What I read last month.
This month, my middle Ages-centered reading continues with a history of the early middle ages by Chris Wickham, works by Augustine, Ptolemy and Boethius, and two more sections from the Bible they commented on, plus Medieval mysteries by PC Doherty, Rousseau who wrote the other "Confessions", AJ Jacobs' attempt to live literally by the Bible, and the most entertaining by far, a 'mostly accurate' memoir by The Bloggess, Jenny Lawson. Enjoy!
WWJD: The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs
I’m not finished with my year, so I’m withholding judgment, but my rational side says that intercessory prayer today is no more effective than Abraham’s effort. I still can’t wrap my brain around the notion that God would change His mind because we ask Him to.
And yet I love these prayers. To me, they’re moral weight training. Every night I pray for others for ten minutes—a friend about to undergo a cornea operation, my great aunt whose husband just died in their swimming pool, the guy I met in a Bible study class whose head was dented in a subway accident. It’s ten minutes where it’s impossible to be self-centered. Ten minutes where I can’t think about my career, or my Amazon.com ranking, or that a blog in San francisco made snarky comments about my latest esquire article.
The Bible says not to boast, so I’m not going to say that I’ve turned into Albert Schweitzer or Angelina Jolie. But I do feel myself becoming a slightly more compassionate person. The odd thing, though, is that to be fully compassionate, I might not want to tell these people I’m praying for them. I recently read about a new study of 1,802 coronary artery bypass patients. The patients who knew they were being prayed for actually had MORE complications than those who didn’t. Perhaps they thought, “If I’m sick enough that I need people to pray for me, I must really be in bad shape.” In case that’s true, I’ll pray secretly and hope they don’t read this chapter.
A.J. Jacobs is the guy whose “Year of the Ultimate Healthy Body” I tracked last year (Drop Dead Healthy, Bookpost, September 2012). In that book, Jacobs referenced his previous “Year of the Ultimate Godly Soul” book, and since my exploration of Medieval texts has to be heavy on Christianity because that’s what they wrote about, I figured I might as well read The Year of Living Biblically now.
I’m glad I did. It’s like having a guide who, like me, is not a true believer and who is willing to point out that Biblical exhortations run the gamut from true wisdom to the ridiculous. And yet, Jacobs tries to live by them all. He lets his hair grow. He stones sinners (trying to minimize the legal consequences by only throwing pebbles at them in the park). He refuses to sit on chairs that his wife Julie has sat on during her “unclean” time of the month, and when Julie retaliates by sitting on every chair in the apartment, A.J. invests in a portable cane/seat that he carries with him. Julie becomes one of my favorite characters, perpetually rolling her eyes and objecting to the patriarchal stereotypes inherent in scripture. When Jacobs muses about Deuteronomy 25:11-12 (“When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the genitals, then you shall cut off her hand”)—why the heck would they put in a rule about THAT? Julie suggests that the author of Deuteronomy probably had that happen to him and decided to forbid it for all eternity.
It’s only partly played for laughs. As the year progresses, Jacobs strikes up a religious relationship with a shatnez tester (the guy who tests garments for mixed fibers), makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and another one to Amish country, visits an Atheists’ society and a creationist museum (again, not played for laughs). He interviews ultra-orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians, and modernized liberal/reform practitioners. And he learns a lot, shares a lot, and identifies many of the right questions to ask, some of which don’t have adequate answers and maybe never will. Very high recommendations.
A Nice Headspace to Visit...: Let’s Pretend this Never Happened, by Jenny Lawson
My friend Karen told me that when they have a fox problem in England, the man of the house just pees all around the perimeter, because there’s something in male urine that scares the shit out of foxes for some reason. It seems legit, so I tell Victor that I need him to pee in a circle around our house to protect the dog. Victor walks out of the room and locks himself in his office. I can almost hear him shaking his head through the door. In retrospect, I probably could have started with more context.
“JUST GO PEE!” I screamed desperately at Victor. “If you loved our dog Barnaby you would be peeing all OVER him right now!”
Victor looked up. “Do you ever listen to the things you say out loud?”
“Well, I try not to,” I admitted. “But in this case? I’m right. You need to go pee over the back yard. And possibly the front yard. And on the dog.”
Victor shook his head. “I’m not peeing in the yard. We don’t have a fence. That’s how you get arrested. I don’t even have that much pee.”
