Self-Quarantine: The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.
Kafka's famous tale of Gregor, the salesman who wakes up to find he has turned into a hideous insect, is in the revised Great Books set. I've read it before and always interpreted it in a different way.
This time, I read it as a metaphor for disability or old age and rejection of one as "useless" following inability to give any more. And never mind that two of the three family members who reject Gregor are his parents. The man has been the sole supporter of the family for years, loses his ability to work in the first scene of the story, and is immediately loathed by the family that once depended on him, is confined to his room, has his back injured by a thrown apple, and the apple is left lodged in his back for the rest of the story as his neglected body becomes more worn, starved, and decayed as time passes.
He is the unwanted, useless relative shut up in the attic. And eventually, he comes out and hears the rest of the family discussing what a useless, hideous burden he is to them, and he crawls back to his room and dies, unloved, as I will one day too, when my usefulness runs out. And as soon as he is dead, his sister is found to blossom into a young, marriageable maiden, but her time of rejection will one day come when the blossom fades.
My historical reading has become so depressing since I passed into 20th Century books.
Spiritual Costs of technology: Science and the Modern World, by Alfred North Whitehead
It may be doubted whether any properly general metaphysics can ever, without the illicit introduction of other considerations, get much further than Aristotle. But his conclusion does represent a first step without which no evidence on a narrower experiential basis can be of much avail in shaping the conception. For nothing, within any limited type of experience, can give intelligence to shape our ideas of any entity at the base of actual things, unless the general character of things requires that there be such an entity.
Te only nonfiction I read this month was a small book that I know was written in English, but it was hard to understand. If my early 20th century reading has driven one point home, it is that there was an enormous intellectual reaction against the exponential rise in science that took off in the mid 19th Century, particularly against Darwin. Evolutionary theory was blamed for capitalism and "social Darwinism", and the mathematics of Cantor and Dedekind, and accompanying contemplation of the infinity of time and space, were said to give rise to a nihilism in which humans were no longer the center of the universe and therefore why bother?
Whitehead's metaphysics was yet another attempt to bring back the necessity of thought as an influence on what would otherwise be a vast, meaningless void with bits of inconsequential matter here and there. Whitehead, whose Introduction to Mathematics (Bookpost, November 2019) I found accessible and enjoyable, was almost incomprehensible to me with his use of relativity and quantum theory to demonstrate the evolution of thought over several centuries towards an apex yet to be determined.
The Postwar Murders: O Jerusalem, by Laurie R. King
"Actually, no", Holmes said, completely ignoring the man's fury and sounding merely bored--an old and effective technique of his. "She will not wear those clothes, or anything like them. No burkah, no bangles, no veil. She will not walk behind us, she will not cook our food, she will not carry water on her head. This is not, you understand, my choice. I should be perfectly happy to have her clothed head to foot and in a subservient position--the novelty would be most entertaining. However, she will simply not do that, so we must either live with it or separate. The choice, gentlemen, is yours.:
I started Laurie King's series about the clever, badass Mary Russell who assists Sherlock Holmes during the period where Watson has left off, last year, but broke it off when I realized that most of the stories take place after WWI, and I was studying pre-WWI works that year. Now I'm ready for more, and can't get to the library. Hrumph!
It's a pity. The series is delightful, and I am quite smitten with Mary Russell, who is often more than a match for Holmes and who doesn't clog up the adventure by having (much) sexual tension with a man old enough to be her dad, or with anyone else either.
In this episode, they go to post-Turkish Palestine on a mission from Mycroft, encountering and foiling the usual dastardly plot while visiting many historical/Biblical sites and wrestling with culture shock. Very high recommendations.
And that's it for the month. You might think that during a quarantine, I'd be reading more, but between my first attempt at running for local office and my need to take my son's second grade education in hand, without busses or gym cardio equipment to provide regular reading--no, I'm not.
Hope you all are well.