All the King's Men- final 2 passages

I lay there, having drowned in West, my body having drifted down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze on the sea floor of History. Lying there, I had what I thought then was a fine per- spective on my own history, and saw that the girl I had known that summer a long time back hadn’t been beautiful and charming but had merely been smooth-faced and healthy, and though she had sung songs to Jackie-Bird while she cradled his head on her breast, she hadn’t loved him, but had merely had a mysterious itch in the blood and he was handy and the word love was a word for the mysterious itch. And that she had been tormented by the mysterious itch and torn between its impulse and fear, and that all her withholdments and hesitations had not been prompted by some dream of making “love mean something’ and making me understand that dream but that they had been prompted by all the fears which the leaning, sibilant, sour-breathed old dough-faces of conventional society had whispered into her ear like fairy godmothers while she lay in her cradle, and that those withholdments and hesitations were no better or worse than the hottest surrender nor better or worse than those withholdments practiced by Lois for other ends. And in die end you could not tell Anne Stanton from Lois Seager, for they were alike, and though the mad poet William Blake wrote a poem to tell the Adversary who is Prince of This World that He could not ever change Kate into Nan, the mad poet was quite wrong, for anybody could change Kate into Nan, or if indeed the Prince couldn't change Kate into Nan it was only because Kate and Nan were exactly alike to begin with and were, in fact, the same with only the illusory difference of name, which meant nothing, for names meant nothing and all the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog's leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through. So when I lay there on the bed in Long Beach, and shut my eyes, I saw in the inward darkness as in mire the vast heave and contortion of numberless bodies, and limbs detached from bodies, sweating and perhaps bleeding from inexhaustible wounds. But finally this spectacle, which I could summon up by the mere act of closing my eyes, seemed merely funny to me. So I laughed out loud. I laughed out loud, and then after watching for some time the rhythmic flushing of the sea mist by the neon sign, I went to sleep. When I woke up I made ready to go back to the place and the things I had come from. Years before, a young girl had lain there naked on the iron bed in my room with her eyes closed and her hands folded over her breast, and I had been so struck by the pathos of her submissiveness and her trust in me and of the moment which would plunge her into the full, dark stream of the world that I had hesitated before laying my hands upon her and had, without understanding myself, called out her name. At that time I had had no words for what I felt, and now, too, it is difficult to find them. But lying there, she had seemed to be again the little girl who had, on the day of the picnic, floated on the waters of the bay, with her eyes closed under the stormy and grape-purple sky and the single white gull passing over, very high. As she lay there that image came into my head, and I had wanted to call her name, to tell her something—what, I did not know. She trusted me, but perhaps for that moment of hesitation I did not trust myself, and looked back upon the past as some- thing precious about to be snatched away from us and was afraid of the future. I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore I lacked some essential confidence in the world and in myself. She came, as time passed, to suspect this fact about me. I do not know that she had words to describe the fact to herself. Or she only had the easy words people gave her: wanting to have a job, studying law, doing some- thing. We went different ways in the world, as I have said, but I had with me always that image of the little girl on the waters of the bay, all innocence and trustfulness, under the stormy sky. Then, there came the day when that image was taken from me. I learned that Anne Stanton had become the mistress of Willie Stark, that some- how by an obscure and necessary logic I had handed her over to him. That fact was too horrible to face, for it robbed me of some- thing out of the past by which, unwittingly until that moment, I had been living. So I fled west from the fact, and in the West, at the end of His-tory, the Last Man on that Last Coast, on my hotel bed, I had dis- covered the dream. That dream was the dream that all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve. When you flee as far as you can flee, you will always find that dream, which is- the dream of our age. At first, it is always a nightmare and horrible, but in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic. At least, it was so for me for a certain time. It was bracing because after the dream I felt that, in a way, Anne Stanton did not exist. The words Anne Stanton were simply a name for a peculiarly complicated piece of mechanism which should mean nothing whatsoever to Jack Burden, who himself was simply another rather com- plicated piece of mechanism. At that time, when I first discovered that view of things— really discovered, in my own way and not from any book— I felt that 1 had discovered the secret source of all strength and all endurance. That dream solves all problems. At first It was, as I have said, rather bracing and tonic. For after the dream there is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about die past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Stark), for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody’s fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all. If you believe the dream you dream when you go there. 

