The Twelve Tables

via Mary Beard
HOW DID THE Republic really begin? Ancient Roman historians were experts at turning historical chaos into a tidy narrative and always keen to imagine that their familiar institutions went back much further than they really did. For them the transition from monarchy to Republic was as smooth as any revolution could be: the Tarquins fled; the new form of government emerged fully formed; the consulship was instantly established, providing the new order with its chronology from year one. In reality, the whole process must have been more gradual than that story suggests, and messier. The ‘Republic’ was born slowly, over a period of decades, if not centuries. It was reinvented many times over.
Even the consuls did not go back to the beginning of the new regime. Livy hints that the highest official in the state, and the one whose job it was to bang the nail into the Temple of Jupiter each year, was originally called the chief praetor, although the word ‘praetor’ was later used for a junior official below the consuls. There are other early titles recorded for those at the top of the political hierarchy, which only complicate the picture. These include ‘dictator’, usually described as a temporary position to cope with a military emergency, and without the decidedly negative modern connotations of the word; and ‘military tribunes with consular power’, a mouthful aptly translated by one modern historian as ‘colonels’.
There is still a big question mark over when exactly the defining office of the Republic was invented, or when and why some other office was renamed ‘consul’, or even when the fundamental Republican principle that power should always be shared was first defined. ‘Chief praetor’ smacks of hierarchy, not equality. But whatever the key date or dates, the list of consuls on which the chronology of the Republic was based – going back in an unbroken series to Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus in 509 BCE – was in its earliest parts the product of a good deal of adjustment, imaginative inference, clever guesswork and most likely outright invention. Livy conceded, looking back from the end of the first century BCE, that it was next to impossible to sort out with confidence the chronology of officeholders in this early period. It was, he wrote, simply too long ago.
There is also a question mark over how violent the fall of the monarchy was. The Romans envisaged a fairly bloodless regime change. Lucretia was the most prominent, tragic casualty, but, though warfare was to follow, Tarquin was allowed to escape unscathed.

The whole process has been ferociously technical, and intricate debates still rage about the exact wording of the clauses, about how large and how representative a selection of the original they are and about how accurate the later Roman scholars were in their quotations. Some modernising has definitely gone on: the Latin looks archaic, but not quite archaic enough for the fifth century BCE, and on occasion the paraphrases have tried to bring the original sense into line with later procedures in Roman law. In some cases, even learned Roman lawyers misunderstood what they read in the Twelve Tables. The idea that a defaulting debtor who had several creditors could be put to death and his body divided between them, in appropriately sized pieces, according to the amount owed, looks like one such misunderstanding (or so many modern critics have hoped). All the same, these quotations offer the most direct route into mid-fifth-century BCE society, into its homes and families, worries and intellectual horizons.
It is a much simpler society, and its horizons much more restricted, than Livy’s account ever implies. That is clear from the language and forms of expression as much as from the content. Although modern translations do their best to make it all sound fairly lucid, the original Latin wording is often far from that. In particular, the absence of nouns and differentiated pronouns can make it almost impossible to know who is doing what to whom. ‘If he summons to law, he is to go. If he does not go, he is to call to witness, then is to seize him’ presumably means, as it is usually translated, ‘If a plaintiff summons a defendant to law, the defendant is to go. If he does not go, the plaintiff is to call someone else to witness, then is to seize the defendant.’ But it does not exactly say that. All the signs are that whoever drafted this and many other clauses was still struggling to use written language to frame precise regulations, and that the conventions of logical argument and rational expression were very much in their infancy.
Yet the mere attempt to create a formal record of this sort was an important stage in what is now often called state formation. One of the key turning points in many early societies is the rudimentary, usually very partial, codification of law. In ancient Athens, for example, the work of Draco in the seventh century BCE, though now a byword for harshness (‘draconian’), was notable as the first attempt there to put what had been oral rules into writing; a thousand years before that in Babylon, Hammurabi’s code did something similar. The Twelve Tables are much on that pattern. They are a long way from being a comprehensive legal code and may well never have been intended as such. Unless the range of surviving quotations is very misleading, they included almost nothing on public, constitutional law. What they do imply is a commitment to agreed, shared and publicly acknowledged procedures for resolving disputes and some thought on dealing with practical and theoretical obstacles to that. What was to be done if the defendant was too elderly to come to meet the plaintiff? The plaintiff was to provide an animal to transport him. What was to happen if the guilty party was a child? The penalty in that case might be beating rather than hanging – a distinction that heralds our ideas of the age of criminal responsibility.
The themes of the regulations point to a world of multiple inequalities. There were slaves of various types, from defaulters on their loans who had fallen into some form of debt bondage to those fully enslaved, presumably (though this is only a guess) captured in raiding or war. And their disadvantage was spelled out: the penalty for assault on a slave is set at half as much as for assault on a free man, whereas a slave could be punished with his life for an offence for which free citizens got off with not much more than a beating. But some slaves were eventually freed, as is clear from a reference to an ex-slave, or libertus.
There were hierarchies within the free citizen population too. One clause draws a distinction between patricians and plebeians, another between assidui (men of property) and proletarii (those without property – whose contribution to the city was the production of offspring, proles). Another refers to ‘patrons’ and ‘clients’ and to a relationship of dependency and mutual obligation between richer and poorer citizens that remained important throughout Roman history. The basic principle was that the client depended on his patron for protection and assistance, financial and otherwise, in return for a variety of services rendered, including votes in elections. Later Roman writing is full of rather high-flown rhetoric from the patron class on the virtues of the relationship, and miserable complaints from the side of the client about the humiliations they have to go through, all for a second-rate meal. In the Twelve Tables, the rule simply states: ‘If a patron has done harm to his client, he is to be cursed’ – whatever that meant.
For the most part, the Twelve Tables confront domestic problems, with a heavy focus on family life, troublesome neighbours, private property and death. They lay down procedures for the abandonment or killing of deformed babies (a practice common throughout antiquity, euphemistically known to modern scholars as ‘exposure’), for inheritance and for the proper conduct of funerals. Particular clauses prohibit women from tearing their cheeks in mourning, funeral pyres being built too close to someone’s house and the burial of gold – except dental gold – with the body. Criminal and accidental damage was another obvious concern. This was a world in which people worried about how to cope with their neighbour’s tree overhanging their property (solution: it had to be cut back to a specified height) or with their neighbour’s animals running amok (solution: the damage had to be made good or the animal surrendered). They worried about thieves breaking in at night, which was to be punished more harshly than daylight theft, about vandals destroying their crops or about stray weapons accidentally hitting the innocent. But, just in case this all sounds a bit too familiar, it was also a world in which people worried about magic. What should you do if some enemy bewitched your crops or cast a spell on you? Sadly, the remedy for this is lost.
To judge from the Twelve Tables, Rome in the mid fifth century BCE was an agricultural town, complex enough to recognise basic divisions between slave and free and between different ranks of citizen and sophisticated enough to have devised some formal civic procedures to deal consistently with disputes, to regulate social and family relations and to impose some basic rules on such human activities as the disposal of the dead. But there is no evidence that it was more than that. The strikingly tentative formulation of the regulations, in places awkward or even confusing, should call into question some of the references in Livy and other ancient writers to complicated laws and treaties at this period. And the absence, at least from the selection of clauses preserved, of any reference to a specific public official, apart from a Vestal Virgin (who as a priestess was to be free of her father’s control), certainly does not suggest a dominant state apparatus. What is more, there is hardly any mention of the world outside Rome – beyond a couple of references to how particular rules applied to a hostis (a ‘foreigner’ or an ‘enemy’; the same Latin word, significantly, can mean both) and one possible reference to sale into slavery ‘in foreign country across the Tiber’, as a punishment of last resort for debt. Maybe this collection had an intentionally internal rather than external focus. All the same, there is no hint in the Twelve Tables that this was a community putting a high priority on relations, whether of dominance, exploitation or friendship, beyond its locality.

