the man kind of dull and overcooked - I am curious is me and my proclivities, or if other people felt this way?). Two of these people, Ada and Ruby, are women living in a little town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's deep into the war, at the point when almost all men are engaged in the war, and the women are, as it were, left behind doing the work they've always done, plus the work, in their case, of running a farm. Ada is a former rich girl who has no idea how to do these practical things, Ruby is a sort of societal cast-off with an amazing (and let me say, deeply intriguing) drive to work, who moves in on equal terms with Ada, to co-run the large farm Ada has ended up with on her hands and let fall into disarray. The two grow extremely close, both of them, in many ways, teaching the other how to live an adult life, in different ways. This aspect of the book I found very moving. At one point after Ada (inevitably) finds the man, who was her fiance before he went off to war, there is a moving scene, understated, and sad, where Ruby tells Ada that she doesn't need to marry the man, that they can run the farm without him. Ada tells her that she knows, but the she wants the man. And Ruby smiles quietly, and sets up for them to have a bit of time alone together.

Reading the scene was the most powerful moment in the book, because I could feel how palpably Ruby wanted things to stay just as they were, particularly because Ruby, a child born in abject poverty and forced to shift for herself all her life really has no other moment in the whole book where she lets her guard so completely down. She is, in a very valid way, a woman deeply in love, who knows that their relationship won't stay the way it is.

But, and this is what was so powerful to me, when I say in love, I don't mean romantically, not at all. She is sad things are falling apart, but I never feel like she is jealous, per se, of the man, or that she is attracted to Ada in a physical way. The relationship is what we now call 'only platonic'. I think the 'only' in this is a sad reflection of our times.

Before the latter half of the 19th century, it was actually remarkably common for people to have deep, powerful friendships with people of the same sex. It's interesting, because historians read the artifacts of these friendships now, and the assumption is, frequently, that the relationship was homosexual. Abraham Lincoln is an excellent example. Lincoln and his friend, Joshua Speed, spent years sharing a bed, and remained lifelong friends, exchanging letters that, in many ways, feel more like what we think of as love letters than anything he ever exchanged with Mary Todd. Emily Dickinson's life-long devotion to her sister-in-law is another example, or Shakespeare's many poems written to an unknown man or men.

This is not to denigrate or disprove the many historians who suggest that some of these relationships were sublimated homosexual relationships, or even covers for actual physical relationships. I imagine this happened at the time. At the same time, I think that some of them WEREN'T romantic relationships. And I think that's wonderful (as a sidenote, I would suggest that some of the poems written about women by men, and vice-versa, may similarly have been the admiration between extremely close friends).

Such a relationship cannot exist easily anymore, of course. A man hugging a man now is a joke, a byword, something funny in movies because it's uncomfortable. IT's something we mock because it's frightening. I think this is tragic. Friendship has become something that must retain a certain distance and boundary. In some ways, this is perhaps healthy, and a sign of the increasing equality of the genders. A hundred years ago, men's and women's worlds were so seperate that they practically spoke different languages, and it must have been very difficult to communicate across that chasm on some levels. Perhaps in some ways, the romantic friendship was for some people a way of feeling parts of closeness and intimacy that society did not account for between men and women. At the same time, it leads one to wonder - we have to an extent fetishized sexual-romantic love to the point where we presume it is the power more binding than any other - after all, can you imagine a romcom about two people who loved each other deeply but without a hint of sex between them? And I think that in a sense this makes it difficult even within marriages - because the assumption in a marriage is that the romantic aspect of the relationship (in our newer conception of the word romantic) is the penultimate expression of closeness, and I would suggest that this is an illusion that does nto hold up long in many relationships. The friendship aspect of marriage - that one should marry their best friend, and foster that friendship throughout - becomes the sort of adorable side note, the humdrum, uninteresting part of the relationship (again, how many romcoms involve people who don't really like each other falling in love in spite of that?). To some extent one wonders if perhaps it would be easier to marry by choosing someone that they are close friends with, whatever the gender or appearance, and just letting sex follow on from that (I'm a bit biased since I fell in love over letters that had nothing to do with sex...). I don't know. I don't mean to make little of romantic, erotic love. It is what it is. But I think we've forgotten that we can care, deeply and powerfully and madly and beautifully, even foolishly sometimes, or jealously, or desperately, for someone without it being a call of hormones.

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Fear and a Handful of Dust

I made a snide comment earlier today, about Victor Hugo, how certain elements exist in all his books - this was in mind, because I've just finished listening to my third of his novels: Toilers of the Sea, a very Hugo-ish novel about a man from one of the Channel Islands struggling against the elements. I loved the novel to death, another consistent element of Victor Hugo novels, that I neglected to mention this morning. It was wonderful, I listened to the end while grocery shopping, and knew just where it would end up pretty early on, but just about started crying walking the aisles of the grocery store.