and

a settlement named Don Jon, New Mexico, I talked to a man propped against the shady side of the filling station, enjoying the only patch of shade in a hundred miles due east. He was an old fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the fact that while 332 you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, *which seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy's jaw, you would suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he wasn’t going to wink. The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind the face or to anything in the whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we are lost in. It was remarkable, in that face, the twitch which lived that little life all its own. I squatted by his side, where he sat on a bundle of rags from which the handle of a tin skillet protruded, and listened to him talk. But the words were not alive. What was alive was the twitch, of which he was no longer aware. After my tank had been filled, I continued to watch that twitch, with glances stolen from the highway, as we sat side by side in the car and hurtled eastward. He was going east, too, going back. That was back in the days when the dust storms were blowing half the country away and folks headed west like the lemmings on a ram- page. Only, the folks who got there lacked the fine ecstasy of the lemmings. They did not start swimming in teeming, obsessed hordes straight out to the middle of the blue Pacific. That would have been the logical thing for them to do, just start swimming, pa and ma, grandpa and grandma, and Baby Rosebud with the running sore on her little chin, the whole kit and kaboodle of 'em, flailing the water to a froth and heading out. But, no, they were not like the lemmings, and so they just sat down and starved slowly in California. But this old fellow didn't. He was going back to north Arkansas to starve where he had come from. “Californy," he said, '‘hit is jes lak the rest of the world, only it is more of hit." “Yeah," I replied, “that is a fact." “You been thar?" he demanded. I told him I had been there. “You goen back home?" he asked. I told him I was going home. We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me to try for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the final wisdom under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing. Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all? Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man's face know about the twitch, m and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great Twitch. 

Does God Exist?

From Robert Wright

It‘s a bedrock idea of modern physics that, even if you define “ultimate reality” as the ultimate scientific reality-the most fundamental truths of physics- ultimate reality isn’t something you can clearly conceive. 

Think of an electron, a little particle that spins around another little particle. Wrong! True, physicists sometimes find it useful to think of electrons as particles, but sometimes it’s more useful to think of them as waves. Conceiving of them as either is incomplete, yet conceiving of them as both is...well, inconceivable. (Try it!) And electrons are just the tip of the iceberg. In general, the quantum world-the world of subatomic reality-behaves in ways that don’t make sense to minds like ours. Various aspects of quantum physics evince the property that the late physicist Heinz Pagels called quantum weirdness. The bad news for the religiously inclined, then, is that maybe they should abandon hope of figuring out what God is. (If we can’t conceive of an electron accurately, what are our chances of getting God right?) The good news is that the hopelessness of figuring out exactly what something is doesn’t mean it doesn‘t exist. Apparently some things are just inconceivable-and yet are things nonetheless. 

At least, some physicists believe electrons are things. The fact that nobody’s actually seen an electron, and that trying to imagine one ties our minds in knots, has led some physicists and philosophers of science to wonder whether it’s even accurate to say that electrons do exist. You could say that with electrons, as with God, there are believers and there are skeptics. 

The believers believe there’s something out there-some “thing” in some sense of the word “thing”-that corresponds to the word “electron”; and that, though the best we can do is conceive of this “thing” imperfectly, even misleadingly, conceiving of it that way makes more sense than not conceiving of it at all. They believe in electrons while professing their inability to really “know” what an electron is. You might say they believe in electrons even while lacking proof that electrons per se exist. 

Many of these physicists, while holding that imperfectly conceiving subatomic reality is a valid form of knowledge, wouldn’t approve if you tried to perform a similar maneuver in a theological context. If you said you believe in God, even while acknowledging that you have no clear idea what God is-and that you can‘t even really prove God per se exists-they would say your belief has no foundation. 

Yet what exactly is the difference between the logic of their belief in electrons and the logic of a belief in God? They perceive patterns in the physical world-such as the behavior of electricity --and posit a source of these patterns and call that source the “electron." A believer in God perceives patterns in the moral world (or, at least. moral patterns in the physical world) and posits a source of these patterns and calls the source "God." “God” is that unknown thing that is the source of the moral order, the reason there is a moral dimension to life on Earth and a moral direction to time on Earth: “God“ is responsible for the fact that life is sentient, capable of good and had feelings, and hence morally significant; “God" is responsible for the evolutionary system that placed highly sentient life on a trajectory toward the good. or at least toward tests that uttered the opportunity and incentive to realize the good: in the process “God" gave each of us a moral axis around which to organize our lives, should we choose to. Being human, we will always conceive of the source of this moral order in misleadingly crude ways, but then again you could say the same thing about conceiving electrons. So you‘ll do with the source of the moral order what physicists do with a subatomic source of the physical order, such as an electron-try to think about it the best you can, and fail. This. at least, is one modern, scientifically informed argument that could be deployed by the believer in God. 

The Atheist Strikes Back 

There are plausible rejoinders that an atheist scientist who believes in electrons could make, because there are places where the analogy between God and an electron breaks down. In particular, the scientist could say, “But something like an electron is necessary to explain patterns we see in the physical world. In contrast, something like God isn’t necessary to explain the moral order of the universe.” 

It’s a good point. This book’s account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account. We’ve explained the expansion of the moral imagination as an outgrowth of expanding social organization, which is itself an outgrowth of technological evolution, which itself grows naturally out of the human brain, which itself grew naturally out of the primordial ooze via biological evolution. There’s no mystical force that has to enter the system to explain this, and there’s no need to look for one. 

Indeed, when the religious believer talks about the “source” of the moral order. the scientist could reply that the source of the moral order is. . . the electron- or, strictly speaking, other subatomic particles that are more fundamental than the electron.