The Twelve Tables were one of the outcomes of what is often now called the Conflict of the Orders (the Latin word ordo meaning, among other things, ‘social rank’), which according to Roman writers dominated domestic politics in those crucial couple of hundred years after the end of the monarchy. This was the struggle by the plebeian citizens for full political rights and for parity with the elite, patrician citizens, who were generally loath to give up their hereditary monopoly of power.
By far the most dramatic events in the conflict surrounded the drafting of the Twelve Tables, in the mid fifth century BCE. The clauses that are preserved may be brief, allusive and even slightly dry, but, as the Romans told the story, they were compiled in an atmosphere involving a tragic, highly coloured mixture of deception, allegations of tyranny, attempted rape and murder. The story was that for several years, the plebeians had demanded that the city’s ‘laws’ be made public and not be merely a secret resource of the patricians; and, as a concession, normal political offices were suspended in 451 BCE and ten men (decemviri) were appointed to collect, draft and publish them. In the first year, the decemviri successfully completed ten tables of laws, but the job was not finished. So for the following year another board was appointed, which proved to be of a very different, and far more conservative, character. This second board produced the remaining two tables, introducing a notorious clause banning marriage between patricians and plebeians. Although the initiative behind the drafting had originally been reformist, it turned into the most extreme attempt to keep the two groups utterly separate: ‘the most inhuman law’ Cicero called it, entirely against the spirit of Roman openness.
There was worse to come. This second board of decemviri – the Ten Tarquins, as they were sometimes known – started to ape the behaviour of tyrants, right down to sexual violence. In what was almost a replay of the rape of Lucretia, which had led to the foundation of the Republic, one of their number, the patrician Appius Claudius (a great-great-grandfather of the road builder) demanded sex with a young plebeian woman, the aptly named Virginia, unmarried but betrothed. Deception and corruption followed. Appius suborned one of his hangers-on to claim that she was his slave, who had been stolen by her so-called father. The judge in the case was Appius himself, who of course found in his accomplice’s favour, and strode through the Forum to grab Virginia. In the arguments that followed, her father, Lucius Virginius, picked up a knife from a nearby butcher’s stall and stabbed his daughter to death: ‘I am making you free, my child, in the only way I can,’ he shouted.
Virginia’s story has always been even more unsettling than that of Lucretia. It not only combines domestic murder with the brutality of class conflict but inevitably raises the question of the price to be paid for chastity. What kind of model of fatherhood is this? Who was most at fault? Did high principles need to come at such a terrible cost? But once more, (attempted) rape turned out to be a catalyst of political change. The display of Virginia’s body and a passionate speech that Virginius gave to the army led to riots, mutiny, the abolition of the tyrannical board of decemviriand, as Livy puts it, the recovery of liberty. Despite the taint of tyranny, the Twelve Tables remained. They were soon regarded as the honoured ancestor of Roman law, excluding the ban on intermarriage, which was quickly repealed.
This story of the Conflict of the Orders adds up to one of the most radical and coherent manifestos of popular power and liberty to survive from the ancient world – far more radical than anything to survive from classical democratic Athens, most of whose writers, when they had anything explicitly to say on the subject, were opposed to democracy and popular power. Taken together, the demands put into the mouths of the plebeians offered a systematic programme of political reform, based on different aspects of the freedom of the citizen, from freedom to participate in the government of the state and freedom to share in its rewards to freedom from exploitation and freedom of information. It is hardly surprising that working class movements in many countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a memorable precedent, and some winning rhetoric, in the ancient story of how the concerted action of the Roman people wrung concessions from the hereditary patrician aristocracy and secured full political rights for the plebeians. Nor is it surprising that early trades unions could look to the plebeian walkouts as a model for a successful strike.
But just how accurate is the story that the Romans told of this conflict? And what light does it shed on Rome’s ‘great leap forward’? Here the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle become hard to fit together. But the outlines of a picture, and some probably crucial dates, do stand out.
Many aspects of the story as it has come down to us must be wrong, heavily modernised by later writers or, especially towards the beginning of the period of the conflict, still much more myth than history. Virginia is probably no less a fictional construct than Lucretia. There is an awkward mismatch between the surviving clauses of the Twelve Tables and the elaborate story of the decemviri. Why, if the compilation came directly out of the clashes between patricians and plebeians, is there just one reference to that distinction (in the marriage ban) in the clauses preserved? Much of the argument, and even more of the rhetoric, of the early plebeian reformers is almost certainly an imaginative reconstruction by writers of the first century BCE, drawing on the sophisticated debates of their own day rather than being a product of the world of the Twelve Tables – and it may well be better evidence for the popular political ideology of that later period than for the Conflict of the Orders. What is more, despite Roman certainty that the exclusion of plebeians from power in the state went back to the fall of the monarchy, there are hints that it developed only in the course of the fifth century BCE. The standard list of consuls, for example, however fictionalised it may be, includes in the early fifth century BCE plenty of recognisably plebeian names (including that of the first consul, Lucius Junius Brutus himself), which completely disappear in the second half of the century.
That said, there is no doubt that long periods of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE were fractured by social and political struggles between a privileged, hereditary minority and the rest. More than half a millennium later, the formal distinction between patrician and plebeian families still survived, as one of those ‘fossils’ I discussed earlier (p. 79), with a whiff of snobbery attached to it and not much more. It would be hard to explain why the distinction existed at all if the difference between the two groups had not once been a significant marker of political, social and economic power. There are also strong reasons to think that the year 367 BCE was a major turning point, even if not in quite the way Roman historians imagined it.
For them, this was the revolutionary moment when it was decided not only that the consulship should be open to plebeians but that one of the two consuls must always be a plebeian. If so, the law was flouted as soon as it was made, as on several occasions in the following years two patrician names are recorded as consuls. Livy noticed the problem and unconvincingly suggests that the plebeians were satisfied with getting the right to stand and not so bothered about being elected. Much more likely is that there was no obligatory plebeian consul but that this was the year when the consulship as the major annual office of state was established on a permanent basis, presumably open to both patricians and plebeians.
That would certainly fit with two other significant clues. First, even in the traditional Roman record, the entries for most of the years between the 420s and the 360s BCE name the mysterious ‘colonels’ as the chief officials of the state. That changes once and for all in 367 BCE, when consuls become the norm for the rest of Roman history. Second, it may well be that the senate was given its definitive form at this time. Roman writers tended to take it for granted that the origins of the senate went back to Romulus, as a council of ‘old men’ (senes), and that by the fifth century BCE it was already a fully fledged institution operating much as it did in 63 BCE. One highly technical entry in an ancient Roman dictionary implies a very different version, suggesting that it was only around the middle of the fourth century BCE that the senate was established as a permanent body with lifelong members rather than being just an ad hoc group of friends and advisors to whatever officials were in charge, with no continuity from one year, or even one day, to the next. If this is correct (and, of course, not all arcane pieces of technical information necessarily are), then it backs up the idea that the Roman political system took its characteristic form in the mid fourth century BCE. Whatever the precursors, whatever elements such as assemblies or the census, may long have been in place, Rome did not look distinctively ‘Roman’ for more than a century after 509 BCE.