So, if I enjoyed it so much, why did I feel the urge to make a snide comment?

In specific, here is what I said:

"How to recognize a Victor Hugo novel:

1) Accidental love triangle
2) Heroic Gesture
3) Suicide near the end
4) Tangents
5) French People"

I do not intend to make of this comment more than it was. I think it sounded not too mean-spirited, a sort of gentle ribbing between friends. So, this post will not be one of my confessionals, I promise. But the question itself is interesting to me - why, if I really enjoyed the novel, did I feel the need to be snarky about it? I didn't say anything nice about it, which is what one would expect in a perfect world where I loved the novel. Why?

Well, I will tell you, after much thinking - it's a kind of self-defense. I don't think this is particularly uncommon. To love a thing is to give power to it, and power to others who know of your love. Love is a distilled and keened kind of vulnerability. And we live in a world, honestly, where it's necessary to keep yourself safe. Say all you will about how it should be from a practical standpoing, but having had people laugh over things I thought were sacred and beautiful, and it's a painful thing. I've done the laughing too, I know how easy - and socially acceptable - it is to twist each other's knives. 

Fear of other people (or of myself in the midst of other people, more precisely), though, is a theme I probably talk abotu too much already. What's more interesting is that part of this fear, this vulnerability is a vulnerability to the book itself. 

People spend a great deal of time talking about how a book can change your life for the better, how books can salve wounds, or staunch sorrows, or teach lessons. But people seldom mention the ways a book can stab you, mock you, or break your heart. In order to let a book change you, you HAVE to unshield yourself. 

I have experienced this myself, in the best and worst of books. I read a book earlier this year that nudged me into a good few months of depression. I read a Jeffrey Archer book when I was about 12 that has a scene that has gnawed painfully at me ever since. Nor is it simply a matter of 'this book really made me sad'. In my more lucid moments, I can look at some of the books that I love, and see what they've made of me - and how it is sometimes a bad thing. Victor Hugo is a good example, one that probably goes back to why I avoided being honest with myself in my tweet.

I read Les Mis a long, long time ago, and loved it. Something in the way it echoed and spoke felt very familiar and honest to me. The problem is, of course, Hugo is a wild-eyed romantic idealist, and the echoes of his hopes for a lot of things - for love, for revolution, for the success of virtue over the world - do not necessarily reflect the world. One of the reasons I never dated in high school (one reason, of many), for instance, is because all of my favorite love stories (Valjean and Fantine, Quasimodo and Esmeralda, to an extent Romney Leigh and Aurora Leigh) were these wild, chaste, hopeless loves, loves that cannot be, and that are beautiful because they exist precisely BECAUSE they cannot be. Love, in real life, doesn't work that way. When I did finally get married, this desire for the ideal, for a love affair that told a story, instead of a love affair that was real and present, gnawed at me, made me feel as if I was failing to live up to my ideals, made me do wildly, stupidly foolish things as a result. I don't BLAME this on Victor Hugo (and his various friends). To write an ideal is beautiful and valuable, and I would be horrified if I could forget I'd ever read them. To an extent, this part of Hugo is so imbued into me, now, that I can't even realistically tell you 'this is where I stop and Hugo starts' - I am to an extent the man that Les Miserables made me (along with many other books). But, to be the man that Les Miserables made me is as dangerous (for me and others) as it is comforting. 

Yesterday, Ms Amy put up a quote about characters on Tumblr, and I think it gnaws, in a way, at the duality of this power. The thing that caught me up most in the quote was that the book tv show, in this case, tore her in two different directions: it made her wonder if she could keep watching, and knowing she won't ever not watch. There is something horrible about a well-written character, a great and terrible part to it, because if we allow ourselves to engage entirely with a book, then we can feel for these figments of someone else's imagination as powerfully as for a real person. This is a dangerous proposition, one that produces situations that are almost, ALMOST horrifying. When I look back on my childhood, and try to think of the people I felt closest to, I felt far closer to Anne Shirley, Ozma, Galadriel, than I did to any of my real life friends. There is a little part of me that thinks of Wuthering Heights as a companion from high school who has stayed closer to me than any of my other companions of that time. And my relationship with Emily Dickinson, now, bears a sort of emotional intimacy in my mind, a sort of seriousness and intensity, that makes me feel at times as if I am waiting for a friend to come home who never will. But, you don't talk about it this way in real life, in everyday. IF you do, it's a joke, it's playing. Celebrating Emily Dickinson's birthday is a silly thing. REmembering how I felt about Galadriel is sort aww-cute-adorable in the way that we react to any story about the innocence of childhood. I see other people say things about books, and sometimes, I think I sense that same hesitance, that same sort of terrified self-ignorance, and I wonder if this is something other people feel.