 After all, the primordial ooze ultimately consisted of subatomic particles; if the expansion of the moral imagination can be explained in materialist terms. then its deepest explanation is the deepest explanation for the material world in general-the grand unified theory that physicists have been looking for. So why start talking about God? 

The believer has a reply, and it takes us back to chapter 18. There we saw something that modern biologists and the nineteenth-century Christian theologian William Paley agree on: the existence of animals-compared to, say, the existence of rocks-demands a special kind of explanation. And the reason isn’t that the creation of an animal can’t be explained in material terms; indeed, with growing success scientists understand how an animal’s intricately integrated functionality (organs of digestion, of perception, and so on) grows from a fertilized egg via explicable physical processes. Rather, the idea is that this emphatically material process-the emergence of integrated functionality via biological maturation seems like the kind of physical system that wouldn’t “just happen”; it must be the result of a creative process that imbues things with functionality-either a designer (such as a god, as Rev. Paley argued) or a “designer” (such as natural selection, as Darwin later argued). 

Turns out it was the latter-a “designing” process, not a designing god. But, however big a setback that fact is for Rev. Paley’s religious beliefs, there is a moral to this story that modern believers will want to emphasize: biologists agree that a strictly physical system or process whose workings can be wholly explained in mate~ rial terms-can have such extraordinary characteristics that it is fair to posit some special creative force as its source and ask about the nature of that force. Darwin inquired into the creative force behind plants and animals, and his answer was evolution. Surely the believer is entitled to ask the same question about evolution: Where did the amazing algorithm of natural selection come from? 

Such a believer, by the way, would not here be making an argument for “intelligent design,” the idea that natural selection isn’t adequate to account for human evolution. On the contrary, the idea here is that natural selection is such a powerful mechanism that its origin demands a special explanation; that evolution by natural selection has patterns and properties every bit as extraordinary as an animal‘s maturation toward functional integration. 

We spelled out some of those patterns in chapter 18: as natural selection ground along, creating more and more intelligent forms of life, it eventually created a form of life so intelligent as to give birth to a second creative process, cultural evolution; and as cultural (especially technological) evolution proceeded, the human species exhibited larger and larger expanses of social organization, and eventually this expanse approached global proportions; and in the process there appeared a moral order, linkage between the growth of social organization and progress toward moral truth. This moral order, to the believer, is among the grounds for suspecting that the system of evolution by natural selection itself demands a special creative explanation. 

This suspicion may be wrong, but the argument behind it is intelligible and legitimate-parallel in structure to the argument that, before Darwin, provided motivation to search for the theory of natural selection. And if the believer, having concluded that the moral order suggests the existence of some as-yet-unknown source of creativity that set natural selection in motion, decides to call that source “God,” well, that’s the believer’s business. After all, physicists got to choose the word “electron.” 

Of course, you could ask why the believer is entitled to suspect a creative source as exotic-sounding as a “god,” when the creative source of organic life turned out to be a mere mechanical process known as natural selection. To which the believer might reply that a physical system exhibiting moral order demands a more exotic explanation than a physical system exhibiting only a more mundane form of order. 

Even if the atheist scientist found this argument persuasive, the believer would still have some work to do. For there’s a formidable argument the scientist could make against the whole idea of comparing the conjectured existence of God to the conjectured existence of the electron.... Granted we believe in the existence of the electron even though our attempts thus far to conceive of it have been imperfect at best. Still there's a sense in which our imperfect conceptions of the electron have worked. We manipulate physical reality on the assumption that electrons exist as we imperfectly conceive them and - voila- we get the personal computer.

and

To answer this question (how did religion get built from the ground up) we have to view cultural evolution at a tine-grained level. We have to think about individual units of culture--beliefs and practices, in this case-and how they spread. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” for units of culture, in part because it sounds a bit like “gene,” and he wanted to stress some parallels between cultural and biological evolution. For example: just as genes are transmitted from body to body, down the generations, memes are transmitted from mind to mind. And just as newly minted genes “compete” for a place in the gene pool, newly minted memes “compete” for the finite space in the world’s supply of human brains. In this constant struggle of meme against meme, what kinds of memes will have a “selective advantage”? Newspapers are a good place to look for clues. Newspaper editors work hard to figure out what kinds of information people want. and to fill that demand. They are accomplished meme engineers, and thus students of human nature. One thing you’ll notice about newspapers is that they have a bias toward good things and bad things. The headlines “Stock market rises by 5 percent“ and “Stock market drops by 5 percent” will get better play than the headline “Stock market does nothing in particular.” Here religions, and certainly “primitive” religions, are like newspapers. In every hunter-gatherer society. Religion is devoted largely to explaining why bad things happen and why good things happen- illness, recovery; famine. abundance: and so on. 

There is also devotion to raising the ratio of good to had. The Andaman Islanders, convinced that whistling at night attracts bad spirits whereas singing repels them, do more singing in the dark than whistling in the dark. People naturally try to exert control over their environment, and believing that they have such control naturally makes them feel good. So people’s minds are open to ideas that promise to give them such control. This doesn’t mean people uncritically embrace every such idea that comes their way. But it does mean that these ideas get their attention-and for a meme, that’s the first step toward acceptance. While the Andaman Island meme asserting that thunderstorms are divine punishment for melting beeswax was hardly guaranteed a place in the society’s religion, it had a big head start over memes saying, “Thunderstorms just happen-there’s nothing you can do about it.” 