“YOU KNOW WHAT?” I said, my arms crossed angrily. “FINE. I’m trying to save our dog and you’re hoarding pee. PEE HOARDER.”
“I’m not HOARDING pee, Victor yelled. “I’m flushing it down the toilet. WHERE IT BELONGS.”
“You’re WASTING it!”
“You’re supposed to waste it. THAT’S WHY IT’S CALLED WASTE.”
“Great”, I answered. “I’m sure Barnaby will be very comforted knowing that he died of fox disease because of semantics.
I called my mom to ask whether Daddy could drive a few hours to come pee around my house for protection, but she said he couldn’t, because it’s a really busy season for taxidermy. But she said if I “really needed it” she could probably mail me some. I considered it but then said no, because first of all it’s a package I don’t ever want to sign for, and second because I already can predict that Victor will be all pissed off (no pun intended) that I asked my father for help protecting us from foxen, and then Victor will be all “I AM THE ALPHA MALE IN THIS HOUSE AND NO ONE IS PEEING ON IT BUT ME.” Then the next time my dad comes over they’ll end up in a pissing contest. Except Victor is too competitive and he’d probably push it too far and would be like, “Oh yeah? Forget pee, I’ll throw up everywhere!” and I’d be all, “Your overachievement is gross.” We never had these problems when we lived in the suburbs.
Jenny Lawson, who calls herself “The Bloggess” online, has one of The Redhead’s favorite sites. Unfortunately, she chose to introduce me to The Bloggess by showing me the viral entry in which Jenny wants to buy towels, and her husband Victor tells her they don’t need no stinking towels, and don’t you dare get any more towels, and so The Bloggess goes and brings home a giant metal chicken instead, and she names it Beyonce and says, “See, Victor? Not towels! Are you happy now, you sonuvabitch?”, and she puts Beyonce outside facing into his study window to taunt him. And I was all, “Omigod, that poor husband!”, and The Redhead was all, “No, it’s funny, really”, and I was all“Poor, poor Victor” and was traumatized for life and started looking over my shoulder for giant metal chickens the way Dinsdale Pirahna feared for giant hedgehogs, and now every time The Redhead goes shopping I drive myself crazy trying to make all-inclusive lists of things NOT to get, and it’s taking a toll on our marriage. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You know what? Let me start over.
I love The Redhead, and so when she asked me to read and review Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, I got on the library reserve list and waited several months until a copy was available, and then I read most of it out loud to her. Until they got to the giant chicken story, and I started twitching uncontrollably and The Redhead put me out of my misery by taking the book away and finishing it herself while I yelled “NO! No giant metal chickens! Never!” And I’m totally starting over again.
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is Jenny Lawson’s “mostly true memoir” about growing up crazy in rural Texas. Her parents are crazy. Her home town is crazy. The Bloggess herself is crazier than a shithouse rat, probably in large part because her dad the taxidermist used to do things like wake her up at night by making an instant hand-puppet out of a real, dead squirrel he’d just gutted, and thrusting it in her face. She’d bring home a suitor like the hapless Victor, and dear old Dad would sneak up behind him and drop a live bobcat in his lap.
Jenny and Victor have this perpetual thing going like Ernie and Bert, Dharma and Greg, Gilligan and Skipper, Pooka and Straight Man, where the happy go lucky one with no impulse control is forever inflicting indignities on the responsible uptight one, causing career-threatening disasters, fucking up the chance to get rescued, the usual. Half the time, I’m laughing, the other half, I’m sitting with my head in my hands in empathy with Victor. I’m imagining Victor and A.J. Jacobs’s wife Julie meeting up to commiserate about their respective crazy spouses, and maybe ending up running off together. And then two things happen.
One, Victor turns out to be a Republican, which makes me feel a lot better about his misery. And two, Lawson winds up the book by saying this:
I can finally see that all the terrible parts of my life, the embarrassing parts, the incidents I want to pretend never happened, and the things that make me ‘weird’ and ‘different’, were actually the most important parts of my life. They were the parts that made me ME. And this was the very reason I decided to tell this story. To celebrate the strange, to give thanks for the bizarre, and to one day help my daughter understand that the reason her mother appeared mostly naked on Fox News is probably the same reason her grandfather occasionally brings his donkey into bars. Because you are defined NOT by life’s imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. Because there is joy in embracing, rather than running screaming from, the utter absurdity of life. And because it’s illegal to leave an unattended donkey in your car, even if you do live in Texas.