Modernity and monads from Spinoza/Liebniz

by Matthew Stewart
Modernity dethrones humankind. It reduces all our thoughts, pur-poses, and hopes to the object of scientific inquiry. It makes labora-tory rats of us all. Spinoza actively embraces this collapse of the human into mere nature. Leibniz abhors it. Even more than he wants to convince us that God is good, Leibniz intends to demonstrate that we are the most special of all beings in nature. In the entire universe, he says, there is nothing more real or more permanent or more wor-thy of love than the individual human soul. We belong to the innermost reality of things. The human being is the new God, he announces: Each of us is "a small divinity and eminently a universe: God in ectype and the universe in prototype." This is the idea that defines Leibniz's philosophy, and that explains the enormous, if often unacknowledged, influence that his thought has wielded in the past three centuries of human history. The greatest obstacle Leibniz confronts in his quest to deify the human being is Spinoza's theory of mind. In Spinoza's view, the mind is nothing real; it is merely an abstraction over the material processes of the body. But, counters Leibniz, in the material world, nothing lasts forever; everything is at the mercy of impersonal forces; what passes for "unity" is merely temporary aggregation; and "identity" is a chimera in the never-ending flux of becoming and passing away. If Spinoza is correct, Leibniz concludes, then the human being, too, is merely chaff blowing in the silent winds of nature. Leibniz's metaphysics is thus best understood as the effort to demonstrate, against Spinoza, that there is another world that is prior to and constitutes the material world; that this more real reality con-sists of indestructible, self-identical unities; and that we ourselves—in virtue of our having minds—are the immaterial constituents of this more-than-real world. Of course, as a defender of the immaterial mind, Leibniz now faces the Cartesian mind-body problem in its full glory: He must explain how it happens that the immaterial mid. nd at least appears to interact with the less-than-real material worl So. more precisely, his metaphysics may be understood as an attempt to solve the Cartesian mind-body problem in such a manner as to avoid falling into Spinozistic heresy. IN (1,,RDER TO rid the world of Spinoza's theory of mind, Leibniz must first annihilate Spinoza's idea of Substance. For, in declaringm that God alone is Substance, Spinoza reduces human beings to ere modes of Substance, and thereby renders our minds material and mortal. Leibniz's strategy is therefore to replace the doctrine that God alone is Substance with the claim that there is a plurality of substances in the world. By identifying the mind with these new substances, Leibniz intends to secure for humankind a degree of indestructibil-ity, power, and freedom that his rival philosopher associates only with God. In one of his rare later comments on Spinoza, Leibniz new ly ' summarizes the difference between the two philosophers on this fun-damental point. The author of the Ethics, as we know, scoffs at those "for,? who regard the human mind as "a kingdom within a kingdom,  in his view, there is only one kingdom of Nature, one Substance. To which Leibniz responds:"My view is that every substance whatsoever is a kingdom within a kingdom!' The hunch that the world is made up of a plurality of substances appears in some of Leibniz's earliest writings. In the context of his reading of Spinoza's writings upon his return from The Hague, how-ever, he formulates his view in a transparent way. In hotes on Spinoza's letters to Oldenburg as well as on his copy of the Opera Posthuma, Leibniz explicitly rejects Spinoza's definition of "sub-stance" as that which is "in itself" and "conceived through itself." The second part of the definition, he now asserts, is incorrect:A sub-stance must be "in itself," but it need not be "conceived through itself." Rather, it may be "conceived through God."
An obscure point, it would seem; and yet, if true, it destroys the proof of the Proposition 5 in Part I of the Ethics that there cannot be two or more substances in the world. For, that proof turns on the claim that two substances which are "conceived through themselves" can have nothing in common and so cannot be part of the same uni-verse. It is no coincidence, then, that the proposition of the Ethics whose proof Leibniz seeks in his first letter to Schuller upon getting to Hanover is Proposition 5 of Part I of the Ethics. If he can find the weak point in Spinoza's proof, Leibniz thinks, he will open up the tantalizing possibility that there is not one but a plurality of substances in the world. He further infers—on the basis of quasi-mathematical arguments that would require several more books to elucidate—that the number of such substances must be infinite for roughly the same reason that the number of points on a line is infi-nite. No matter how small a slice of the universe you take, he says, it will contain an infinite number of substances. In writings dating from the 1690s, he dubs these substances with a name derived from the Greek for "unity," first used by his predecessor Giordano Bruno, and which has since become famous: monads. The claim that reality consists of an infinite number of monads entails some astonishing consequences, and Leibniz is not shy to draw these out. As substances, for example, monads must be entirely self-contained. That is, they depend on nothing else to be what they are. The most important implication of this is that they cannot interact with one another in any way at all—for, if they did so, one monad could conceivably alter the nature of another monad, and this would imply that its nature depends on the activity of some other substance, which, by the definition of substance, is not permissible. Thus, mon-ads are—in Leibniz's notably poetic language—"windowless." They can't see out, and you can't see in. It also follows that monads are immortal—they are always what they were and will be, namely, themselves. They have no beginning and no end. In order to make room for God, perhaps, Leibniz some-what mysteriously allows that at the moment of creation, all mon-ads came into being together, in a single "flash"; and if they should disappear, they must all vanish together in a comparable "flash" of annihilation.
Notwithstanding their evident durability and self-identity, monads do experience change of a sort, for they possess a capability to develop or "realize" themselves according to purely internal princi-ples. In Leibniz's lyrical terms, they are "big [in the sense of "preg-nant"] with the future." They may exist in the form of "seeds," he suggests, such as those observed in human semen by scientists such as Jan Swammerdam and Antoni von Leeuwenhoek (both of whom Leibniz met on his journey through Holland). Here Leibniz appeals to contemporary scientific findings in a man-ner that cannot but recall the practice of those modern philosophers who likewise attempt to substantiate their metaphysical claims with reference to recent scientific discoveries (in our time, usually quan-tum mechanics).The rocket science of Leibniz's time was microscopy. The work of the Dutch pioneers in the field, says Leibniz, demon-strates that there are tin.iimals) everywhere—animals within ani-mals—on no matter how small a scale one looks. Therefore, he concludes, it is quite plausible—nay, practically certain—that if these tiny animals had microscopes, they, too, would find even tinier ani-mals, and so on all the way down without end. Although all monads exist forever, they nonetheless seem to per-dure in the context of very different fellow-monad structures over time. The Leibniz monad, for instance, existed in seed form from the beginning of time. Contrary to popular prejudice, what it acquired on July 1, 1646, was only the agglomeration of fellow monads that make up its outward body. (The fact that Leibniz had two parents vexed the philosopher's followers—who had the monad, mom or dad?—but they did their best to overcome the "problem of sex.") Furthermore, as scientists have shown that even in fires small particles of ash survive in the smoke, it is evident that the Leibniz monad, like its brother monads, will continue to exist indefinitely in microscopic form—perhaps wafting on a piece of dust around its favorite city of Paris, where it will enjoy memories of happier days and receive from, God the rewards and punishments appropriate to its deeds. One of the most striking and controversial inferences that Leibniz, draws from the substantial nature of the monad is that a monad's future is written into its essence from the very beginning of things.
He expresses this daring doctrine in terms of logic as well as meta-physics. The "complete" concept of a substance, he says, must contain all the predicates that ever have been and ever will be true of it. For example—and here he invites much aggravation from his critics--the complete concept of "Caesar" ever and always includes the predicate "crossed the Rubicon"; just as the complete concept of "Leibniz," presumably, ever and always includes the predicate "visited Spinoza in The Hague." A monad, one could say, is the ideal subject for a biog-raphy: its entire life story unfolds with absolute logical necessity from its singular essence; and so the biographer need only locate this essence in order to settle on an appropriate plot and chapter outline. The life of a monad does not seem as solitary as it in fact is. Each monad, according to Leibniz, has within itself a "mirror" of the entire universe—a picture of what is happening everywhere at all times and how its own activities "fit in." Thus, monads are essentially mindlike. That is, they have a faculty of perception that constructs for them a pic-ture of the "external" world, and a faculty of apperception that registers an awareness of this process of perception itself. By means of these "mirrors" of consciousness, each monad repli-cates the entire universe of monads within itself; and so each monad is a "universe in prototype." Leibniz refers to this strange vision of worlds within worlds as "the principle of macrocosm and micro-cosm"—meaning that the microcosm contains or replicates the macrocosm all the way down to the infinitely small. He expresses the same notion in his claim that the ancient doctrine that "All is One" must now be supplemented with the equally important corollary that "One is All." If Leibniz had been writing in the information age, incidentally, he very likely would have replaced the monad mirrors with laptops run-ning interactive virtual-reality software. Such a metaphor perhaps better conveys the sense in which monads interact with a wider uni-verse only in an internal, "virtual" way, since they cannot really have contact with the rest of the universe at all. The monad mirrors, in any case, are somewhat scratched and imperfect—no doubt like the silver-backed mirrors that would have caught the philosopher's gaze in Paris. (Or, one could say, the virtual-reality screens have low resolution; or, the software still has lots of bugs.) So, all monads have a confused perception of the world around them. (Save God, of course, whose version of Windows is perfect). It is the logic of his system—and not arbitrary fancy nor a theory of the subconscious mind, as some have suggested—that compels Leibniz to scratch the mirrors of his monads. The imperfections in individual monads' perceptions play a key role in distinguishing one monad from another, for it is the partial perspective of each monad on the totality that makes it a unique individual with a unique "point of view" as it were. This is what Leibniz means when he says that a monad subsists "in itself" but is not necessarily "conceived through itself." To put it another way: two monads with absolutely perspicu-ous knowledge of the entire universe would be indistinguishable—in fact, they would both be God, or that through which all substances are conceived. Equally important, the splotchiness in the mirrors creates the pos-sibility of "free will" in monads, or so Leibniz contends.Although the entire past and future of a monad are embedded in its complete con-cept, nonetheless, on account of the inferior optics, a monad cannot understand its own essence in a fully perspicuous way. Because it does not know its own future (as God does), the monad is forced to make decisions and behave as though it were free. So, for example, God knew through all eternity that Leibniz was going to visit Spinoza in The Hague; but when Leibniz got off the boat, he faced a choice between walking over to the Paviljoensgracht and stopping in a local coffeehouse for the afternoon. The obscurity in the monad mirrors, finally, allows us to explain the crucial differences among types of monads. Although in the final analysis monads differ in degree and not kind, they nonetheless fall roughly into three groups, corresponding to what we may think of as rocks, animals, and people. All monads are mindlike to some degree, but only the peoplelike monads have minds, properly speaking. That is, their mirrors—their faculties of perception and apperception—are developed to the point where they have memory and self-awareness. Animal monads have souls, but not minds, strictly speaking, for their apperception or self-awareness tends to be lacking (Leibniz is a little vague on the point; but, in any case, it is worth noting that, compared with the dog-beating Cartesians, he was practically an animal-rights activist, insisting that it is repugnant to view animals as mere machines.) Rocklike monads are extremely passive, and so Leibniz has little to say about them. Note, however, that what we think of as an individual human being consists of one mind-monad dominating an infinite, swirling agglomeration of rocklike body-monads. With this last observation, the main point of the strange fable of the monads begins to come into focus. Leibniz's purpose is to lay out the context within which the Cartesian mind-body problem may be resolved and the immateriality of the mind preserved against Spinoza's soul-destroying Substance. In the new vocabulary of monads, the mind-body problem may be restated thus: How do mind-monads coordinate their activities with body-monads so that all work together to create a coherent universe in which minds and bodies appear to interact? For example: How is it that, when the Leibniz mind-monad decides to meet Spinoza in The Hague, his body-monads get him aboard the yacht, walk him down along the canals, and knock on his fellow philosopher's door? And how is it that the equally self-contained Spinoza monad happens to organize its body-monads in such a way as to open the door for his visitor? Phrased in these terms, now, it is evident that, within the Leibniz-ian system, the mind-body problem no longer refers to something that is logically impossible, but only to something that seems ludi-crously improbable. That is, Leibniz does not have to explain how two radically different classes of entity—minds and bodies—may interact with each other; he simply takes it as given that all substances are of the same mindlike nature and that they do not interact with one another at all. The remaining problem is only that it seems very unlikely, to say the least, that all these monads would coordinate their internally driven activities in such a way as to produce a coherent world—that the Leibniz mind-monad should not decide to visit Spinoza, for example, while the rest of him goes for a cup of coffee. This understanding of the problem sets the stage for what Leibniz claims is his single most magnificent bequest to humanity: the doc-trine of "the pre-established harmony" Although each monad acts according to its own, purely internal laws of development, Leibniz maintains, each is so designed that the world within which it per-ceives itself to be acting coheres exactly with the world within which all the other monads perceive themselves to be acting. Thus, for example, when the Leibniz mind-monad decides to call on Spinoza, the Leibniz body-monads just happen to be planning a walk up the Paviljoensgracht, too. Leibniz's choice of a musical metaphor to describe the coordina-tion of monad activities seems very much in the spirit of his age. In the late seventeenth century, the delights of contrapuntal music became widely celebrated, great architecture was praised as "frozen music," and even the orbits of the planets around the sun were said to have agreeably musical properties. Sometimes, though, Leibniz uses a different metaphor, one drawn from another of the wonders of his age: the watch. Mind and body, he says, are like a pair of perfectly constructed and perfectly synchronized watches. They tell the same time throughout eternity, not because they are causally linked to each other, nor because anyone intervenes to adjust one to the other, but because each on its own progresses through the same series of sec-onds on its own devices. (It is interesting to note that in Leibniz's day watches were notoriously imprecise, and could be counted on to diverge appreciably from one another by the end of each working day; but the race was on to build one of sufficient reliability to be used in measuring the longitude of ships at sea.) In the information age, we would probably favor a different metaphor: although each monad runs its own virtual-reality software on a stand-alone basis, we could say, the virtual reality of each monad is perfectly consistent with the virtual realities of all the other monads. Needless to say, the extraordinary degree of mutual compatibility among monads is far greater than could ever be attributed to any merely human watchmaker or even any immortal software corpora-tion. In fact, says Leibniz, the pre-established harmony is manifestly the handiwork of God. When the Almighty creates the infinite infin-ity of monads in the big flash, he designs each in such a way that its internal principle of activity harmonizes perfectly with those of all the others. The doctrine of the pre-established harmony may also be understood as a generalized and perhaps more elegant version of Malebranche's occasionalism. According to the latter, God intervenes on every occasion where there is an interaction of mind and body, in an endless series of real-time miracles. In Leibniz's world, God inter-venes only once, at the moment of creation, in an original miracle whereby he programs the infinite infinity of monads with such aston-ishing skill that they sing in harmony for all eternity. The pre-established harmony also lines up neatly as the apparent replacement for Spinoza's doctrine of parallelism. Spinoza, we should recall, claims that mind and body operate in parallel because they are really the same thing seen from two angles, like two sides of the same coin. Leibniz implicitly agrees that mind and body appear to operate in parallel, like two clocks ticking away side by side; but, on his account, they do so only by the grace of God's impeccable craftsman-ship, for they are in themselves radically independent of each other. God's intervention on the mind-body problem is so wondrous, Leibniz adds, that it amounts to another proof of his existence and of his goodness. The proof belongs to an ancient theological tradition, one that flared in the seventeenth century but that has always smol-dered somewhere in the hearth of the human imagination. Leibniz's question—How is it that all the monads manage to get along so well?—is a generalization over some much simpler questions that have been asked many times before: How is it that apples are just the right size for our mouths? How is it that the water we need to live falls so abundantly from the sky? With minor changes in vocabulary, the same type of question may be heard in places even today: How is it that the apparently arbitrary parameters of the physical laws of the universe, some would ask, are set at precisely those values that make life in the universe possible? How can such complex phenomena as intelligent life be the result of an evolutionary process that has no purpose or designer? The argument that only God could account for such improbable developments as bite-sized apples, congenial cosmo-logical constants, intelligent life, and the pre-established harmony is generally called "the argument from design." Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and many other philosophers have long since pointed out that the logic of the argument is hardly compelling: it establishes a probability, not a certainty; and the probability of an event that is absolutely unique is in any case indefinable. But, as Leibniz understood, mere quibbles about logic do little to diminish the enduring appeal of the argument. The story about monads and the pre-established harmony clearly reinforces—and is intended to reinforce—Leibniz's political vision. To the respublica Christiana and the Empire of Reason, Leibniz now adds a third name for his political ideal: the City of God.The citizens of this heavenly metropolis, he says, are the thinking monads of the world—i.e., all people—and the harmony they exhibit among them-selves is a reflection of God's glory. A pillar of the theocratic order represented in the City of God is the doctrine of personal immortal-ity encoded in the monadology. Indeed, Leibniz maintains that with-out universal belief in rewards and punishments in the afterlife, people will behave very badly and anarchy will consume society., Thus, at stake in his refutation of Spinoza's theory of mind is the preservation of Christian civilization. Yet, notwithstanding their creator's medieval-sounding politics, Leibniz's monads have a curiously modern edge, too. The City of God is a monarchy, to be sure, with God as its king. But, among its earthly denizens, a certain kind of egalitarianism reigns. All monads are created equal; each embodies the All, and each reflects the full glory of God; and so each has certain basic rights of citizenship. Indeed, Leibniz specifically opposes slavery, for example, on the basis of the equality of monads.The universal equality of monads also finds expression in Leibniz's thoroughgoing cosmopolitanism: "Justice is that which is useful to the community, and the public good is the supreme law—a community, however, let it be recalled, not of a few, not of a particular nation, but of all those who are part of the City of God and, so to speak, of the state of the universe." Although Leibniz's legacy was later commandeered by Germans in the name of nation building, the philosopher himself never wavered from the universal-ity of his ideal. In the context of a tiff among the various European academies, for example, he writes: "Provided something of conse-quence is achieved, I am indifferent whether this is done in Germany or France, for I seek the good of mankind. I am neither a phil-Hellene nor a phil-Roman, but a phil-anthropos."
Leibniz was indeed a phil-anthropos, and this was perhaps both the central message embedded in his monadology and the chief point of contrast with the reviled Spinoza. For, according to the latter, the human being is nothing exceptional, and it is merely ignorance and vanity that lead humankind to imagine that we "are the largest part of nature." But, according to Leibniz, the human being is every-thing—the point and the substance of the world. The modern secu-lar state, when viewed from a global perspective, looks much more like Spinoza's free republic than Leibniz's City of God; and yet, para-doxically, many of the beliefs that guide individuals within the mod-ern world—the faith in the sanctity of the individual, the ideal of charity, and the unique purpose of humankind—would seem to fol-low directly from Leibniz's essentially antimodern theocratic project. One the most intriguing features of Leibniz's monadological vision is the most obvious one: that it seems to describe an ideal. The City of God serves Leibniz as a vision whose realization is the goal of all of his efforts (and those of like-Minded individuals). In some passages, Leibniz even makes this rather modern notion of progress explicit: "We must also recognize that the entire universe is involved in a perpetual and most free progress, so that it is always advancing toward greater culture." And yet, logically speaking, the City of God is a representation of the actual world, not of an ideal one. We are monads, after all; we are already immortal and we necessarily live according to the laws of the pre-established harmony. This conflation of--or perhaps confusion between—representations of the real and depictions of the ideal is a fundamental feature of Leibnizian meta-physics, and perhaps even raises the question as to whether the entire system of monads and harmonies was less a representation of life as we know it than some sort of visionary utopia.
All this, I acknowledge, I understand not at all," wrote the English philosopher Samuel Clarke in response to Leibniz's attempt to explain his ideas about substances and the pre-established harmony, and there is no shame in admitting as much even today when presented with the monadological philosophy in bare outline. Bertrand Russell frankly confesses that, on first reading, Leibniz's metaphysics struck him as "a fascinating fairy tale, coherent, perhaps, but wholly arbitrary.
Hegel too acknowledges: Liebniz's philosophy appears like a string of arbitrary assertions. The bizarre monads all follow from the premise that substantiality is a quality of individual minds and not of nature.