The other thing Ms Amy's quote did, the thing that finally made me change the original topic I was going to write about in reaction to Toilers of the Sea (the idea of 'struggling against nature' and 'subduing nature'). In the middle of the quote, as she talks about how a character exists in the nether regions of the emotions she inspires, she (mis)quotes T.S. Eliot's most famous quote: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." The full quote is longer:

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I will not begin to pretend that I knew what Eliot 'meant' in the Wasteland. I know people spend their lives trying to understand the poem. But for me, this gnawed at me, when I first read it, and again when I saw this in the midst of Amy's quote yesterday. To me, feeling about a person is like carrying a shadow - we can never carry a shadow on purpose, because it isn't really there, but we carry one continuously nevertheless, a shadow that can loom larger and larger as the sun gets cloer and farther from the horizon, until night when the shadow melt into the omni-shadow of lightlessness, and everyone's shadows sort of mingle until the sun returns to tease our bits apart into individual self. Emotions are only safe because, at some level, like a shadow they remain attached when the sun comes up. We each carry our own, and noone else's. To love a thing we have made up ourselves, or interpolated from a book, this is different. There is nothing casting the shadow, it's like a reverse kaleidoscope, little shafts of shadow ever whirling inwards and inwards on themselves, inescpable, and ever comingling, perhaps to form our own shadows. Imbued with meaning, but completely ineffable, inseperable (this happens, eventually with people too, we create our own internal shadows of them). But that is the handful of dust - the infinitely ineffable, gathered together to stare at, to see the two simultaneous horrors, that that which we thought was nothing, was escapable, is in fact a thing, a thing that comes about and can be held in the hand, and msut be reckoned, and at the same time, that all the significances of the world, all the things we feel matter, are just as much nothing as this nothing. Shadows falling, overlapping, combing and shifting, passing through each other, affecting and reflecting (or the reverse of reflecting), but still at some level, atomic, able to touch and combine only in the darkest, shortest moments. This simultaneous isolation into individuality, and knowledge that one's self is simply an absence, the reverse shadow of all the things that have made it, is the struggle that religions have been born over, that philosophers have tried to rationalize, that humans conquer nations and throw themselves off bridges for. And narrative is as close as we can get to it, which is it's combination, in a way of horror and power and beauty all at once. 

People always quote Nietzsche when he said that if you stare at the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back. Then why do men stare at the abyss so long? Maybe it's that the abyss is the only thing that can truly stare back.

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Thoughts on Heroism From the Odyssey

With Ms Trish's recently completed readalong (which I did a horrible job of contributing to, sorry Trish), I have read the Odyssey three times now. I've read three different translations (my favorite, though I know this is geeky, is the old, inaccurate poetic one by Alexander Pope). I've been told the story in a number of forms outside of this, I've even read Ulysses.

And every time I read this story, my main impression of it is strengthened: that Odysseus and Telemachus are big jerks.

Let me apologize, this is in some ways my failing. I am aware of why I don't like him - it's the classic issue of a 21st century reader trying to sympathize from someone from a very different time and place. Intellectually I can understand this, but it doesn't change the fact that I really loathe the guy. He's just not very nice. At all. Ever.

Looking at WHY I dislike him so much, however, was kind of illuminating to me, so since I want to at least show that I MEANT to be a good participant in the readlong, I will try to put a few of these thoughts down.

Of course, at one level, it's very simple to explain why I dislike Odysseus. He's a misogynistic, violent, seemingly unloving man, dishonest on a whim, unabashed about taking advantage of others, and cruel to even the slightest failing of others (killing the maids of the house because they had sex with teh suitors puts the final nail in for me). But then, of course, I'm left to step back, and ask myself: why was a man like this considered heroic? And why do I hate him so much, when I can like other heroes from later in history that are obnoxious in their own ways? Why, in short, does Odysseus, whether I like him or not, not feel like a hero, when clearly he is meant to?

The trick, for me, in looking closely is that Odysseus's heroism is almost entirely selfish. Throughout the book, his entire purpose is for himself - he wants to get home, and get his life back. HE wants to be back with his wife, but only after he's tested her loyalty. He wants to meet his son, but only if he's worthy of him. He wants to reward those loyal to him, and punish those who were not. In Odysseus's character there is not. one. single. shred. of altruism. No ideals, no grand purpose, or meaningful direction. He just wants to get home, get his stuff back (his wife being more or less just slightly noisier stuff from his point of view, by the way), and get back to being the king.

At some level, this is honest. After all, at some level someone like, say, Joan of Arc to take a somewhat more contemporary mythic hero, is much more selfish. Sure, she goes out with a purpose - to save France and glorify God - but it's not really out of the goodness of her heart. The religious martyr can never do anything truly selfless, because every good thing becomes an investment in some future heaven. Joan's suffering, in some sense, doesn't matter to her, because she knows that when she dies, if she remains faithful, god will pluck her up and reward her for her goodness.