And suddenly I bawled, and I loved The Bloggess. Honestly, while simultaneously reading five books of the Bible, Augustine’s major works, A.J. Jacobs’s spiritual odyssey and the opening dialectics of the Summa Theologica--THAT paragraph is the one that gave me the most spiritual insight and comfort, and told me the most about the meaning of our existence and our role in the Universe.
Attack of the Vernacular Motets: Discarding Images, by Christopher Page
A second generalization might be called the ‘Waning’ interpretation. Based upon the powerful image of the twelfth century as ‘medieval society in its prime’, this interpretation defines the culture of the Middle Ages in the North as luxurious yet overripe, losing itself in a proliferation of stylized forms as ideal and reality diverged. It is associated with Johan Huizinga but has been developed (rarely refined) in numerous subsequent books; it seems to have provided many influential musicologists with their view of the late Middle Ages in France and Burgundy.
This one was recommended by a medieval musicologist friend when I told her I was focusing this year on the period between 200 and 1400 AD. It discusses the later end of the period whereas I’m still in the Byzantine era; nevertheless, it’s a welcome change from the incessant theology in the other works I’m reading. Besides which, it’s brief.
It’s an academic work, with a lot of specialized musical vocabulary. The main point of the book is the dueling opinions of the “Cathedralist” historians who postulate the late Middle Ages as a restoration of culture, as evidenced by the palatial buildings the church built with what they stole from the masses; and the “Huizinga-ists” who see the period as continuing to decline and fall, as if there was room to fall further after the Dark Ages. I’m still coming off of the highlights of Rome, and getting into Edward Gibbon’s images of a millennia of utter, utter barbarism, and so I’m biased.
Through it all, we have musical developments involving the development of new forms and the use of vernacular language for the people instead of high Latin for the ruling classes. And yes, the use of song for mass empowerment appeals to me greatly.
Old Testament: Exodus, Leviticus
”You shall speak all that I command you. And Aaron your Brother shall tell Pharaoh to send the children of Israel out of his land. And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply My signs and My wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh will not heed you, so that I may lay my hand on Egypt and bring My armies and My people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great Judgments. And the Egyptians shall know that I am The Lord, when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them.”
--Exodus 7:2-5
If a woman has a discharge, and the discharge is blood, she shall be set apart seven days, and whoever touches her shall be Unclean until evening.
Everything that she lies on during her impurity shall be Unclean; also, everything she sits upon shall be Unclean.
Whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and shall be Unclean until evening.
And whosoever touches anything that she sat on shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and shall be Unclean until evening.
If anything is on her bed or on anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be Unclean until evening.
And if any man lies with her at all, so that her impurity is on him, he shall be Unclean seven days, and every bed on which he lies shall be Unclean.
--Leviticus 15:19-24
Here are books 2 and 3 of the Old Testament. Exodus is a two-part story, the first part of which relates the holocaust that the Old Testament God perpetrates against the Egyptian people. Many people (including Motel from Fiddler on the Roof) believe that God miraculously “softened Pharaoh’s heart”; this is not so. Not only does the Old Testament God harden Pharaoh’s heart multiple times, but the passage quoted above (and Ex. 4:21, earlier) indicates that before Moses is even sent to talk to Pharaoh about releasing the Jews from captivity, it is God’s plan to cause Pharaoh to say no, so that God will have an excuse to visit plagues on the Egyptian people, up to and including the slaughter of masses of children.
Part two, where Moses leads the Jews through the desert and hears God’s instructions on a mountaintop, gets dull. A large segment is devoted to describing the Ark of the Covenant, and another large segment repeats the first, as Aaron and the others are described building the Ark, in the exact same language. In between, we get not only what are commonly called the ten commandments, but a whole lot of much more dubious material as well. I’ve noticed that the Jews in this section behave a lot like small children and their stand-ins (Curious George, Pooh Bear, Papa Berenstein-Bear, etc.) in cautionary stories for very young children, in which even five year olds are meant to understand that certain behaviors are not going to end well. They get told how to handle the manna from Heaven, then do the other thing, and it gets wormy and noxious. They get told not to have other Gods, and they build and worship the golden calf as soon as Moses turns his back. Where do they get these habits? Oh, right—they’re descended from Adam.