Another thing you’ll notice in newspapers is that the strange and novel wins out over the ordinary and expected. Tuberculosis and the West Nile virus are both bad news, and in terms of the number of people killed, tuberculosis is the worse of the two. Yet the headline “Outbreak of deadly new virus puzzles experts” easily crowds out “Usual number of people expected to die of tuberculosis this year” (except, perhaps, in the humor magazine The Onion, which earns its laughs by violating this pattern). As journalism sages famously put it: “Dog bites man” is not a story; “Man bites dog" is a story.6 

It makes sense that human brains would naturally seize on strange, surprising things, since the predictable things have already been absorbed into the expectations that guide them through the world; news of the strange and surprising may signal that some amendment of our expectations is warranted. But one property of strange surprising claims is that the're often untrue. So if they get preferred access to our brains, that gives falsehood a kind of advantage-if a fleeting advantage over truth. In the days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. one widely circulated story was that a man at the top of one of the twin towers had survived by sliding down the rubble as it formed. It was a story so incredible that it virtually compelled you to click the “forward” icon on your e-mail-and a story so incredible that it wasn’t true. It was an example of the famous dictum that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on. 

Of course, in the long run, the truth often does get its boots on, and people often welcome it upon its arrival. Indeed, if the attraction to surprising news weren’t balanced by an attraction to claims that survive subsequent scrutiny, the average human ancestor wouldn’t have lived long enough to become a human ancestor. Imagine a local sage, 200,000 years ago, saying that eating a certain berry will let you live forever. Now imagine that the first two people who follow his advice drop dead. Genes that counseled continued faith in advice thus besieged by countervailing evidence would not long remain a part of the species, whereas genes that inclined the brain to take account of such evidence might. This natural human respect for evidence is the reason convincing someone that one plus one equals three, or that water flows uphill, takes real work. 

But some kinds of beliefs are harder to test than those two. And hard-to-test beliefs could do well in the process of cultural evolution that gave birth to religion. Indeed, hunter-gatherer religious belief-like religious belief generally-consists largely of claims that resist falsification. The Haida, a people indigenous to the northwest coast of North America, when caught in a storm while out at sea, would try to appease the relevant authorities (killer whale deities) by pouring a cup of fresh water into the sea or putting some tobacco or deer tallow on the end of a paddle. Many people no doubt returned from sea to report that these measures had kept them from drowning. No one, presumably, ever reported that they had taken these measures but drowned anyway. 

To be sure, some religious beliefs can be put to a clearer test. 

If the Andaman Islanders were right, and melting beeswax was a leading cause of thunderstorms, then a melting moratorium should cut down on thunderstorms. But how can you be sure that, in the days preceding a thunderstorm, no one in your village melted a smidgen of wax -or engaged in some other thunder-inducing activity. such as making a loud noise while the cicadas were singing?

Such loopholes are found in modern religions, too. If you pray for someone to recover from illness, and they don’t, then prayer would seem to have lost credibility. But religions usually have ways of explaining such failure. Maybe you or the sick person had done something horribly wrong, and this is God’s punishment. Or maybe God just works in mysterious ways. 

So far, then, we would expect the following kinds of memes to be survivors in the dog-eat-dog world of cultural evolution: claims that (a) are somewhat strange, surprising, counterintuitive; (b) illuminate sources of fortune and misfortune; (c) give people a sense that they can influence these sources; (d) are by their nature hard to test decisively. In this light, the birth of religion doesn’t seem so mysterious. 

But doesn’t our attraction to strangeness have its limits? It’s one thing to believe that a man could survive a slide down a crumpling skyscraper through a series of lucky breaks. It’s quite another to believe, with the Inuit (in chapter I), that a sudden shortage of game is the work of a pouty female deity who lives at the bottom of the sea. In other words, “Man bites dog,” however unlikely, seems more plausible than “God bites man.”

Death with Interruptions

by Jose Saramago

APART FROM A FEW RARE INSTANCES, AS WITH THOSE unusually perspicacious people whom we mentioned before, who, as they lay dying, spotted her at the foot of the bed in the classic garb of a ghost swathed in a white sheet or, as appears to have happened with proust, in the guise of a fat woman dressed in black, death is usually very discreet and prefers not to be noticed, especially if circumstances oblige her to go out into the street. There is a widely held belief that since death, as some like to say, is one side of a coin of which god is the reverse, she must, like him, by her very nature, be invisible. Well, it isn’t quite like that We are reliable witnesses to the fact that death is a skeleton Wrapped in a sheet, that she lives in a chilly room accompanied by a rusty old scythe that never replies to questions, and is surrounded only by cobwebs and a few dozen filing cabinets with large drawers stuffed with index cards. One can understand. therefore, why death wouldn’t want to appear before people in that get-up, firstly, for reasons of personal pride. secondly, so that the poor passers-by wouldn’t die of fright when, on turning 