In some sense, then, the closest character to this modern martyr-hero model in the Odyssey would be, say, Eumaeus, the faithful swineherd who is a slave to Odysseus, and who could have made his life easier by being craven with the suitors, but who is loyal to his 'god', believing that when his master returns (or when he dies and the Gods see what kind of slave he was), he will be rewarded.

Not all modern heroes are martyrs, of course. Not all are even saints, to be honest - one of the more popular heroes of the last few years would be Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean. And he's the latest in a long series of rogue heroes - Han Solo is another great example. This woudl seem to be much closer to the old Odysseus model. Sparrow is not a paragon of virtue - on the contrary, his entire motivation is simply to get his ship back, to be captain again, etc. But here too there are differences, two of them really - one the writer juxtaposes the rogue character against someone truly wicked (Captain Barbossa, say, or the Galactic Empire and Darth Vader), making the rogue the lesser of two evils. Who is the greater evil in the Odyssey? The suitors? There's some argument to be made for this, but not to the same extent, particularly because of the second reason: rogue heroes are always underdogs. If they aren't, they cease to be heroes. Third, the sins of an underdog must be presented as, more or less, venial. Sparrow was a pirate, yes, but notice you never see him kill anyone except for Barbossa, you never see him rob anyone who can't manifestly afford it, etc. Of course, a moment's thought will tell us - thi sis a pirate. Of course in the normal everyday line of his business, he's going to rob a ship, which will require the use of martial force, and the indiscriminate robbery of the cargo no matter who it belongs to. But if he did these things on screen, his desire for a ship would cease to be easy to empathize with. Finally, rogues are pretty much universally comic characters, usually even a bit clumsy and clownish. In a serious picture, we'd engage the thinking part of our brain, the part that makes judgements.

Then of course there is the unbelievably competent hero - the action hero for instance. Take, Gibbs, from Amanda's favorite show, NCIS. Taciturn, endlessly loyal, impossibly talented, always wins. This is more the fantasy type - the man designed to be somenoe we yearn for, yearn to be or yearn to be with (Lara Croft, for instance, might be a female example). At surface level, I would say these are unlike Odysseus as well - again, they are always devoted to something - they are patriots, or protectors, or altruists, etc.

But in a sense, this is the closest equivalent we have to Odysseus, the man who is washed ashore after a shipwreck, and nonetheless can outplay the best people in the land at any sport, who can slip in and kill all the suitors almost singlehandedly, who could outwit the entire city of Troy. And this sort of points out the most interesting fact to me - that the main difference is simply one of cultural values. We, as a culture, value patriotism, and protecting the honor of or our country. The Greeks, at least in the evidence of the Odyssey AND the Iliad, fought more for the honor of the individual. There's some overlap in tribe and family loyalties, but even there, these things are mostly shown as simply extensions of the individual - Odysseus protects Penelope because her honor is his honor. When a friend dies in the Odyssey, it is sad because Odysseus has lost something useful or pleasing to him. To an extent, when a friend dies in NCIS, it is Gibbs' duty to pay back the affront, rather than something he does to protect his honor.

This points not to some civilizing effect of progress, I think, but rather simply shows that there are certain things in our current heroes that are equally ephemeral - heroes from a hundred years ago, for instance, often feel dated to us now, so will ours in a hundred years or so. So the hero who is a model of a 'perfect man' will appear less than perfect with time. And I would venture to say, that's a good thing. Gibbs, at a base moral level, isn't a morally superior hero really, and patriotism isn't really more productive, in the long term (or less selfish) than selfish defense of personal honor - after all, we could not fight wars without patriots, on BOTH sides of the conflict.

But then, of course patriotism has it's purposes, and is not an unalloyed evil. Patriotism and Nationalism, in many ways, were the birthing mothers of republicanism and democracy in the western world - they give a natural scope to a people's ambitions. Patriotism, additionally, does sometimes impel people to truly selfless acts in the defense and for the greater good of a group. The problem in the heroic formula of patriotism (or any other unshakeable loyalty) is in it's absolutism. A Gibbs would never, no matter what, betray his country. Just as an Abraham would never, no matter what, betray his god. In both cases, this produces an impetus in the unhealthy mind, towards extremism, in ways that it isn't difficult to find tragic examples of.

The personal honor of Odysseus, then, is very similar after all. Personal honor is not an unabashedly bad thing. A healthy respect for one's own individual welfare and reputation is, after all, at some level the basis of lawful civil society - there is never sufficient punishment available to deter crime, crime must be deterred because committing it has a social cost that is higher than it's physical benefits. Enlightened self-interest is a building block of civilization. Taken too far, though, it becomes the selfishness and mean-spirited hate of Odysseus.