DID YOU KNOW...When Moses is on his way to meet Pharaoh, God, having sent him on this mission, inexplicably catches up to him and tries to kill Moses (Ex. 4: 24-26), apparently because God only just then realizes that Moses is not circumcised. This is never brought up again, but WTF?
On the other hand, it's hard to read Leviticus without bursting into peals of merry laughter at the randomness of it all. It's like a third-tier roleplaying game rulebook where the rules were written by a drug addict with CDO. We begin with the rules Clerics must use to make offerings for recovering Wisdom points lost due to sinning, and continuing to hygiene rules for leper characters, lady characters, rogue characters, and stuff you can't do without having to roll a "smite" check. Menstrual blood that will wither the crops. Cursed garments and tattoos. Bad side effects of succumbing to seduction spells. Boring rules for creating new characters (pregnancy). And the GM never tires of reminding you that he's the GM and what he says goes, no matter how stupid or autocratic he gets. "You will DO IT, I tell you! For I am the Lord your Game Master!"
And yes, this is the part where, among the arbitrary rules, he curses same sex relationships, briefly, in a total of two separate verses, without giving a reason other than "Because I say so", and this is the part that people who pretend to Christianity as an excuse to hate someone and act rughteous about it point to. The first six chapters are all about making meat offerings on altars, while gay-hating gets two verses. How obsessed are the hate-based "Christians" with making offerings, eh? And are they as careful about releasing everyone’s debts on the jubilee as they are about hating people condemned under Leviticus?
DID YOU KNOW--Apparently in the old, old days, it was traditional to eat roadkill and sleep with one's stepchildren, because the GM goes out of His way to order them not to do that either.
Confessions 1: Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby? For in your sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth. Who can show me what my sins were? Some small baby in whom I can see all that I do not remember about myself? What sins, then, did I commit when I was a baby myself? Was it a sin to cry when I wanted to feed at the breast? I am too old now to feed on mother’s milk, but if I were to cry for the kind of food suited to my age, others would rightly laugh me to scorn and remonstrate with me. So then too I deserved a scolding for what I did; but since I could not have understood the scolding, it would have been unreasonable, and most unusual, to rebuke me. We root out these faults and discard them as we grow up, and this is proof enough that they are faults, because I have never seen a man purposely throw out the good when he clears aways the bad. It can hardly be right for a child, even at that age, to cry for everything, including things that would harm him; to work himself up into a tantrum against people older than himself and not required to obey him; and to try his best to strike and hurt others who know better than he does, including his own parents, when they do not give in to him and refuse to pander to whims which would only do him harm. This shows that, if babies are innocent, it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength.
Last month, I was underwhelmed with Augustine’s large theological workCity of God, in which the most important founding church patriarch outside of the New Testament correctly pointed out that Roman Paganism was ridiculous and inconsistent, and that their clergy were corrupt sophists, while asserting that Christianity could not possibly be ridiculous or inconsistent, nor its clergy corrupt sophists, because it was the one true Word of God. Of course.
This month, I tackled Augustine’s other major work (he wrote many, many things, but I’m not going to read them all), which is thankfully much shorter and easier to read, being an autobiography and not a thick history of the church.
Christian high-level clergy are weird. They’re always looking for heretics to denounce. Today they’re denouncing heretics who believe same-sex couples are better people than priests who molest children; in Augustine’s day, they were denouncing heretics who believed the holy trinity consisted of three divine beings instead of one being with three aspects. I’ve read Augustine’s Confessions twice before, and they still don’t impress me, although I’ve noticed the imagined tone of voice I experience is different each time. He addresses most of his remarks, not to you the reader, but to Thou, O God Who Sees All. On my first reading, he seemed to me to grovel like a whining toad before God: “I idled on the sabbath when i should have been adoring YOU!” On my second reading, he seemed more authoritative and at least trying to comfort: “I’ve been through it all, and if I can be saved, so can all mankind. Come join us.” This time, it all seemed sanctimonious. The “sins” he confesses aren’t all that sinful, and it’s obvious by now that he’s really saying that all human beings are essentially evil and worthless, and that unless we bow down to Augustine’s concept of God, we will be evil and worthless forever and ever. And part of how he gets there is by crying crocodile tears over his own minor imperfections like having cried a lot as a baby or having committed petty thefts when he was a kid, knowing that you and I have far worse than that on our childhood consciences, never mind that we grew up and got over it. That’s how he reels you in. Next thing you know, you’re sitting in his lap while he spends the last three chapters forgetting that it’s an autobiography and talking about the opening lines of Genesis instead.