and

You look very pretty, said the scythe, and it was true, death did look very pretty and she was young, about thirty-six or thirty-seven just as the anthropologists had calculated, You spoke, exclaimed death, There seemed to me to be a good reason, it isn’t every day one sees death trans formed into the species of which she is the enemy, So it wasn’t because you thought I looked pretty, Oh, that too, that too, but I would have spoken even if you’d emerged in the guise of a fat woman in black like the one who appeared to monsieur marcel proust, Well, I’m not fat and I’m not dressed in black, and you have no idea who marcel proust was, For obvious reasons, we scythes, both those who cut down people and those who cut down grass, have never been taught how to read, but we have good memories, mine of blood and theirs of sap, and I’ve heard proust’s name several times and put together the facts, he was a great writer, one of the greatest who ever lived, and his tile must be somewhere in the old archives, Yes, but not in mine, I wasn’t the death who killed him, So this monsieur marcel proust wasn’t from here, then, asked the scythe, No, he was from another country, a place called france, replied death, and there was a touch of sadness in her words, Don’t worry, you can console yourself for the fact that it wasn’t you who killed proust by how pretty you look today, said the scythe helpfully, As you know, I’ve always considered you to be a friend, but my sadness has nothing to do with not having been the one to kill proust, What then. Well, I’m not sure I can explain. The scythe gave death a bemused look and thought it best to change the subject, Where did you find the clothes you’re wearing, it asked, There are plenty to choose from behind that door, it’s like a warehouse, like a vast theater wardrobe, there are literally hundreds of wardrobes, hundreds of mannequins, thousands of hangers, Take me there, pleaded the scythe, What’s the point, you know nothing about fashions or style, Well, one look at you tells me that you don’t know much more than I do, the clothes you’re wearing don’t seem to go together at all, Since you never leave this room, you have no idea what people are wearing these days, That blouse looks very like others I can remember from when I led an active life, fashions go in cycles, they come and go, they go and come, if I were to tell you what I see out in those streets, No need to tell me, I believe you, Don’t you think this blouse goes well with the color of the trousers and the shoes, Yes, agreed the scythe, And with this cap I’m wearing, Yes, that too, And with this fur coat, Yes, And with this shoulder bag, Yes, you’re quite right, And with these earrings, Oh, I give up, Go on, admit it, I’m irresistible, That depends on the kind of man you hope to seduce, But you think I look pretty, That’s what 1 said to begin with, In that case, goodbye, I’ll be back on sunday, or monday at the latest, don’t forget to send off the mail each day. that shouldn’t be too hard a task for someone who spends all his time leaning against the wall.

The Skin Chairs

by Barbara Comyns

It had been my turn to have luncheon with the Lawrences. When we were drinking our coffee in the room like a conservatory where the birds lived, Aunt Lawrence abruptly broke off a discussion she was having with my uncle about selling some horses to the police force and turned to Mother accusingiy to say: ‘What is all this about Frances driving about in an open car with that mad Italian woman?’ 

I was on the point of leaving the room with Grace to look at some hurdles that had been put up for her to practise jumping over, but we paused at the door to hear Mother’s reply. ‘Has she?’ she said, Opening her eyes wide. ‘Oh yes, of course; Mrs Alexander. The child enjoys listening to her playing the piano, you know. I don’t think the woman's mad, only eccentric.’  

Aunt Lawrence put down her coffee-cup and said firmly: ‘I have never met the woman, but I have seen her driving about in a tin-pot motor-car looking as mad as a hatter. Wears a turban, doesn't pay her bills, plays at being a nurse. keeps unlimited monkeys and paints her slippers gold. Of course the woman isn't sane.’ Mother bit her lip and started twisting her handkerchief like a child

and

Every morning a tutor called Mr Derbyshire came to teach me for about three hours. I enjoyed the lessons. At last I seemed to be learning; things that I had never understood be fore became clear. It was as if my mind had been tightly clenched against lesson books. In the afternoons there was the pony to ride, and on Saturday mornings an athletic young woman came and taught us to play tennis. There was, some talk about us having French conversation with a nun, but fortunately Mother forgot about this. 

I should have been pleased that the chairs were to be banished to the loft, but I wasn't. Now they were doomed, I felt sorry for them, and the rumbling and grumbling at night seemed to become louder. If I sat up in bed and listened, it wasn't there, but, as soon as I lay down, it started again and sometimes I thought there was a kind of chanting. I asked Esmé if she heard noises during the night, but she said she slept like a stone and I didn’t like to ask the little ones in case it made them afraid. 

One night, as I lay in bed listening to a rumbling, rattling sound, I sat up and could still hear it distinctly. I was only safe from it when I put my head under the clothes. I imagined all the chairs moaning and groaning together because they were to be shut away in the loft and had lost their bodies and souls. As I lay suffocating under the clothes, I remembered Esmé's joking remark about giving the chairs a Christian burial. The more I thought about it, the more the idea pleased me, until I knew it was the only thing to do. I couldn’t actually bury the chairs, because they would need such an enormous grave, but I could read the Burial Service over them, and the loft, when they were taken there. would serve as a kind of tomb. 