Self-awareness... and Alex Haley from the papers.

Ripped from the headlines:

The male capuchins, particularly the high-ranking ones, may be discomfited by their reflection because it fails to play by the rules of the monkey hierarchy and show them due deference.. On the other hand, this realization might be expected to build up gradually in the minds of the male monkeys, making it hard to explain why they instantly perceive that the image is not a stranger. Human infants learn to recognize them-selves in a mirror at 18 to 24 months, but they acquire an understanding of mirrors before that. Give a female chimp a mirror, and one can have no doubt she knows just what it is for. The chimp will look at the two important parts of her body that she can usually never see, Dr. de Waal said. One is the inside of her mouth; the other is her rear end. Mirror self-recognition is often regarded as a touchstone of self-awareness. But every animal must have some sense of self, for ex-ample in calculating its weight when grasping or sitting on thin branches. Self-recognition, Dr. de Waal said, may tap into a higher sense of self. But there also may be a spectrum of self-awareness, with the capuchin's version falling short of the chimp's but above that of species that fail to recognize themselves. For example, the capuchin's understanding of mirrors is more advanced than that of male robins, who will ceaselessly attack the intruding male they see reflected, or that of cats and dogs, which will ignore a mirror once they have established there is nothing behind it. Male capuchins probably react differently from females because they take their mirror image more seriously and don't know how to handle it, Dr. de Waal said. But both sexes seem to possess a greater understanding of the illusory qualities of mirrors than is generally assumed.

and a 1995 article on Georg Baselitz which describes how he became the enfant terrible by hanging his work upside down- and something equally discouraging about Arshile Gorky an Armenian Painter who straddled cubism and surrealism, became a favorite among artists of the time yet who was compelled to lie, even asserting that he was a nobleman related to Maxim Gorky.

an article on a book called Men are not Cost-Effective that argues that women are being forced pay a disproportionate share of the cost of incarceration since 94 percent of imprisoned criminals are men.

and an expose on the shoddy scholarship of Alex Haley, from the Village Voice 2/23/93:

Haley, at sea in the writing and desperate to finish the long overdue manuscript, had copied 80 or so passages from Harold Courlander's 1967 slave novel, The African, and threaded them into his family saga, Roots. Apart from the humiliation, a last-minute settlement would be expensive. Courlander and Crown Publishers had previously rejected a $250,000 offer. Now, on the eve of the judge's verdict, surrender would cost much more. Everything was at stake for the apprehensive 55-year-old writer—his honor, his Pulitzer, his fortune, and his legend as the author of the magnificent Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965 and the epic Roots in 1976. Though Haley's hidden private life was untidy, and his career strung with bro-ken promises (like the one to Betty Shabazz about turning over his rights to her husband's Autobiography, his public image was noble, heroic, even sainted—a status that endures.. They revered their client and urged him to hold out. Even if Judge Ward decided against them on both elements of copyright infringement—i.e., actual and substantial copying—they would win on appeal. Granting all 81 parallelisms on Courlander's list, the amount of plagiarized material came to less than 1 per cent of Roots's lengthy text. How substantial was that? But Haley resisted their advice. A guilty verdict connoted official disgrace. It was bad enough being an accused plagiarist, but if he did not settle before the next morning, he would be an adjudged one, too. Besides, the broadcast of Roots II: The Next Generation, a miniseries sequel about his own life, was just around the corner in February. A negative outcome would definitely dent ABC's promotion. Callagy recalls that Ha-ley said, "I can't take the press on this.... I can't have a case that I copied." Haley was not telling the whole story. Other fears haunted him: the Courlander plagiarism was only one of his trespasses. Haley was a writer of modest talents, as a number of editors would say, who required enormous editorial support. But his prose needed more than polish; as Haley admit-ted under cross-examination, he lifted pas-sages from several books (Travels of Mungo Park, a 17th century West Africa travel-ogue; The Story of Phyllis Wheatley, the biography of an 18th century slave girl by Shirley Graham; and other sources) to fill up the pages of Roots. But beyond the plagiarism, and the massive perjury required to cover it up, Roots, as Haley well knew, was a hoax, a literary painted mouse, a Piltdown of genealogy, a pyramid of bogus research. While Lillian Hellman merely invented herself as an anti-Nazi courier in the "Julia" chapter of Pen-timento, Haley went farther. Overwhelming evidence—from interviews with scholars and surviving associates, along with a re-view of Haley's private papers soon to be made public—confirms that Haley invented 200 years of family history. All of Haley's ripping yarns about his search for Kunta Kinte and his 10-year struggle to write Roots were part of an elegant and complex make-it-up-as-you-go-along scam. Haley did not fool everybody at the time. Shortly after the publication of Roots in 1976, Southern historian Willie Lee Rose cited egregious factual errors in The New York Review of Books. A few months later in The Times of London, Mark Ottaway persuasively argued that the griot whom Haley met in Gambia, the crucial link in Roots's research chain, was a phony and a setup. The Voice's Eliot Fremont-Smith, alone among New York critics, took the Courlander case seriously and challenged Haley's bona fides in a series of contemporaneous columns. The New York Times, in a critical summary accompanying a front-page follow-up to Ottaway, quoted Harvard professor Oscar Handlin's severe observa-tion about Roots: "A fraud's a fraud. ... Historians are reluctant—cowardly—about calling attention to factual errors when the general theme is in the right direction. That goes for foreign policy, for race, and for this book." Following the trial, other scholars would chip away at Roots. Yet Haley stood like a Colossus above his detractors and debunkers, waiting for the clouds to dissolve, and they always did. Even when Margaret Walker, the doyenne of black American belles lettres, sued him for allegedly copying her celebrated Civil War novel Jubilee- few paid attention.
 On February 23, the Alex Haley Papers at the Special Collections Library of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville will be opened. And it is in those archives that the truth about Roots, once crushed to earth by white guilt and repressed by black solidarity, is now emerging. Although George Sims, Haley's childhood friend and researcher, said, "Those files at UT, they were purged" to prevent "misinterpretation by nitpickers," and although some relatives and friends declined to be interviewed, enough smoking documents and informed observers have arisen to substantiate the modern era's most successful literary hoax.
To understand the daring and the grandiosity of Haley's fakery one has only to recall the last three chapters of Roots, in which he described his "amazing" detective work and linked himself and his family to the destiny of 25 million African Americans. "Flying homeward from Dakar, I decided to write a book," he states, depicting his spiritual cast of mind after the miraculous resurrection of Kunta Kinte. "My own ancestors' [sic] would also automatically be a symbolic saga of all African-descent people—who are without exception the seeds of someone like Kunta who was born and grew up in some black African village, someone who was captured and chained down in one of those slave ships that sailed them across the same ocean, into some succession of plantations, and since then a struggle for freedom."
But Haley did not decide during a plane ride in 1967 from Africa to go ahead with Roots. By then he was already at work on the book, which grew out of an idea he had sold, getting a $5000 advance, to Double-day in 1964 about his post-Emancipation family in Henning, Tennessee. Such episte-mological problems are embedded in Roots's final pages. The story behind the story, told in the last three chapters, is more compelling than the rest of the book. Here Haley, an amateur genealogist, ex-plains how in U.S. archives he located documents that traced his maternal line to a slave named Toby, who was captured in Gambia, shipped to Annapolis, and auctioned to John Waller, a farmer from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in 1767—all just like his grandmother said. According to his family, Toby was a defiant slave who had half a foot chopped off after a fourth escape attempt. Then he settled down and mated with a Waller house cook named Bell. They had a daughter, Kizzy, who absorbed her father's frequently told tales of Africa, spiced with foreign words like Kin-tay and Kamby Bolongo, and the English fragment 'Naplis for the spot where Kinte's slave ship docked. Kizzy passed the oral tradition down to her son, Chicken George, a gamecock trainer on Tom Lea's North Carolina plantation in the 1850s. George's son, a blacksmith named Tom Murray, led a brood of eight children out of slavery, one of whom passed the tales to her grandson, Alex Haley.
Haley did not want Roots to be regarded as fiction, thus the book's final chapter included the claim:
To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American families' carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural de-tails of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh, have come from years of intensive research in fifty-odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.
Yet, once questions were asked, Haley never engaged in any sustained defense of the factual content of Roots. A charmer and disarmer, he telephoned historian Willie Lee Rose after her blast in The New York Review of Books. "Why are you being so hard on me, Willie Lee?" he said. "I was just trying to give my people a myth to live by." He could also snarl: after Ottaway blew Kunta Kinte's cover and threatened to shipwreck Roots in the Times of London, Haley dismissed the criticism, calling it "a cheap shot. It's like saying Anne Frank nev-er existed or that the whole Nazi thing was a hoax." Releasing his much promised, virtually completed, yet unpublished My Search for Roots would not have dispelled the criti-cism. Since the last three chapters of Roots, a miniversion of Search, were riddled with falsities, a sequel would invite more doubts and risk further exposure. The manuscript of My Search for Roots, along with boxes of other Haley papers in the Special Collec-tions Library in Knoxville, undermines the integrity of Roots and its author. Consider the following:
1. The Griot Tape: The encounter with Kebba Kanji Fofana in the Gambian vil-lage of Juffure on May 17, 1967, was the defining moment of his career. Upon this single scene he built the church of Roots. But listening to the tape recording of the exchange strongly suggests that the events of that pivotal day were fabricated. Fofana recited no lineage of the Kinte clan as worshipfully portrayed in Roots. Instead Haley fed him a few prearranged questions, and the griot replied with answers massaged by Haley's Gambian associates. As long as he lived, Haley apparently never let anyone hear the tape.
"Haley told me that the name of the ship was part of his fam-ily's oral history." The ship's name, of course, does not appear in Roots's family oral history.
CHOPPING THE FAMILY TREE
"Can Roots be accepted as a pioneer work of black family history," Gary Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills asked in a 1981 arti-cle in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, "or is it a delusion that encourages mediocre scholarship in the na-scent field of Afro-American genealogy and relegates black family history to the aca-demic dark ages from which Caucasian ge-nealogy has already emerged? In short, is Roots a legitimate tool for Clio?" In the late '70s, Gary Mills used Roots to interest students in his black history courses at the University of Alabama in Gadsden. But, much to his frustration, he kept running into errors in the text. So one summer he and his wife, Elizabeth, editor of The National Genealogical Society Quar-terly, backtracked Haley through Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland archives to scrutinize the documents vaguely referred to in Roots. "We expected ineptitude, but not subter-fuge," Elizabeth said last fall from her home in Tuscaloosa. "Like every amateur genealogist, Haley made amateur mistakes, preferring his family's traditional oral his-tory whenever it conflicted with the evi-dence. But the records show that he got everything wrong in his pre–Civil War lin-eage. One hundred and eighty-two pages and 39 chapters on Haley's Virginia family have no basis in fact." Mills and Mills declared in Virginia Mag-azine : "By contrast, exhaustive research in the same repositories that [Haley] cites in-dicates the existence of only three peripher-al documents that were incorporated into Roots, and all were misinterpreted or mis-represented. In addition, a boundless num-ber of other documents exist which undeni-ably contradict the identifications, relationships, ownerships, and other specif-ic facts that are crucial to the story." The Millses discovered, for instance, that Kunta was not the slave named Toby owned by the John Waller family in Spotsylvania, Virginia. Furthermore, Waller's Toby died eight years before he supposedly fathered a daughter named Kizzy in 1790, as por-trayed in Roots. Most damning of all when stood next to Haley's text, Toby had been in America at least as early as 1762, five years before the Lord Ligonier docked in 'Naplis.
LIES ON THE PRIZE
How did Haley pull off the Roots scam so smoothly? Although the book sways with the lightest breeze from experts—as Ottoway, Wright, and the Millses proved—there was a savant's grace to Haley's grift.
How is it possible that Haley got away with it for so long? The answer is that no person or institution wanted to chal-lenge him. Take Judge Robert Ward, for example. In December, sitting in his cham-bers at the federal court building in Foley
Square, Judge Ward disclosed his unren-dered decision in the Courlander trial. "Pri-or to closing arguments," he recalled, "I had reached the tentative conclusion that not only was there copying but that it was in sufficient and compelling amounts to be substantial." The 62-year-old Nixon appointee nonetheless regarded his mercy as properly Solomonic. "Haley had written The Autobiography of Malcolm X and young black writers looked up to him," Ward said. "I did not want to destroy that, especially if the plaintiff was inclined to-ward a settlement." The judge's sentiments led him to wash his hands on the matter of suspected perju-ry. He chose not to pursue an affidavit, delivered after the trial by Courlander's lawyer Bob Kaplan, from a Skidmore Col-lege instructor who swore that he handed Haley his personal copy of The African in 1971. "I got all the truth there was to get at the trial. If you read the record, it's all in there." Haley, of course, hoped nobody would read the record. As long as they did not, he could pretend he settled Courlander only to save legal fees and that he had accidentally copied only three snatches from The Afri-can. Apparently, no reporter asked him why he had not waited a few hours more for the judge's decision or how three minor borrowings added up to $650,000. Thus Haley got away with the plagiarism and the hoax, never apologizing, never explaining, never confessing, never feeling the heat, and smearing his few critics as racist or jealous, "gnats," "parasites," and "scorpions." "Nobody wanted his ass," said former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, who voted for Haley's special prize when he was a member of the all-white, 17-man Pulitzer board. William McGill, for-mer president of Columbia and an ex offi-cio presence on the 1977 Pulitzer board, said, "If we blew the Haley prize, as we apparently did, I feel bad." Asked if the complexion of his colleagues was linked to Haley's award, McGill replied: "The an-swer to that question is yes. We were em-barrassed by our makeup. We all labored under the delusion that sudden expressions of love could make up for historical mis-takes.... Of course, that's inverse racism. But there was no way to deal with sensitiv-ities like this."
his prize should • be rescinded." - • The white male establishment (no blacks or women would sit on the Pulitzer board until 1979) recoiled from treating Haley harshly, and there was perhaps more reluc-tance among black intellectuals to disre-spect the writer who discovered Kunta Kinte. Dr. John Henrik Clarke, the grand old dean of black historians who mentored both Malcolm X and Haley, had qualms about Haley's bona fides, but he, too, kept silent. White men had visited so much evil on people of color with their lies that Dr. Clarke felt no obligation to trample down a black man who did so much good with his. The last line of Roots contained a great amen that even Malcolm X could love: " . this story of our people can help to alleviate the legacies of the fact that pre-ponderantly the histories have been written by the winners." "Our people need heroes and heroic oc-casions, something to feel good about them-selves," Dr. Clarke said in December in the book-strewn basement office of his Harlem brownstone. Though blind and aged 72, he still writes and lectures across the country. "When someone almost brings it off we eliminate the almost and give him the bene-fit of the doubt. "Look, Haley is not my enemy," said Dr. Clarke, expressing his tortured ambivalence about Roots. "I cried real tears when I realized that he was less than authentic. But we don't need no more phonies. We don't need no more fakers. . . . We're not weak-lings. We can take our tea with or without sugar." Alex Haley was certainly no hero to Mar-garet Walker—author of the landmark poem For My People (1942) as well as the celebrated, 3 million-seller Civil War novel Jubilee (1966). "I can't begin to tell you my absolute indignation," Walker said on the telephone from her home in Jackson, Mis-sissippi. Now 77 and working on her mem-oir, she spoke forlornly of her plagiarism case and the kiss of the Pulitzer prize.
"When we lost," Walker said, "I told my children that someday we'll know what a hoax Roots is." (Her copying claim against Haley was difficult to argue without the discovery process, which was denied her. Without this legal tool, Courlander might not have prevailed. "The trouble with Mar-garet Walker," Haley told a friend of Walk-er's and Haley's, "is that she didn't have the right lawyer.") Recalling testimony during her case, Margaret Walker is convinced that Haley's Playboy editor Murray Fisher is central to understanding Roots. "Haley was a hack and needed professional help," she argued, saying Fisher largely wrote Roots. Two Ha-ley letters divulged by his Doubleday editor Lisa Drew at Walker's hearing demonstrat-ed that Haley and Fisher fought over credit for the book just as the completed manu-script was being readied for the publisher in October 1975. Fisher wanted "Edited by Murray Fisher" stamped on the title page, a demand Haley agreed to reluctantly. Haley later reneged on the pledge after becoming angered by Fisher's boorish I'm-the-boss behavior during a story meeting with the producer of the miniseries. According to the correspondence, Haley erased his editor from the marquee and told him off at the same time. New West magazine later re-ported that Fisher got a 10 per cent royalty cut, which would add up to an estimated $500,000.  It was just money, money, money, Walker said.
Ken McCormick, former Doubleday editor in chief, is frail, but when he reminisced about Alex Haley he was as feisty as Jedediah Leland recalling Charlie Kane. "Haley was an intriguing guy," Mc-Cormick observed last fall in his West Side apartment. "Almost anything you could say about him is negotiable." McCormick said that he started to won-der about Haley's reliability every time he came in with a request for $10,000 more in advance, without showing or delivering any manuscript. On the question of authorship, McCormick mentioned a second and third writer. This development followed the first 185-page installment Haley brought Doub-leday in 1971. "The material was a mess," McCormick said, repeating his advice to Haley. "Alex, quit kidding. We want this book to go. Work with a writer and we'll pay for him. . . . We got a lot of rewriting and paid two people who really wrote the book." When asked for their names, he remembered Murray Fisher's but not the other. At the Walker trial, McCormick testified that Roots, contrary to the company line, is a novel. ("You consider it to be fiction?" Walker's lawyer asked. McCormick replied, "I do, personally.") Editor Lisa Drew, in her testimony during the Courlander trial, said she lobbied Doubleday's publishing committee to create the nonfiction label. This genre switch was extremely signifi-
cant. Most houses are purposely indifferent to the factual content of their nonfiction titles unless libel is in the air. By taking ir upon itself to designate the book nonfic-tion, Doubleday vouched for the truth of Roots. But how could they possibly know? At the Walker hearings, where Drew alsc took the stand, she was asked, "Did you check and corroborate the historical facts that are contained in the book?" "No," she replied, "that isn't part of the editorial function, so I didn't do that." "Did anyone do that at Doubleday?" "No."