Nevertheless, even though he seems to have been content and well-behaved during his pre-Christian life, he is certainly content and well-behaved at the time he writes, and so his Confessions are popular for serving as an example to others who need to believe in something. They’re not for me, but they may be just fine for you.
Confessions 2: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I had my childish faults: I prattled, I was greedy, I sometimes told lies. No doubt I stole fruit, sweets, things to eat; but I never, just for the fun of it, did any harm or damage, got others into trouble, or teased dumb animals. I remember on one occasion, however, peeing into the kettle belonging to one of our neighbors, Mme. Clot, while she was at church. I must confess, too, that this memory still makes me laugh, for Mme. Clot, although otherwise a thoroughly good person, was the grumpiest old woman I ever knew in my life. Such is the true but brief history of my childhood misdemeanors.
It amuses me to see the cover blurb praise Augustine's Confessions as "the inspirational life of a great sinner who became a great saint". I'm not qualified to decide who gets to be called a saint, but the idea of Augustine, who never appeared to have a mean bone in his body except when he was preaching sanctimoniously post-conversion ("What did God do before creating the Universe?" "He created Hell for people who ask impertinent questions") as a "great" sinner is laughable to me. To find a REAL sinner, you have to go to that other book of confessions, the one written by the neurotic, narcissistic drama king Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who for all his moments of genius and thought-provoking writing, was capable of being a real bag of dicks when he put his mind to it.
In snooty, aristocratic 18th century France, where apparently the only thing the privileged classes enjoy more than scandalous behavior is gossiping and shunning others for scandalous behavior, Rousseau seems born to simultaneously fit right in and be cast right out. He begins by getting apprenticed to a tradesman who fails to appreciate his genius, running away to the city, and writing tracts against the tyranny of private property while living off the charity of others. He has a series of thoughtless, dickheaded romances in which he is so head-over-heels in love that he almost considers the feelings of his partner from time to time. Later on, he meets, befriends and quarrels with literary and musical figures from Diderot to Rameau to Voltaire to David Hume. Apparently everyone involved in these quarrels wrote volumes about them at the time, explaining that they were all the other party's fault. Rousseau does a passable impression of being amazingly misunderstood, set up and betrayed by those he trusted; however, Rousseau's dramatic flouncing and the sheer number of opponents he has leads me to suspect that he's not as right and innocent as he thinks he is.
The biographies of the great have much to teach us, either as examples or as warnings. For all my dislike of Augustine, there's no denying he managed to find success in one of the most miserable, downwardly mobile periods of human history, and to achieve peace of mind in the process. for all my admiration of some of Rousseau's other writings, there's no denying that his biography serves as a warning, and that he made himself and most people around him unnecessarily miserable at a time when his class of people, at least, enjoyed some of the greatest opportunities mankind had ever hoped for at the time. Fascinating and readable, but ultimately depressing.
Letter from the Ostrogoth Jail: The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethiuss
Those who have done wrong should not be prosecuted with outrage and anger, but should be treated with kindness and sympathy, as if they were sick men who could have their guilt lessened by punishment, as if it were some kind of malignancy. This way, defense lawyers would have nothing to do, or if they wanted to do men good, they would become prosecutors. And the criminals, if they could glimpse through some peephole at the virtue they had abandoned and if they could realize that, through their torments, they could lay aside the burden of their filthy vices, they would not think of them as torments but as cures. In their desire to acquire goodness they would reject any efforts oftheir advocates and give themselves over to the prosecutors and the judges. That is why, in the hearts of the wise, there should be no room for hatred. Only a fool would hate good men; and as for the bad, there is no reason to hate them either. Weakness is a disease of the body, and similarly wickedness is a disease of the mind. We feel sympathy rather than hatred for those who are sick, and those who suffer from a disability greater than any physical ailment deserve pity rather than blame.
Boethius was unfortunate enough to come in at the end of the Roman Empire, to see the city sacked by Goths, and to spend his final days in prison awaiting execution. While there, he wrote the Consolation, which I was surprised and pleased to discover was short, readable, and printed in the form of a dialogue in the style of Cicero.