The question, to me, then becomes what is the value of heroes? IS there forms of heroism that are valuable throughout generations? Or is heroism simply a structure we design to impel people to act in socially useful ways? What do you guys think? And with the age of nationalism and patriotism slowly in the decline, I think (a debatable point, I understand), what will be the next definition of hero, and will it be any better?

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The Problem With Sex Scenes

CONTENT WARNING: Discusses sex and the erotic, and mentions rape, peripherally.

I've recently read several books with very vivid sex scenes: Summit Avenue, which is by the way, a BEAUTIFUL book, and Memoirs of a Beatnik, which quite possibly is the most sex-soaked book I've ever read in my life (No, I've never read the Marquis de Sade, and Sacher-Masoch did a lot more TALKING about sex then actually having it, in what little I read). This has me thinking about the sex scene as an art form - I don't read a lot of modern lit, so this is probably simply because my normal books don't HAVE a lot of explicit sex in them (though I have often thought it'd be really interesting to see how, say, Charlotte Bronte or Elizabeth Barrett Browning would write a sex scene). As such, the things I say here are probably kind of naive and obvious. I apologize.

To summarize my feelings, it is interesting to me that, when one hears the words 'good sex scene', one assumes that this means the scene referenced must be erotic. I don't know, I guess that sounds silly. But let me say it a different way: If I say the words 'good wedding scene', that could be something solemn, something funny, something sad even. We accept that 'wedding' is a very complex topic, that it is a canvas to express something larger, rather than simply to express the idea of the ideal wedding. The title 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' is intriguing, quite simply, because one expects that if there are four of them, that each will be wildly different in emotional tenor. 'Four Sex Scenes and a Funeral' has a different effect (and what a movie that would be...).

I think this, in part, has to do with the relative youngness of the respectable literary sex scene. I know that is an arguable statement, but I would submit that while sex has been written about explicitly likely since the dawn of writing, it has not been always, particularly in the western world, accepted as a part of the palette of the general audience storyteller. If Wuthering Heights were written now, it would be more explicit, I would venture to say, and if most books today were written a hundred years ago, they would be less. Sex Scenes written before the modern era, in fact, seem to revel in their prurience. Even in 1969 when Memoirs of a Beatnik was written, the very explicit sex scenes feel defiant, and rebellious, the author thumbs her nose at the literary establishment every time she says describes a man's penis. Of course, at times now, this can seem a little tiresome, a little bit like the author is being self-indulgent even, but this is the lens of time in large part: a woman writing an explicit description of losing her virginity or having sex with other girls at college in 1969 was a truly rebellious act. And so di Prima quite frankly tries to make the scenes as erotic as possible, to grab the reader and say 'yes, sex is, in fact awesome, and it's awesome whether or not you are a nice nuclear family doing it quietly in your two twin beds pushed together, it's awesome in a hovel of a garrett in New York, or in a field in Connecticut, it's awesome when it's happy and it's awesome when it's sad.' The statement 'sex is kinda awesome' is no longer an entirely controversial one (though there is conversation to be had there) - one can imagine it on a t-shirt, in fact. Sex feels nice, we have, as a culture, come to terms and accepted that.

But, then, I think to an extent, this is still what we've been trained to expect of a sex scene. I speak only anecdotally, here, and I do not know if this is universally applicable, but I would suggest that most children's first emotional exposure to sex (a clinical, academic exposure perhaps preceding it, if they are taught the birds and bees lesson), is usually a prurient one: it's sneaking a book off your parent's shelf, or making out with your significant other and having it go too far, or hearing a dirty joke, or seeing a pornographic movie or picture. Sex is something that we have taught our children must be ignored or sniggered over. So, when those children grow up and become the target market for a movie, a novel, whatever, when they see a sex scene coming, they expect it to titillate and excite. And so, to a certain extent, I think this is how sex scenes end up being written. There is a tendency to describe bodies, instead of minds, sensations instead of emotions, there is a tendency to fantasize (in one direction or another, not always positive), a tendency to glamourize.

And this is not to say that a truly erotic sex scene is not a powerful and worthy thing. Sexual longing and release are very powerful, real parts of the human experience, and at least somewhat close to universal ones. But, at the same time, I think that we discourage the exploration of other parts of what sex is to us, more specifically even, what consensual sex is. A teenager masturbating can be sexually powerful for them, or it can be sort of embarrasingly funny, and these two ideas are expressed pretty widely in films, for instance, but it can also be a lot of other things, solemn and self-searching, angry, self-absorbed, deluded. Masturbation can be very poignantly lonely, or it can be very poignantly comforting. A sex scene between two consenting adults can be very sexy or very awkward, it can also be very upsetting without ever being a rape or a power game, or it can be very exhausting, or very chummy and friendly, or it can be very horrifying, or introspective, or distracted, or sad, or triumphant, or disappointing, or any number of other things. I have had more scenes in my life that fit the outliers (positive and negative), personally, than fit the standard story of no-strings erotic or hilarious. Sex's resonance is not simply that it gives you something snigger over, and it's not just that it feels nice.