Murray Fisher insisted that he knew nothing about a hoax and that his reputa-tion as "the white guy who really wrote Roots" was unfair. He said that he did not recall important prepublication milestones like the first appearance of the Mandinka fragments, the disastrous first submission, or the parts of the book he himself auth-ored. Haley remarks on the acknowledg-ment page that Fisher assisted in plotting and "drafted some of Roots's scenes." In an early interview, Fisher said Haley's acknowledgments were exaggerated. Yes, he did some writing at the end of the or-deal, but Haley rewrote on top of him, leaving nothing of his labor behind. Except-ing that, it was all Haley's book with no abnormal editing requirements. But a sheaf of 50 to 75 manuscript pages in a folder marked "Fisher Edited Copy" at the Knoxville archives indicates that Fisher downscaled the degree of his collaboration. These Fisher-marked pages, corresponding to the first chapters of Roots, constitute a total rewrite, with hardly a line of Haley-typed manuscript surviving Fisher's pencil. And there were no author revisions either. Copy-edited by Fisher meant final copy. According to Bill Shaw, the Philadelphia book collector who bought a chunk of Ha-ley's papers at auction in October, there are more chapters that were substantially re-written by Fisher in his collection. When Shaw informed Fisher that he was talking to the Voice, Fisher implored him not to cooperate. Confronted with the contents of these folders in a later interview, Fisher admitted he rewrote the African section—more than a fifth of the book—because Haley was trapped in a quagmire of Africana. "Final-ly, we ran out of time and I just simply decided to take the bull by the horns and finished them [the African chapters]." After that, he said, Haley got on track in the slaveship section and that it was easy sail-ing through the Civil War to the end of the book. But this rendition of the history of Roots is not consistent with other facts. Although no Fisher line-edits or rewrites of the mid-dle and late chapters have surfaced, Fisher and Haley became more and more attached as the manuscript grew. In 1973, Fisher signed a contract for 10 per cent of Haley's royalties and 5 per cent of the movie rights. The next year, he quit his Playboy job in Chicago and moved to Los Angeles to work full-time on the project. He labored with Haley during long interludes in the author's Jamaican hideaway in 1974 and in 1975. Fisher said he was also in Haley's hotel room during a crash retooling of the final 180 pages of the text. Initially, Fisher denied seeking credit on the title page and was unaware of any 10 per cent royalty deal. Then he said he did not remember such things. Only after docu-ments suggested otherwise did he relent. "There were levels of openness depending on the information you had," he said. "I don't want to feed the fires of doubt .... You can use this as a pretext to impugn my credibility. . . . But I'm trying to be truthful."
Haley could persuasively lie about anything- little lies like passing off store food as home-cooked and big lies like stripping down to his shorts and staying 10 nights in the darkened hold of the freighter African Star which sailed from Dakar to Florida 1973, in order to divine the agony of Kunta Kinte's crossing. ("That never happened," said Frank Ewers, the Star's former first mate. "I had the keys to the hold and Haley never went down there at night. He would have died from the cocoa fumes.") Money problems often forced Haley to beg editors for more advances on four books that were never completed. In 1973, while working on Roots, he and a young Leonard Jeffries, then the head of Black Studies at San Jose State, won a $459,000 grant from the Carnegie Endowment to amass black genealogical documents from around the world and put them in a reposi-tory called the Kinte Library. A codirector with Haley on the project, Jeffries told the Voice that he had no idea where the collected documents were and that his own were destroyed by a flood in his home. Then there was the time Haley refused his only son Bill a loan, saying he had spent $5 million in two years because he was dying of lung cancer, a disease Haley did not have. It was true, however, that Haley was
borrowing money himself and died broke. He never, of course, confessed to the Roots hoax, though he once came close. In the spring of 1990, he had graciously invit-ed a young New York genealogist named Charles Galbraith down to his farm in Knoxville. Galbraith had made a name for himself in the profession by tracing back the lineage of Kitty Dukakis through New York and back to Ireland. He originally intended to write a tribute to Haley for putting the field of genealogy on the American map, but after reading the Millses' refutation, his admiration diminished. When Galbraith arrived at Haley's farm, he was a skeptic. Nevertheless, Galbraith hoped that Haley would somehow explain himself. For most of their conversation, Haley stubbornly stuck to the legend, denouncing detractors and awkwardly refusing to read Galbraith's copy of the Millses' article. No matter what anybody said, Haley consoled himself with having written "the two most important books in black culture since the Civil War period, or the civil rights period." But at one point in the taping, Haley raised the curtain ever so slightly on his predicament. In the middle of a meander-ing, inarticulate defense of his intellectual honesty, Haley perhaps said too much about Roots: "And I have no question but what there must be a hundred other errors in the book. I would lay claim to them. I'd lay claim to some of them in innocence, I would lay claim to others in carelessness, and to oth-ers for one or another thing. But the only thing I would also strongly lay claim to, none of them were an effort to slick over something. Not an effort to get away with something."
" I was caught up in the sweep and the swell of the hugeness of the overall thing. The quest for the symbolic history of a people just swept me like a twig atop a rushing water. It was sort of like riding a tiger. You ride this tiger and the crowd's cheering, if you fall off the tiger, you's eaten"

Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn

`So you are Miss Crowe' It was not the most friendly greeting, Letty felt, but there was nothing for it but to repeat that she was indeed Miss Crowe and to assume that the woman peering through the barely opened door must be Mrs Pope. And why should she have expected friendliness when the relationship between them was to be that of landlady and tenant ? Friendliness was by no means to be taken for granted. Obviously she should have expected little in the way of warmth, with the taxi taking her what seemed so very far north, though the postal address was only Nw6. It was not long before Christmas — St Lucy's Day, Edwin had reminded her, though the saint seemed to have no particular significance for the move. Norman, of course, made much of it being the shortest day. 'Get there in good time,' he advised. 'You don't want to be wandering about in a strange district after dark.' `One has to be careful,' Mrs Pope went on, opening the door a little wider. 'There are so many impostors these days.' Letty had to agree, though she felt that Mrs Pope was not the sort of person to be taken in by an impostor. While Edwin's impression and description of her had been merely that of a woman in her eightieth year who was 'wonderful for her age', Lefty now saw that she was an imposing figure with noble almost Roman features and a mass of thick white hair, of the kind that is sometimes described as 'abundant', arranged in an elaborate old-fashioned style. After the vitality and warmth of Mr Olatunde's house Mrs Pope's seemed bleak and silent, with its heavy dark furniture and ticking grandfather clock, the kind of tick that would keep one awake until one got used to it. Lefty was shown the kitchen where she could prepare her meals and a cupboard where she could keep her food. The bathroom and lavatory were indicated with gestures, being not the kind of rooms into which one would show people.

and

 It appeared that Marjorie had come to London to buy clothes for her trousseau, which seemed to Lefty not only an old-fashioned idea but an inappropriate one for a woman in her sixties. Yet Marjorie had always been of a romantic nature, getting the most out of unpromising circumstances. Even Marcia, Lefty recalled, had an 'interest' in the surgeon who had performed her operation, so that a visit to hospital was something to be looked forward to. Only Letty, it seemed, was without romance in her life, and the prospect of Marjorie's marriage was something beyond her imagining. If she had now got over any disappointment she may have felt at the cancellation of her retirement plans, she was still not able to enter fully into Marjorie's rapture. But she could offer suggestions about clothes and perhaps that was something. shall be wearing a blue crepe dress,' Marjorie was saying, 'and I thought of getting a small, matching hat.' `You could wear a wide-brimmed hat,' Lefty said. A woman of their age could do with a few becoming shadows cast on the face, she thought. 'Oh, do you think so? Yes, I suppose it's not like Royalty — people don't necessarily expect to see one's face — or want to,' Marjorie laughed. 'And of course there won't be crowds of people it's going to be very quiet.' `Yes, I suppose so.' The weddings of older people usually were. `You don't mind, do you, Lefty?' `Mind?' Letty was surprised at the question. `At not being asked to be a bridesmaid, I mean.' `Of course not! I never thought of it.' Older women attending each other in this way seemed highly unsuitable and she was surprised that Marjorie had suggested it. In any case, Lefty had been a bridesmaid at Marjorie's first wedding. She wondered if Marjorie had forgotten this but was too tactful to remind her of it. `And we shan't even be having any guests just my brother to give me away and a friend of David's, a fellow priest, as best man.' `Has he any relations?' `Just his mother — he's an only child.' `But his mother won't be at the wedding?' Marjorie smiled. 'Well, she's in her ninetieth year, so I would hardly expect it. She is living in a religious community — the nuns have taken her in.' `To end her days? It seems a good arrangement.' Lefty saw that churchgoing might have some unexpected advantages and wondered if Mrs Pope had arranged to be taken in by nuns one day.