In fact, though Cicero wrote before, and Boethius after, the Roman Empire existed, their writings are strikingly similar. The same bewailing of corrupt officials, the same denunciation of worldly pleasures, the same exhortation to be master of oneself, and to bear changes of fortune with stoicism. Boethius casts himself as Simplicio, bewailing his bad luck in prison, and visited by Philosophy, who appears as a combination Athena-like goddess, Job’s comforter and Socrates, to discuss the True Good with him when what he needs is a cake with a file in it.
One thing Boethius adds that Cicero did not is the servile “All things come from God and our true reward is in the Afterlife” trope. Previous stoics had stayed with virtue and knowledge of right living as its own reward. Boethius, by adding divine causation, passes to the idea that, if bad things happen to you, you deserve it. And he does this without becoming even more miserable in jail. Seems to me, it would be more consoling to curse an evil earthly tyrant for one’s plight than to decide that the tyrant is right to confine, torture and kill you.
The real moral of The Consolation of Philosophy is that in good times, people love the philosophy of Epicurus, when indeed they even bother to contemplate the blessings of life instead of enjoying them. In wretched times, they turn to magical thinking and dream of astral planes, gods, and afterlifes. The concurrence of the rise of Christianity in Rome with its secular decline and fall (and with the same in post-70s America) are entirely coincidental. Of course.
Flat Earth Society: The Almagest, by Ptolemy
And it seems to them that there is nothing against their supposing, for instance, the heavens immobile and the earth as turning on the same axis from west to east, very nearly one revolution a day; or that they should both move to some extent, but only on the same axis as we said, and conformably to the overtaking of the one by the other. But it has escaped their notice that, indeed, as far as the appearances of the stars are concerned, nothing would perhaps keep things from being in accordance with this simpler conjecture, but that in the light of what happens around us in the air such a notion would seem altogether absurd. For in order for us to grant them what is unnatural in itself, that the lightest and subtlest bodies either do not move at all or no differently from those of contrary nature, while those less light and subtle bodies in the air are clearly more rapid than all the more terrestrial ones; and to grant that the heaviest and most compact bodies have their proper swift and regular motion, while again these terrestrial bodies are certainly at times not easily moved by anything else--for us to grant these things, they would have to admit that the earth's turning is the swiftest of absolutely all the movements about it because of its making so great a revolution in a short time, so that all those things that were not at rest on the earth would seem to have a movement contrary to it, and never would a cloud be seen to move toward the east nor anything that flew or was thrown into the air. For the earth would always outstrip them in its eastward motion, so that all other bodies would seem to be left behind and to move towards the west.
This is the great book of ancient astronomy, and I got very little out of it. It is intensely mathematical, and once Ptolemy had “proved” in the opening chapters that the earth is stationary and that the sun and the rest of the universe revolves around it, I didn’t care to study the mathematics all that hard for something that has been known to be false for centuries. You might want to study it a little harder; the church incorporated the Ptolemaic model into official Christian Doctrine, especially after Dante had modeled his Paradise-o on the series of “heavenly spheres”, and if the Tea Party does manage to take over America, you can expect Copernicus and Kepler to be burned and the Almagest taught as fact to your grandchildren in the interest of religious freedom.
Ptolemy himself was no more Christian than Aristotle (who was also incorporated into church doctrine, never minding how the medieval Christian world was really governed by churches on the model of Plato’s Republic), and there are no references to gods or heaven in the Almagest; it’s simply fallible science that does not consider that the earth may have a much smaller spot in the universe than it appears, and that therefore not being in the exact center of things does not cause the view of the stars to get all kittywampus.
The Medieval Murders: Satan in St. Mary’s, by P.C. Doherty
The group, sensing that the meeting was over, began to disperse one by one, each bowing to the hooded leader before departing. When they had all left, the speaker turned to the Hooded One, and pointed to the old crone who still sat as if in a trance on the beaten dirt floor.
“She waits for her reward,” he said. “What shall we give her?”
“She has served her purpose,” came the whispered reply. “Cut her throat!”
PC Doherty apparently wrote mysteries under a godzillion pseudonyms, but the Hugh Corbett series is his first, his longest running, and in his own name. Satan in St. Mary’s is the first.
It’s better done than the Byzantine series I tried and put aside in January. Maybe the characters work better in shabby, gloomy Medieval England than they do in the luxury of Constantinople. At any rate, Corbett is a clerk in the court of Edward I (Longshanks from Braveheart, after the Becket murder and Richard’s Crusade but before the War of the Roses) called on to investigate the apparent in-church suicide of a merchant who had fled to sanctuary after killing another merchant. The trail involves numerous shadowy black-cloaked figures, a satan-worshipping cult, a plot against the king and several assassination attempts against Corbett himself. The locked-room mystery of the church killing is easy, as is the true identity of the cult leader, but the character and atmosphere make it well worth reading. I expect I’ll be reading a lot more Corbett this year.