In spite of the sound, I switched on the light, put on my Harrods dressing-gown, not bothering about slippers because it always took so long to find them. slipped my school prayerbook in my pocket and opened the door. As I did so, the rumbling-grumbling noises stopped and I seemed to hear a great sigh. I had to walk down the two flights of stairs in the darkness, because I did not want to disturb anyone by showing a light under their bedroom door. I felt extraordinarily brave until I reached the library door, but I dared not open it for fear I might see something so fearful that I’d never be the same again. It was completely quiet except for the halI-clock ticking, no groans or rumbles. I tried looking through the keyhole, but there was a key in it. Then I opened the door a little way with my back to it, so that if anything came out I could run quickly. I sIowly turned round and felt for the light-switch, and under the hard electric light I saw the chairs dismally gathered round the table, perfectly still and quiet, but glowering. I had not realized how cold my feet were until I stepped on to the thick Turkey carpet and felt the long pile between my toes. I opened the prayer-book at the Order for the Burial of the Dead and was dismayed to see how long it was, almost six pages. As I skimmed through it, I saw there was nothing much I could leave out except the two Psalms, which seemed a pity, because there were some beautiful words in them and a lot of wisdom: ‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle, while the ungodly is in my sight” (something to remember when I was with the Lawrences), or ‘For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain: he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them.’ There was even a homely mention of a moth fretting a garment. 

As I was about to start the service I read in small italics that people who have not been baptised cannot have a Christian burial. Now I was faced with two complete services, besides having to choose six suitable Christian names. I thought of kings’ names at first, but there seemed nothing but Georges and Edwards and Henrys. Then I noticed a leather~bound volume of collected poems. It would be nice for the chairs to be called after poets. It took some time to choose names that suited the chairs and appealed to me, but I eventually decided on Percy Shelley. I didn't care for the name Percy. but I loved Shelley and decided that the chair with the lighter skin should be called after him. George Byron was a chair with something slightly wrong with one foot so that it wobbled a bit. Edgar Poe had a mysterious mark running across his skin, as if from a scar. The last three chairs had no distinguishing marks. I called one Alfred Tennyson because it was a good sound name, another William Yeats because he was still alive and I had only recently discovered him, and the third Anon. Circa, who seemed to have died a very long time ago. I read the Baptism of Such as are of Riper Years and used water from a flower-vase to cross each chair with as I read: ‘I baptise thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.’ 

By the time the Baptism Service was over I was feeling terribly tired and my voice had become husky from reading. I sank into Percy Shelley and started on the Burial Service. singing the first part, because it said “say or sing’ and singing made a change. But then there was that long part all about fishes and birds and the twinkling of an eye and the last trump. I only hope I finished the whole service before I fell asleep, leaning forward in Percy Shelley with my head on the table.

Sennett on the City

From Flesh and Stone:

The Parthenon's placement in the city dramatized its collective civic value. Visible from many places in the city, from new or expanding districts as well as from older quarters, the icon of unity glinted in the sun. M. I. Finley has aptly called its quality of self-display, of being looked at, “out-of-doorness.” He says, “In this respect nothing could be more misleading than our usual impression: we see ruins, we look through them, we walk about inside the Parthenon. . . . What Greeks saw was physically quite different. . . .” The building exterior mattered in itself; like naked skin it was a continuous, self-sufficing, arresting surface. In an architectural object, a surface differs from a facade; a facade like the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris conveys the sense that the interior mass of the building has generated the exterior facade, while the Parthenon’s skin of columns and roof does not look like a form pushed out from within. In this, the temple gave a clue to Athenian urban form more generally; urban volume came from the play of surfaces. 

and

The Elgin Marbles were unusual because they brought together the vast crowd of human beings in the Panathenaic procession with such images of the gods. The sculptor Pheidias represented the human bodies in distinctive ways, first of all by carving them more boldly in the round than had other sculptors; this carving increased the reality of their presence near the gods. Indeed, the human beings depicted on the Parthenon friezes look more at home among the gods than they do, say, in friezes at Delphi. The Delphi sculptor emphasized the differences between gods and men, while Pheidias in Athens sculpted, in Philipp Fehls's phrase, “a subtle connection between the realms of gods and men that somehow has the appearance of an inherent necessity.”

The human figures on the Parthenon friezes are all young, perfect bodies. their perfections nakedly exposed, and their expression: equally serene whether they are tending an ox or mastering horses. They are generalizations about what human beings should look like, and contrasted. for instance, to a Zeus carved at Olympia a few years before; the god's body there was more an individual, his muscles showing signs of age and his face signs of fear. In the Parthenon friezes, the critic John Boardman has remarked, the image of the human body is “idealized rather than individualized . . . otherworldly; [never was] the divine so human, the human so divine?“ Ideal, young, naked bodies represented a human power which tested the divide between gods and men, a test the Greeks also knew could lead to tragic consequences; for love of their bodies, the Athenians risked the tragic flaw of hubris, of fatal pride. 