I understand that there are authors, directors, screenwriters, actors, etc that go to express this (the song 'First Orgasm' by Amanda Palmer is an interesting example), and I also don't want to suggest that the world just needs more sex scenes - I don't mean to suggest that sex is the ONLY reservoir of emotional resonance. Thank god, it isn't, or we couldn't ever be friends without nudity ensuing. And I think we are much better at, for instance, exploring the intricacies of the buildup to sex, the long courting period (I know Amanda hated it, but I found Fingersmith to be an excellent example of this, or the above-mentioned Summit Avenue, for a wonderfully sentimentalist take on it). I think the responsibility lies on us, as readers, honestly, to make a dialogue about sex scenes that goes past joking or discussing the erotic (both of these being fine in their place, but we need to do MORE than that, you know?). I've had haunting, powerful conversations with people about other scenes in books, but sex scenes, we shy away from - or we say, simply, there was a 'really great sex scene', which the reader, generally, interprets to mean 'it was very erotic.' Of course, this is difficult, because I know that there are people who, with very good reason DON'T feel comfortable discussing a sex scene. But, we overcome that in other places - warnings about spoilers come to mind, or warning at the beginning of the review that we're discussing rape, so that we don't traumatize someone who has been a victim in the past. But, you know, I think it would be possible to have a really fascinating, enlightening conversation about, again, say, the sex scene in Fingersmith, or those in the film Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive, or the sexual scenes in Tender Morsels (and not just the rape ones, either).

Anyway, just a thought. Perhaps I'm just naive.

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Responsible Escapism in Literature

One of the frustrating parts of being a reader is (as with a lot of parts of life) dealing with snobbery. This is a danger that takes a special and easily recognizable form when you read a lot of old books. There is the temptation to segregate the world into two spheres: those things which are worthy of notice, and those things which are not.

Of course, this leads to a number of answerless arguments: what is the purpose of literature? How do you recognize good literature? What makes literature a classic, as opposed to just a fun read? These questions are unanswerable, in part, because they're irrelevant. Literature, for most people, is like any form of art - it is worth experiencing if it makes us a better person. This can be in a little way (cheering up a bad day, for instance) or in a monumental way (changing one's outlook on life), but nonetheless, that's what literature is for. If Twilight improves you as a person, it's a good book, for you. If the Bible does nothing for you, it's a bad book for you (or, you're just not ready for it. On both ends of the spectrum, books change over time).

This isn't to preclude all arguments over whether literature is 'good'. If a book is good for two people, and out and out damaging for two billion people, then it's important for us to talk about that. If a book cheers up some people, but also subtly teaches misogny or racism, then there's a reason we have conversations and argue about it. But in the end, these conversations can't be inspired by exclusivity and a search for a canon. They have to, simply, be a kindness we do each other, helping each other avoid books that hurt us, and find books that make us better people. Anything that distracts us from that goal is damaging, in the end, to our search for happiness.

One of these damaging fallacies is the subtle snobbery against books that are 'escapist'. I hesitate even to write the book. My friends who are fans of 'genre' (another subtle slur word) literature probably growl and get their hackles up just hearing the word. Fantasy, mysteries, historical romances, these sorts of books, says the conventional wisdom, are books that have some mild value as simple entertainment, but they're 'just escapism' - they don't have any intrinsic worth, except as a way to wind down and escape. They are the sitcoms of books, says this wisdom.

Examine this for a moment, though: it rests on the assumption that 'escape' is 'just for fun'. That the only value in becoming someone, something, or somewhere else is that it lets one ignore one's problems for a bit. And, in my personal opinion, no assumption could be more wrong.

'Escape' (already a loaded, and probably inappropriate word) is one of the most ancient and beautiful traditions of creative endeavor. Think of it - escape is the ability to put one's mind somewhere else. 'Escape' is, the root of all our ideas of divinity. It is the schoolmaster of empathy and selflessness. It's one of the most natural forms of play and self-education. It's a powerful form of introspection, and used by psychologists and sociologists every day.  Putting one's self in someone else's place (real or imaginary) is at once playful, solemn, sacred, and benevolent, if done with the right spirit. (If you would like me to further justify any of these points, let me know - the essay was already getting a bit long).

But, nonetheless, we think of escape as the realm of children's literature. Something that we need when we are young, but that we cease to need when we age. But then, at the same time, we wonder why children are so much more openminded, so much quicker to learn and grow, so much more self-assured and powerfully vulnerable than grownups are. 'Mere' escapism is a vital part of our growth throughout our lives, not something that simply helps us figure out how to get to adulthood.