Identity Theft: The Man who Killed Himself, by Julian Symons
In the end, Arthur Brownjohn killed himself, but in the beginning he made up his mind to murder his wife. He did so on the day that Major Easonby Mellon met Patricia Parker. Others might have come to such a decision earlier but arthur Brownjohn was a patient and, as all those who knew him agreed, a timid and long-suffering man. When people say that a man is long-suffering, they mean that they see no reason why he should not suffer for ever.
Julian Symons was a pioneer in the “psychological thriller” genre, where the point of the story is not identifying the criminal but understanding the psychology behind the crime. The Man Who Killed Himself begins with a similar premise to Malice Aforethought (Bookpost, February 2012); in both stories, an inoffensive henpecked husband plots to murder his wife. Symons, however, goes much, much further. His antihero Arthur Brownjohn is already leading a double life at the start of the story, and the fantasy personality he invents for himself so that he can pretend to be more assertive and competent begins to take over who he really is. If this were a short story, it would end with Arthur killing his wife and announcing to the police, “Ha-ha! That weakling Arthur isn’t here right now; I am Easonby Mellon!” In long form, the irony is much more delicious than that; it doubles and triples on itself before the story is over, and I found myself musing on the many layers of meaning in the title. The fact that I saw the big reveal coming from several miles away didn’t matter. Highly recommended.
Game of Thoughts: The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse
The rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property—on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like an organist on an organ.
When you play the Game Of Thoughts, you neither win nor die.
About a tenth of the book consists of a lengthy introduction describing the glass bead game of the title, mostly its history and development, and how the foremost intellectuals of a Europe somewhere in the far future revere its masters the way Americans of today revere Hollywood and sports elites. Hesse doesn’t, however, give more than a hint about how the game is played, in part because it’s impossible. With that kind of life-the-universe-and-everything set up, you can’t give a serious answer to how to play a game that incorporates the highest levels of mathematics, logic, music, cultural history and dozens of other disciplines. Four dimensional chess would be a letdown. It doesn’t appear to be a competitive game. Playing it is more like the creation of great art or philosophy.
Anyhow, having presented an esoteric exposition of The Game, Hesse then presents the biography of one Joseph Knecht, who attained the high office of “Master of the Game”. It is told stylistically, as if we were watching Knecht’s youth, education and advancement on the Learning channel while a very serious voice-over read the text of the book aloud.
I found it hard to take seriously. The contemplative life of the intellectuals who do nothing but study The Game might as well be Trappist or Buddhist monks, and the distinction that The Game is an academic discipline, not a religion, brings about comparisons with Gulliver’s voyage to Laputa. Having recently suffered my way through Plotinus (Bookpost, November 2012), I found myself frequently rolling my eyes and wondering if Knecht and the others were ever going to do something useful instead of contemplating until they died.
Further, Hesse seems to have come to the same conclusion. According to the forward, Hesse wanted to glorify the contemplative, intellectual life; however, when he was halfway finished, Hitler came to power and the intellectuals of the day stayed above the fray and refused to get their hands dirty in sordid politics while the fascists built ovens in Auschwitz and Treblinka. Hesse then decided that intellectuals have a duty to use their gifts for the good of society, and wrote an ending in which Master Knecht resigns his office (making the Game players clutch their pearls in horror) and goes out into the world.
Recommended only if you’re in the most cerebral of moods.
West of Eden: Eva Trout, by Elizabeth Bowen
After school Eva, accompanying her father on global business trips, had constantly sent picture postcards to Miss Smith from wherever she found herself. She obtained glimpses of Miss Smith when back in London. As a wedding present, she had sent an enormous, glitteringly-fitted picnic basket from Fortnum & Mason’s: the bride would have liked to exchange it for comestibles, but dared not; Eva often visited Larkins. Iseult Smith’s abandonment of a star career for an obscure marriage puzzled those for whom it was hearsay only—but the reason leaped to the eye: the marriage was founded on a cerebral young woman’s first physical passion. The Arbles had now been the Arbles for some years—so far, no children. Accordingly, room for Eva. She had had her way. Visits terminate, visitors have to go—she now was a visitor no longer.