The source of pride in the body came from beliefs about body heat, which governed the process of making a human being. Those fetuses well heated in the womb early in pregnancy were thought to become males; fetuses lacking initial heat became females. The lack of sufficient heating in the womb produced a creature who was “more soft, more liquid, more clammy-cold, altogether more formless than were men.” Diogenes of Apollonia was the first Greek to explore this inequality of heat, and Aristotle took up and expanded Diogenes’ analysis, notably in his work On the Generation of Animals. Aristotle made a connection, for instance, between menstrual blood and sperm, believing that menstrual blood was cold blood whereas sperm was cooked blood; sperm was superior because it generated new life, whereas menstrual blood remained inert. Aristotle characterizes “the male as possessing the principle of movement and of generation, the female that of matter.

The Greeks believed that “female” and “male” represented the two poles of a bodily continuum, whereas the Victorians, for example treated menstruation and menopause as such mysterious female forces that men and women seemed almost different species.  Laqueur describes this Greek view as one in which “at least two genders correspond to but one sex, where the boundaries between male and female are of degree and not of kind . . . a one-sex body." Barely heated male fetuses became effeminate men; female fetuses heated beyond the norm produced butch women. Indeed, from this physiology of reproduction the Greeks derived principles for understanding the anatomies of men and women: the same organs were reversed in male and female genitalia. “Turn outward the woman's” vagina, Galen of Pergamum asked a medical student to imagine, and “turn inward . . . and fold double the man’s penis, and you will find the same structure in both in every respect.” Galen’s views would serve as scientific truth for nearly two thousand years, passing from Western antiquity, via Arab doctors, into Christian medicine of the Middle Ages, surviving the Renaissance, and ending only in the seventeenth century. 

For most of Western history, medicine thus spoke about “the body”-one body, whose physiology moved from very cold to very hot, from very female to very male. Heat in the body seemed to govern people's power to see, to listen, to act and react, even to speak. In Perikles' time, this discourse began to cohere as a language of bodily stimulation. Two generations before him, for instance, people commonly believed that “one sees because light issues from the eye." By the time of Perikles it was thought that the eye instead receives warming rays from an object. In his 'On Sense and Sensible Objects, Aristotle later argued that even the experience of transparency and empty space was such a physical experience; since light, which is a substance, impresses itself on the eye, images generate heat in the viewer. Yet these warming rays are felt unequally by different human beings: the warmer the receiving body, the more intensely it responds to stimuli- as a roaring fire consumes a log more avidly than does a barely flickering fire. The cold body is sluggish in its responses, it heats more slowly. 

Words seemed to make the same physical impress on the body’s senses as did images, and the ability to respond to these verbal stimuli also depended on the degree of heat the receiving body contained. For Plato, phrases like “hot words” and “the heat of argument” were literal descriptions rather than metaphors; dialectic and debate warmed the bodies of the participants, while bodies which thought in solitude grew cold. To be sure, by the Periklean age the Greeks had developed the habit of silent reading, a habit dramatized by the playwright Euripides in Hippolytos; reading required different mental habits than speaking. Yet the Greeks did not have the modern, abstract experience of a “text”: the Greek reader would have thought he heard the voices of real people speaking even on the page, and to revise a written text was like interrupting someone talking. Only when the body was alone, neither speaking not reading, did its powers grow cold and sluggish. 

This ancient understanding of body heat led to beliefs about shame and honor amongst human beings. The medical register passing from female, cold, passive, and weak, to male, hot, strong, and engaged formed a scale of ascending human worth; it treated males as superior to females made of the same materials. The modern historian Giulia Sissa observes that “When the feminine was included in the same sphere as the masculine . . . the result was not liberal acknowledgment of equality but dismissal of the female as ‘obviously’ inferior to the male.”

Vonnegut

I read Slaughterhouse-Five for WWII book club topic. The few passages that I enjoyed:

She said she was going to join a church as soon as she decided which one was right. She never did decide. She did develop a terrible hankering for a crucifix, though. And she bought one from a Santa Fe gift shop during a trip the little family made out West during the Great Depression. Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

and

Billy asked for something to read on is trip to Tralfamadore. His captors had five million Earthling books on microfilm, but no way to project them in Billy's cabin. The had only one actual book in English, which would be placed in a Tralfamadorian museum. It was Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.

Mysteries at book club

For book club I read Dorothy Hughes, The Expendable Man.


"Unyielding bigots were a minority save in pockets of the Deep South. In today's climate, it was they who could do nothing but retreat behind their warped, sagging fences. No longer could they demand that the fences enclose the rest of the country."