This week, at the GENIUS suggestion of my friend Nymeth, I read 'Emma', a Manga by Kaoru Mori about a Victorian maid and a rich young gentleman who fall in love. It was the most wonderful escape I've had in a very long time, and one that has, unmistakably, made me a better person for having read it. The story was amazingly, powerfully immersive, rich with detail, and with the ineffable sense of it being a truly different world, instead of simply a modern story set in dresses and gaslights.

And, from a 'literary' perspective, I can make my arguments. The artist/author is a careful student of symbolism and human nature, tiny subconscious clues suggesting depths to the individual characters that would have taken a book of Dickensian prose to suggest otherwise. The art in this (and this is from someone who doesn't always like the Manga art style) was beautiful, sweeping and echoing across the pages. This is the sort of book that a Bronte would write in different circumstances, and as someone who thinks of the Bronte as more akin to sisters and friends than favorite authors, that's the most sincere praise I can offer.

But to an extent, this misses the point - or more (because these elements are not ones I want to say aren't beautiful), it presumes that there is the important elements of the story, and then there's the ones that are just there to make it easy to read. Emma is very much an escapist book, and part of the appeal of the book for me was that I really, really wanted to be someone else for a little while. OF course, this could be a bad thing. This could mean I simply 'veg out' and read something useless and just pretend my problems don't exist for a while. Escapist reading (like any reading) can be a drug, and a very dangerous one.

But like many of the most beautiful of escapist books, Emma is both an honest and an ennobling experience, one that, instead of tricking you with a sense of false betterness, simply lets you stretch into a place you cannot normally be, to feel it's freedoms, and it's constraints, to let you play quietly with the pieces of you that resonate in the work, the pieces that otherwise atrophy, so that when they're needed they're too tired to stand. To, like the Greeks with their myths, stretch and figure the shards of the divine, by reflecting them off of the selves we choose to be, instead of simply the one life we live simply because of circumstance. That's what 'escapism' should be - the refreshing rites we play at naively as children, and that we practice with a whimsical solemn knowledge when we're grown.

(Image: Princess Hyacinth, by Alphonse Mucha. Incidentally, Mucha, one of my favorite artists, was a 'low artist' himself - painting everything from cigarette ads to theatre posters to advert calendars)

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In Defense of Happiness

Having been generally grouchy lately (special apologies to Ms Nymeth, Ms Debi, and Amanda on that one...) I have noticed myself falling at times into an old trap - glamorising misery. It's a classic trick, as old as Greek Tragedy (and older), the tendency to believe that sorrow is greater than joy, that misery is a more real and powerful feeling than ecstasy.

Heck with that!

Happiness can be meaningful - I feel silly even having to SAY that. Happiness has it's gradations and variations, it's intensities and mysteries, it's secrets and ceremonies, just like sorrow. And sometimes, I think it's hard (especially for snotty nosed snob jerks like me) to remember that. So, here's a quick list of five books that are filled with happy, and pregnant with beauty and meaning, all at the same time:

1) Silas Marner - There are those who call this book saccharine, and it has been imitated so many times it's easy to read past. But Silas Marner has a gentle joy that suffuses it, even through a drug addled mother dying, a burglary, and an angsty secret. The book is beautiful because it accepts the sorrows of the world, accepts that there's no God waving his happy stick and making them all better, and nonetheless, in the end, shows how beautiful and joyous life really is. No book tells the healing and sanctifying power of love quite like Silas Marner.

2) Better Angel - I just read this book recently. It was written in 1931, and tells a very frank tale of what it was like to be a homosexual in the 20's. I honestly read this book fully expecting it to be a downer, and character after character was introduced that I fully expected to end up lettign me down. But Better Angel is filled with a passion and honest affection for romantic love that lets the author redeem men with sincerity and feeling. The scene in the book where the protagonist tells his best female friend (who's in love with him) that he's gay was one of the most bittersweet, but frankly love-infused moments of reading I've experienced in a long time.

3) The Arrival - Ms Nymeth just reviewed this recently, but in case you missed it, The Arrival is a graphic novel with no words, that tells a fantastical tale about emigration and immigration. The world Tan builds is a pitch perfect mixture of terrifying and exciting exoticism, where everything you meet has an equal chance of being filled with danger or filled with compassion and hope. And in the middle of the world is human beings who, through their mistakes, love each other, care for each other, take care of each other, in spite of the instinct for self-preservation. And by the end, you see some of the terrifying newness of the beginning transform almost magically into symbols of hope and joy. This is the most joyful book I read last year, I think.

4) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Another coming of age story, and ironically another story of immigrant life, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a book that loves everyone. CArrying all the stock characters and situations of the worst of tragedies: drunken father, crushing poverty, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, childhood in the shadow of hopelessness - this book manages, by sheer force of will, to refuse to pity itself for even the shortest of seconds. And in the process, you learn what it is to love characters, even the ones you would normally hate, unconditionally and completely.