What had deteriorated?
I’ve read one other Elizabeth Bowen book, The Death of the Heart, and I’m still trying to get a feel for the elements these books have in common. Both books feature tragic heroines trying to find their true selves in a world of self-absorption. The title character of Eva Trout is not really described physically, except that she’s very tall, but with a name like Trout, it's hard not to think of her as other than someone fishlike, from Innsmouth. She tends to make good first impressions but rebuffs people who want to follow through.. Her parents die when she’s young, leaving her an heiress with an exasperated guardian, and she spends the bulk of the book “changing scenes” by going from one place to another at a moment’s notice. Is she running away from something undefined, or running towards something undefined, or both?
I tended to get exasperated along with the other characters, as the plot hinges on several avoidable misunderstandings, and Eva and the other major characters make many bad decisions for the sake of Teh Dramaz. I’m past the age of thinking that’s a good thing to do, and so watching other people who should know better making those mistakes just makes me wince. Tragedy strikes often, sometimes by happenstance and sometimes by acts of thoughtless, impulsive cruelty. Eva does a major plot spoiler in the middle of the book, and something senselessly bad happens to her at the very end, and I kept scratching my head, asking myself, why did they do that? Why did Bowen decide to write them doing that?
Bowen had a genius for telling stories in unconventional ways. I loved the way important plot developments and character background were revealed through letters and conversations between unrelated characters. One of my favorite sections consists of a chapter-length letter written by a stranger who sits next to Eva on an airplane trip, who does not appear anywhere else in the story and who knows nothing of anyone else except for the conversation he has with Eva. This letter, recapping the conversation and the character’s (often wrong) guesses about Eva from observation contains bombshells of Reveal and is a masterful lesson by example of good storytelling.
Definitely a well-written book, though I remain a little puzzled as to what, exactly, was written so well.
Life During Wartime: The Framing of the Middle Ages, by Chris Wickham
The early middle ages has always resisted synthesis; single generalizations about the motors of its development (Christianization, Roman-Germanic fusion, the breaking of the Mediterranean...) have always foundered. Accordingly, I have sought, not to provide The Answer, but my framing for answers, and generalizations that are consistently qualified by regional variation. Even then, the picture is incomplete. The variables chosen here, fiscal structures, aristocratic wealth, estate management, settlement pattern, peasant collective autonomy, urbanism, exchange, are not the full range that could have been provided. In particular, belief systems, gender roles, values, and representations, ritual and cultural practices could in principle have been analyzed in the same way, regionally and comparatively. I did not exclude them because they are unimportant; this book absolutely must not be read as a counterblast to the trend towards cultural history as a central element in contemporary historical scholarship, which is a trend I applaud.
The last book included this month is by far the thickest, and apart from Ptolemy and Page, the most difficult to understand. Fortunately, I’m steeping myself in other books of and about the age, and so I approached it with some understanding of a period (400 to 800 AD) that, though it encompasses the collapse of the Roman Empire and the establishment of Islam, is not one that most people are familiar with today.
Wickham takes general themes of state economy, aristocracy, peasant life and urban and commercial networks, and applies each of them to ten regions around the edges of Europe and the Mediterranean: Northwest Africa; Egypt, the Levant; the Byzantine Empire; Italy; Spain, Gaul/France; Britain; Ireland and Denmark. All but the last two begin the era as part of Rome, but by 800 they are distinct regions. Central government goes; the aristocracy becomes poorer across the continent; and the peasants are “free’ in that they are left alone by the rotten old taxing, military conscripting government and instead left to fend for themselves against any savage, armed barbarians who want their stuff or their lives. This is the paradise that today’s savage, armed barbarians the Republicans and the Tea Party have in mind when they urge the abolishment of all government. Barbarians and the church will fill the void.
Page’s main theme is that it is almost impossible to pigeonhole what things were like in the early middle ages, in part because it was so decentralized. The regions Page focuses on are relatively isolated, on islands or peninsulae or across the sea, while the center is presumably still savage. Different things are happening in different areas. The sword of Islam that rushes from Asia across Africa to Spain misses most of Europe, and Denmark and Ireland even miss the farthest reaches of Rome. Centralized government even survives, to an extent, in Byzantium. As Page himself says, he’s not there to provide the answers, but he does get people asking the right questions.
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