Spinoza & Leibniz

Modernity reduces God's creation to a silent, colorless, odorless world of weights and measures—a pointless machine—or so it has seemed to many observers. Spinoza embraces this new world indeed, with his doctrine that God is Nature, he attempts to deify it. But Leibniz does not believe in Spinoza's new deity. And it is this rejection of Spinoza's God that represents the first principle of Leibniz's mature philosophy and the starting point of his own, unique response to modernity. Any God worthy of the name, says Leibniz, must be able to make choices. That is, God must have an intellect with which to contemplate his options, and a will with which to affirm his decisions. God must have a choice, according to Leibniz's way of thinking, because otherwise he would not have a chance to be good. That is, God must make his choices with the idea that he is doing something that deserves praise. But Spinoza's God makes no choices. It has no will or intellect, at least as we understand those terms. In Spinoza's world, furthermore, "good" is just a term relative to human needs and limitations, no more applicable to God than, say, "delicious," "orange," or, for that matter, "bad." The God of Spinoza, Leibniz concludes, is not a God at all. Spinoza was, as he puts it to the Count von Hessen-Rheinfels, "truly Atheist." The questions Leibniz raises here concerning Spinoza's doctrine of God are valid ones, and must be contemplated by all those who wish to penetrate to the core of either philosopher's thought. According to Spinoza, God or Nature causes the things of the world in the same way that the nature of a coffee, for example, causes it to be black. But we do not usually say that that the nature of coffee is divine, so why should we say that Nature is God? In the Ethics, as a matter of fact, one can substitute the word "Nature" (or "Substance," or even simply an X) for God throughout, and the logic of the argument changes  little, if at all. So, why use the term "God" at all? What does the name of God add—except, perhaps, some of the crusty and, for Spinoza, impermissible connotations about a divine decision maker who, say, chooses to make coffee black rather than pink? The intuition that motivates Leibniz's position here might be stated this way: what is divine must be in some way beyond or before what is natural, or else it is not divine at all. In arguing that God must be good, Leibniz puts his finger on a related paradox in Spinoza's thinking. To say that nature is divine is in some way to judge the world—usually, to imply that the world as a whole is good. Nietzsche—whose qualifications as a Spinozist have been insufficiently acknowledged, even by himself—suggests as much when he says that Spinoza "deified the All" in order to "affirm" the world. Spinoza himself says that the world is "perfect." But, according to Spinoza's own logic, the totality of things lies beyond all human judgment. It is neither good nor bad. Now, says Leibniz, if Spinoza cannot say that the world is good, he certainly cannot say that it is perfect, except in the most abstract sense meaning "complete" or "all that there is." He cannot judge or "affirm" the world in the way that one must if one says that it is divine. Therefore, he has no license to give Nature the name of God, as he claims to do. Even as he rejects Spinoza's concept of God, however, Leibniz retains his deep commitment to the guidance of reason. No less than Spinoza, he finds intolerable the idea of a God without reason, that is, a God who makes up reasons as he goes along, who has the arbitrary power to declare that two plus two is four on one day and then change his mind the next. Like Spinoza, Leibniz now faces one of the defining problems of modernity, namely, how to manage the potentially destructive conflict between God and Nature, or between belief in divinity and the ever expanding power circle of scientific knowledge. Unlike his more orthodox contemporaries, Leibniz is too honest to ignore the claims of reason. Unlike Spinoza, however, he cannot find it in himself to deify the object of the new sciences. His problem, then, is to discover a God of reason—that is, one who answers to philosophical proofs and whose existence is compatible with the findings of science—who nonetheless avoids the Spinozistic pitfall of losing his divinity altogether. In the Discourse, Leibniz first formulates his answer to this problem in a clear and perspicuous way. "God has chosen that world which is most perfect," he writes. That is to say, God is that being which chooses the "the best of all possible worlds." In his later writings, in which he allows himself the poetic license that accrues to well-ripened visions, Leibniz presents a more vivid representation of this idea of God. In the final pages of his Theodicy, a character named Theodorus (Leibniz's alter ego in this instance) falls asleep in a temple and begins to dream. In his reverie, he visits "a palace of unimaginable splendor and prodigious size"—an edifice that, as it happens, belongs to God. The halls in the palace represent possible worlds. As Theodorus wanders through this magnificent con-struction, he tours a variety of worlds in which things happened very differently than in our own: worlds in which Adam did not eat the apple, for instance, and worlds in which Judas kept his mouth shut.
The halls rose in a pyramid, becoming even more beautiful as one mounted toward the apex, and representing more beautiful worlds. Finally they reached the highest one which completed the pyramid, and which was the most beautiful of all: ... for the pyramid had an apex, but no base; it went on increasing to infinity. That is . . . because amongst an endless number of possible worlds there is the best of all, else God would not have deter-mined to create any.
The world at the apex, the best of all possible worlds, it turns out, is the actual world, the one in which we live. The vision is unmistakably baroque. It is possibly an apt represen-tation of what it feels like to get lost at Versailles, and perhaps it is best read with music of the period in the back of one's mind. (Handel, incidentally, was Leibniz's fellow courtier at Hanover in the year that the Theodicy was published.) The passage also oozes the optimism that would later induce Voltaire to satirize Leibniz in the figure of Dr. Pangloss. After all, many would have guessed that our world is one or two levels down from the top of the pyramid, at the very least. In any case, the crucial and novel feature in Leibniz's account is his characterization of God's choice in terms of possible worlds—as opposed to possible things. According to Leibniz, God chooses not between, say, allowing Adam to eat the apple or not, but between pos-sible worlds that do or do not include an Adam eating an apple. This marks what Leibniz believed was one of his decisive breakthroughs in the ten years after his journey to The Hague. In his earlier writings, Leibniz's unswerving commitment to the principle of sufficient rea-son made it difficult for him to conceive of possible things. For, inas-much as everything happens for a reason, there are no isolated accidents or random events in Leibniz's world—everything is part of a single, causal tapestry. "Because of the interconnection of things," he acknowledges at the time of his Discourse, "the universe with all its parts would be wholly different from the commencement if the least thing in it happened otherwise than it had." By raising God's choice to the level of possible worlds, however, Leibniz can have his princi-ple of sufficient reason and eat it, too, in a sense: that is, he can grant that all things within our world are linked together in a necessary way while still maintaining that the world as a whole does not necessar-ily have to be the way that it is. "The reasons for the world," he says, "lie in something extramundane." The concept of possible worlds, according to Leibniz's way of
thinking, also neatly solves the problem of God's goodness. Inasmuch as God does not choose particular things, he does not choose things that are evil; rather, he chooses a world that, for some reason, must have evil in it. The reason for this world is the principle of the best, which God applies with perfect precision; and if this world seems to us to have things that deserve the name of evil, we may nonetheless rest assured that God could not have made a better choice. In other to solidify the conclusion that God must make a choice, Leibniz labors hard to establish a distinction between "moral" neces-sity and "metaphysical" necessity. God's decision to create the best of all possible worlds, he grants, exhibits a kind of moral necessity. That is, if God wishes to be good, he must apply the principle of the best in his choice of possible worlds. But God's choice does not involve any metaphysical necessity. That is, God is theoretically capable of ordering up a less than ideal world, or no world at all, should he be so inclined. At this point, the contrast with Spinoza's concept of God could hardly be starker—and that is precisely the point behind the vision. The difference goes back to that simple-sounding question: Does God have a choice? Spinoza says no; Leibniz says yes. Spinoza says that God has only one world to choose from, namely, the one that follows ineluctably from its own Nature. Leibniz counters that God always has the option not to create the world; and, when God decides to go ahead with the project, he faces a choice among an infinite number of possible worlds. Spinoza's God has no need for anthropo-morphic encumbrances such as a will or intellect, for it has no choices to contemplate and no resolutions to affirm. Leibniz's God, on the other hand, looks much more like you or me: he must have a capacity for thought and action,in order to make his choices. Finally, whereas Spinoza's Substance is well beyond the merely human cate-gories of good and evil, Leibniz's God is the ultimate do-gooder, as he shuffles through all possible worlds hoping to locate "the best." In sum, Spinoza believes in an "immanent" God; Leibniz argues for a "transcendent" one. Spinoza's God is the immanent cause of things: it creates the world in the same way that an essence creates its prop-erties that is, in the same way that the nature of a circle makes it round. It is in the world (just as the world is in it) and therefore can-not conceivably be associated with any other world or with no world at all. A transcendent God, on the other hand, is the "transitive" cause of things. He creates the world in the same way that a watchmaker makes a watch. He stands outside the world, and he would still be God whether he opted to create this world, another world, or no world at all. He has a certain degree of personhood (which is why we tend to call him "he," in deference to the tradition). Leibniz some-times uses the phrase "supra-mundane intelligence" to describe his transcendent God. Dropping the polysyllables, we could also say sim-ply that Spinoza's divinity is one that inhabits the "here and now," while Leibniz's resides in the "before and beyond." The confrontation between Leibnizian and Spinozistic concep-tions of divinity, incidentally, continues to characterize discussions to the present, notably in the field of cosmology (never mind the rela-tively changeless field of theology). Among contemporary physicists, for example, there are those who maintain that the laws of nature are inherently arbitrary. According to their rather Leibnizian view, God (or perhaps a Great Designer) selects from among an infinite range of parameters for the laws of nature, and everything else in the world then unfolds within the chosen regime. Others physicists, however, maintain that the parameters that define the laws of physics may ulti-mately be determined by the laws themselves, such that nature may account for itself in an utterly self-sufficient way. Such theorists may be said to lean to the side of Spinoza. In the seventeenth century, of course, the difference between Leib-nizian and Spinozan concepts of divinity was hugely—and perhaps essentially—political. Spinoza argues that the deity of popular super-stition is a prop for theocratic tyranny. But what Spinoza calls theo-cratic oppression Leibniz identifies as the best of all possible systems of government. Thus, Leibniz turns the tables and calls Spinoza's con-cept of God "bad" and "dangerous," on the grounds that it will lead only to "out-and-out anarchy" His own concept of God, Leibniz assures us, will protect civilization—indeed, it will serve as the basis for a Christian republic united under a single church. Leibniz's insistence on political implications of the metaphysics of
divinity is so forceful that it raises the question as to whether his entire philosophy, like Spinoza's perhaps, was essentially a political project. For, inasmuch as it is the universal belief in the goodness of God that brings about the desired political ends of unity, stability, and charity, then the facts of the matter—whether God does indeed make choices and is good—don't matter at all. Philosophy, on this assump-tion, is not the disinterested search for the truth about God, but a highly sophisticated form of political rhetoric.

Agatha Christie

From Passenger to Frankfurt of which Robert Barnard said:
"The last of the thrillers, and one that slides from the unlikely to the inconceivable and finally lands up in incomprehensible muddle. Prizes should be offered to readers who can explain the ending. Concerns the youth uproar of the 'sixties, drugs, a new Aryan superman and so on, subjects of which Christie's grasp was, to say the least, uncertain (she seems to have the oddest idea of what the term 'Third World' means, for example). Collins insisted she subtitle the book 'An Extravaganza.' One can think of other descriptions."