5) Emily Dickinson - When I told Amanda the books I was thinking of putting on the list, I mentioned Emily Dickinson and she looked at me funny. Yes, Dickinson wrote about Death. But she also wrote some of the happiest, most soothing and gently courageous poems in the history of mankind. She also had a wicked, winking sense of humor, and a cheerful unvarnished affection for beautiful things. If you've only read the ones they give you in school, try Emily again - it's where I turn when I need to cheer up.

So! I feel better! Do you have any favorite books that show how powerful joy can be? Feel free to leave them in the comments - or make your own list if you like. It's so easy to create this false dichotomy between Happy Books and Important Books. But, to be blind to joy in the world is just as crippling as to be blind to sorrow - and just as unfair and productive of injustice to those around you, really.

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Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Having just read this book for the readathon last year and reviewed it here (though looking back it was an awful review, re-reviewing it seems kind of silly. Lord knows I had little enough original to offer in the first place - to do it TWICE? Not so much. I don't want to talk about Orlando as itself then, I would like to dicuss an interesting trend I noticed in the reviews of it.

Orlando, unlike the other two Woolf novels I've read, is funny - or to be more British about it, witty. Woolf's writing here is at time laugh out loud funny, frequently delivered with a quirking sneer you can feel stretching across her lips. The novel, after the stormy seas of To the Lighthouse, and the tidal wave of Mrs Dalloway, feels more like a fresh spanking wind over a playful sea. If you sail the seas of the other books, this book feels more like you roll up your pant legs and wade in it, or wait till noone is looking and skinny dip in it. Ms Frances over at Nonsuch Books talked about the issue behind a witty book in literary circles:

In college, fellow Woolf lovers would mock me a bit for saying that Orlando was my favorite Woolf novel. So many see it as the throw-away novel, something to pass the time in between her more serious works of literature.

I read this a few times this morning in one form or another - Woolf herself said this book was sort of her playtime after writing so many dark, heavy, carefully poetic novels.

But, as I mentioned I my previous review, I felt this novel very strongly.

Now part of this is for personal reasons not relevant to a discussion of the book, but that's not ALL part of it - Orlando, more than TTL or Mrs D made me feel like I knew something about Virginia Woolf. And I think this is inextricably linked to it's wittiness. Wittiness has a particular power that we as 'guardians of high culture' often forget - I realized this the other day, as well, while reading Plato's 'Apology', throughout which Socrates keeps his tongue firmly in his cheek. Gulliver's Travels is another example, as is Catch-22. Shakespeare was a master of this.

Of course, there is humor that is meaningless, and there's humor that is repellently arrogant. These things exist (just like there's drama that is voyeuristic and drama that is overflowing with it's own self-importance). There is two differences that make a witty work great for me: first, the author is not afraid to tell an honest story, with good and bad in it. Catch-22 is the perfect example of this. Real wit not only accepts the real world, it has real, honest human emotion in it, in all the multiple forms that human emotion takes. Secondly, true wit is not something for the author to hide behind - it makes the author more vulnerable, not less. (Honestly, and perhaps meaningfully, both of these statements could be applied to drama with very little modification).

Orlando, more than any of the other books I've read, lets me feel Virginia, rather than Mrs Woolf - tellingly, it's not that the book brings her down to my level, but rather it lifts me up to hers. It's a sort of inversion of Mrs Dalloway - in Dalloway, the author is an invisible god-like force and we drift between her various creations. In Orlando, we are invited into the kitchen of God, and chitchat with her as she cooks up a new batch. Chit-chat can be banal, sure, but it can also be honest, vulnerable, and filled with love and trust: intimate in a way that other ways of communication can't be. Mrs Dalloway, in places, serves as portraiture of Woolf - stiff and formal, carefully formed, methodically rendered. But, in Orlando, we knead bread with Woolf, hands plunged with hers into the self-same bowl.

Particularly in Modernism, the age of James Joyce who couldn't keep a straight face for 3 pages (Ok, I'm exaggerating a LITTLE), it amazes - and kind of saddens - me, how easy it is to dismiss wit and playfulness and humor as 'light', and 'charming.' Humor is a tool that it's easy to dismiss - but to do so shows a weakness in us as readers, not in the author, because humor can carry profound beauty.

Finally, just as a quick note - I don't think any of the reviewers I've read have been doing this, not at all - to the conrary, the reviews I've read have sparkled and danced just like the book did. Just that in several I felt just the slightest edge of defense, as if loving something funny had to be justified. I want to do my little bit to justify this myself, is all, because loving Orlando SHOULD be justified - or Catch-22, or Alice in Wonderland, or Edward Lear, or Finnegan's Wake. Anyway, off my soapbox for the day, and thanks to EVERYONE for the reviews today :).

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