Sir Stafford Nye adjusted himself more comfortably in his seat and listened to the persistent hammering of the Nibelungen, with which the program began. Though he enjoyed Wagnerian opera, Siegfried was by no means his favorite of the operas composing the Ring. Rheingold and Gatterdiimmerung were his two preferences. The music of the young Siegfried, listening to the songs of the birds, had always for some strange reason irritated him instead of filling him with melodic satisfaction. It might have been because he went to a performance in Munich in his young days which had displayed a magnificent tenor of unfortunately overmagnificent proportions, and he had been too young to divorce the joy of music from the visual joy of seeing a young Siegfried that looked even passably young. The fact of an outsized tenor rolling about on the ground in an access of boyishness had revolted him. He was also not particularly fond of birds and forest mur-murs. No, give him the Rhine Maidens every time, al-though in Munich even the Rhine Maidens in those days had been of fairly solid proportions. But that mattered less. Carried away by the melodic flow of water and the joyous impersonal song, he had not allowed visual appreciation to matter.

and

 By the way, Staffy, did you ever read The Prisoner of Zenda?" "Prisoner of Zenda? Sounds very familiar." "Well, of course it's familiar, it's a book." "Yes, yes, I realize it's a book." , "You wouldn't know about it, I expect. After your time. But when I was a girl—that's about the first taste of romance we got. Not pop singers or Beatles. Just a romantic novel. We weren't allowed to read novels when was young. Not in the morning, anyway. You could read them in the afternoon." "What extraordinary rules," said Sir Stafford. "Why is it wrong to read novels in the morning and not in the afternoon?" "Well, in the mornings, you see, girls were supposed be doing something useful. You know, doing the flowers or cleaning the silver photograph frames. All the things we girls did. Doing a bit of studying with the governess all that sort of thing. In the afternoon we were allow to sit down and read a storybook, and The Prisoner of Zenda was usually one of the first ones that came our way." "A very nice, respectable story, was it? I seem to remember something about it. Perhaps I did read it. All very pure, I suppose. Not too sexy?"
''Certainly not. We didn't have sexy books. We had romance. The Prisoner of Zenda was very romantic. One fell in love, usually, with the hero, Rudolf Rassendyll."I seem to remember that name, too. Bit florid, isn't it?' Well, I still think it was rather a romantic name. Twelve years old, I must have been. It made me think of it, you know, your going up and looking at that portrait. princess Flavia," she added. Stafford Nye was smiling at her. "You look young and pink and very sentimental," he said. "Well, that's just what I'm feeling. Girls can't feel like that nowadays. They're swooning with love, or they're fainting when somebody plays the guitar or sings in a very loud voice, but they're not sentimental. But I wasn't in love with Rudolf Rassendyll. I was in love with the other one—his double." "Did he have a double?" "Oh, yes, a king. The King of Ruritania." "Ah, of course, now I know. That's where the word Ruritania comes from: one is always throwing it about. Yes, I think I did read it, you know. The King of Ruriania, and Rudolf Rassendyll was stand-in for the King and fell in love with Princess Flavia, to whom the King as officially betrothed." Lady Matilda gave some more deep sighs. Yes. Rudolf Rassendyll had inherited his red hair from ancestress, and somewhere in the book he bows to the ortrait and says something about the—I can't remember the name now—the Countess Amelia or something like that from whom he inherited his looks and all the rest of it.

Mickey Mantle

From the bio by Jane Leavy:

That the earth would give way beneath his feet was a grim irony for Mickey Mantle. Growing up in Commerce, Oklahoma, in the dead center of the Tri-State Mining District, fatalism was an inheritance. It percolated up from the tainted, unstable earth. That forgotten corner where Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas meet was hardly the Oklahoma of Rodgers and Hammerstein. A century of mining lead and zinc from the ancient bed-rock had left the ground as hollowed out as the faces of the men who worked it. The lead went into munitions used to fight the Hun in World Wars I and II, into lead-based paints and pigments, into sinkers for fishing rods and weights for balancing tires. It was also crucial to the manufacture of lead-acid storage batteries. Zinc was needed to galvanize steel, to cure rubber, and to line sinks and washstands. It was an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
Two blocks west of the front door of Mantle's boyhood home was a hulking, ashen heap of mineral detritus disgorged from the abandoned Turkey Fat Mine, where the first shaft' was sunk in Commerce. Three blocks from the house he purchased for his parents with his first World Series check was a crater twenty to thirty feet deep, an insidious reminder of how easily life could give way. That house at 317 South River Street, with the family's first telephone, was where he went to recuperate when doctors at Johns Hopkins told him he could go home. By the time he arrived, Mutt had gone back to work as the ground boss at the Blue Goose Mine. Even before Mutt got sick, before Mantle ripped up his right knee trying not to run into Joe "Fuckin' DiMaggio, he had reason to doubt his own longevity. Everything about the world that produced him under-mined confidence in long life. When a reporter came to call, Mantle told him that three hundred feet below his chair, men like Mutt were trying to claw out a living from exhausted mines. It was only a slight exaggeration. Mining had created a tenth circle of Hell, turning a verdant swath of the Great Plains into alien terrain, flat except for the mammoth piles of mineral waste known as chat. Locals call this range of bleached man-made dunes the "Chatanagey" Mountains. Cruel Billy Martin called Merlyn "Chat Pile Annie." The highest of them, at the Eagle-Picher Central Mill, a mile and a half northeast of the Mantles' home, was a twenty-story behemoth built from over 13 million tons of chat. Long after the ore played out, the meta-static landscape remained disfigured by 5,000 acres of tailing piles and sludge ponds so toxically opaque that no shadows were cast upon them; 1,200 open or collapsing mine shafts lurked beneath the overgrown, con-taminated grass; 40,000 drill holes and hundreds of water wells reached deep into the Roubidoux Aquifer. The worst desecration was centered in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, where 2,500 acres were left undermined, 50 of them punctured by cave-ins. Also left behind when the ore played out were 300 miles of tunnels that wound their way through parts of three states and underground caverns, one as big as the Houston Astrodome. Some folks swear you can walk the twenty-eight miles from Commerce, Oklahoma, to Joplin, Missouri, without ever seeing the sky. Only 6 percent of what miners like Mutt hauled out of the ground was
ore-grade--thus the aptly named Discard Mine on the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Waste laced with cadmium, magnesium, copper, and gallium was strewn over 41 square miles. When the Mantles arrived in the area in 1935, a time of unprece-dented and violent labor unrest in the Tri-State region, these towering buttes were a source of pride for a workforce known for its fierce indepen-dence and anti-union ways. Adults regarded them as protectors against the tornados that spiraled across the land. Children rode their bikes up the dusty slopes in summer and slid down them on rusting car hoods in winter. In the shadow of these bleak mounds, they roasted wieners, ate cake, and sang "Happy Birthday." Boys learned to play baseball on dried-out sludge ponds of chemical residue, alkali flats as smooth as the most manicured major league infield but not as forgiving. There was one a block from Mantle's home and the ball would roll forever, which is why, he confessed later, he preferred to play the infield. "They was full of lead and zinc—it's a wonder we all didn't end up with lead poisoning in our blood," his boyhood friend LeRoy Bennett said. "There was no grass that growed on 'em because it was so heavily slanted one way or the other on the chemical chart." Everyone but Mantle learned to swim in the quarries created by cave-ins, leaving them with rat-red eyes; his mother would haul him home in a fury when she caught him so much as wading. He could barely manage the dog paddle. Cave-ins were routine yet shocking. One night driving home from work, Merlyn's uncle felt the pavement give way beneath his wheels. "Went over and it crashed in," Merlyn told me. Route 66, the Mother Road connecting Chicago and Santa Monica, California--and Mickey and Merlyn's hometowns—was not immune. "I never will forget, one time, the highway splittin' wide open," Bennett said. "Miners were always gettin' killed and that kind of thing, but it was kind of expected. Eventually it was gonna happen and you couldn't do anything about it anyway, so most people just accepted it." Everyone knew the air the miners breathed wasn't good, that the work was lethal, the earth's crust precarious, but Paul Thomas, the undertaker who buried Mickey's father and Merlyn's mother, never thought he would have to bury the entire place. No one could have imagined that one day the government would pay citizens to leave their toxic homes. Hanging from
the beams in Thomas's Picher garage above three shiny hearses were rusty relics of the miners he interred: helmets with carbide lamps, lanterns, and kettles. The walls were covered by wide-angle portraits of proudmining crews, including Mutt Mantle's at the Hum-bah-wah-tah Mine. Posed in front of the doghouse where they changed their clothes, lunch pails at their feet, the roof trimmers, hookers, bumpers, and rope riders peer at the camera through masks of exhaustion and soot. An Eagle-Picher sign declares: WE USE SAFETY HERE. The photo is dated June 8, 1941. In the language of the mines, men worked on top or in the ground, never above or below. In 1935, when Mutt went to work for Eagle-Picher, a common underground worker earned $2.80 a day, according to Union Busting in the Tri-State, a definitive history of the industry written by George Suggs, Jr. In an eight-hour shift, miners filled as many as forty-five to sixty 1,250-pound cans, all by hand, lifting up to 75,000 pounds every day. They rode to work in the buckets they loaded, falling into the dark-ness at the force of gravity. Everything needed below went down the same five-by-seven-foot shaft, including the air they breathed—there was no other ventilation. The mules that pulled the cans to the shaft lived out their lives in the ground inhaling the smell of mother earth in a climate-controlled 65-degree tomb. The working conditions for man and beast were appalling. Miners carved the rock face, inhaling the dust generated by their labor. A roof trimmer standing atop an 80-foot ladder chipped ore from the ceiling while four rope riders steadied the precarious perch. Their backbreaking labor required teamwork and bred a mordant camaraderie not unlike that of baseball teams. It's no accident that so many of them, including Mutt and his brother Eugene —known as Tunney—spent their off days playing baseball in the sun-shine and arguing over pitch selection. The mine whistle summoned Mutt and his crew at 7 A.M. and sent them home at 4 P.M., fifteen minutes after the dynamite charges were lit in prepara-tion for the next day's dig. The ground shook; wives and children went about their business and hoped for the best. "Sirens were a dreaded, scary thing, because that did mean there had been some kind of a cave-in and somebody was hurt," said Ben Craig, a banker in Kansas City who played sandlot ball with Mantle. "It was just, always, hold your breath."