The last of Rousseau and Hume

For Hume, every detail had to be addressed. In uncovering the conspiracy, Rousseau accorded the most trivial incidents equal probative value with the most wounding. No happening was by chance or without significance. To misquote T. S. Eliot slightly, “In the sordid particulars, the unearthly design appears." And only by confronting and disputing the sordid particulars could Hume confront and dispute the underlying narrative-his alleged plot against Rousseau. 

and

For a period, Rousseau's educational theories were all the rage, not only in France and England, but in Switzerland, Germany, and lreland, too. Scores of novel pedagogical treatises were produced, almost all of them bearing his imprint. Parents who experimented by raising their children on Rousseauian principles experienced mixed results, some reporting that they produced a disconcerting wildness in their guinea pigs. [t is possible that Davenport intentionally brought up his orphaned grandson Davies along Rousseauian lines. The boy turned out well, but fretted that he had received insufficient formal education, and did not like to hear the name of Rousseau mentioned. 

In Paris during 1770-71, Rousseau gave readings-sometimes for up to seventeen hours-from the Confessions. His erstwhile friend Mme d'Epinay, feeling defamed by his portrayal of her as a scheme: and gossip, eventually persuaded the police to prohibit them. His readings elicited polarized reactions. Some listeners wept and kissed Rousseau’s hand.Others were revolted.
 

Also posthumously published was the insanely brilliant Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques, which had gestated over several years. In these split-personality dialogues between Rousseau and Jean-Jacques, Rousseau is judge, jury, and defendant as the author's deeds and personality are forensically examined and extracts from his writings used as evidence against him. Rousseau convicts himself on several counts, including being weak willed and following his whims, rather than being influenced by his duty. (Here he also has second thoughts on Ramsay's portrait of him, accusing Hume of having contrived the painting out of sheer malice and ensuring that in every respect-posture, clothes, Ramsay’s palette-the sitter emerged as dark and monstrous with, in Rousseau’s characterization, “the face of a frightful cyclops.”) When the work was completed in 1776, Rousseau was desperate to forestall any attempt by his foes to suppress it. 

and

OUR TWO PROTAGONISTS shared one noteworthy devotee. In 1762, with Rousseau in Métiers and Hume about to move to Paris, in the isolated Prussian city of Konigsberg, a thirty-eight-year-old lecturer devoured Rousseau’s works as they were published. According to one anecdote, the fastidious Immanuel Kant, whose daily routine was so rigid and undeviating that people set their watches by him, became so absorbed in Emile that he bewildered his neighbors by forgetting to take his usual post-lunch constitutional. Kant was alert to the seductive dangers of Rousseau’s language: he worried that its beauty detracted from his ideas; to penetrate these ideas he read and reread him Rousseau understood, he thought, the paradox of autonomy-that freedom meant conformity to a rule. As he was writing his own masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason, he had a single portrait in his house-of JeanJacques Rousseau. 

As for Hume, Kant said the Scot had “woken him from his dogmatic slumber.” His preoccupation with cause and effect, which he thought the basis of all scientific knowledge, was provoked by Hume's skeptical reflections. Unable to accept Hume’s skepticism about causation, he sought to demonstrate how a proposition such as “every event has a cause" could be known a priori (i.e., could be known independent of experience), even though it was a synthetic proposition (not true or false by virtue of its terms). “Water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius” is a synthetic proposition. “All bachelors are unmarried” is an analytic one, true by definition. 

WITH THE EXCEPTION of Nietzsche, probably no philosopher’s posthumous reputation has fluctuated quite so dramatically as Rousseau’s. The Confessions was initially decried ...pompous and obscene being the general judgment. Yet within a decade, sentiment was already becoming more positive. The work is now established as a literary masterpiece. 

Rousseau’s political legacy has been much more contentious. Although he himself was no advocate of rebellion, his name became inextricably bound up with the French Revolution. Its makers on all sides drew on his works to justify their actions, most famously Robespierre, who ideologically embraced Rousseau (along with such Romans as Cato) and executed with zeal his understanding of “the general will of the people”-in his own phrase une volonté une, “one single will." Nevertheless, two years before Robespierre grasped power, Edmund Burke had responded to the revolutionaries’ worship of Rousseau with a brilliant and farsighted diatribe, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. “Everyone knows that there is a great dispute among leaders [of the National Assembly] which of them is the best resemblance to Rousseau." The truth was, he said, they all resembled him. And Burke accused them of adopting the worst of Rousseau’s vices, vanity, “that makes the whole man false." “We have had the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England. . \ . He left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no principle to influence his heart of guide his understanding but vanity. With that he was possessed to a degree little short of madness.” In the twentieth century, Rousseau was charged with offering intellectual justification for totalitarianism. 

Rousseau’s constant influence on later generations is indubitable though not always positive). He can be seen as father of the Romantic movement (and even a great-grandfather of the Green movement). The Romantics were inspired by his confirmation of the worth of each and every one of us, however ordinary, by his emphasis on equality, on knowledge of the inner self, and on a spiritual connection with nature, as well as by his imagination and the depth of his feelings. 

In 1816, Byron and Percy Shelley went on a pilgrimage to Lake Geneva, carrying with them Héloise. Shelley described Rousseau as “a sublime genius.” Mary Shelley had studied Rousseau, and his writings inspired Frankenstein: the monster becomes corrupted by his association with society. Schiller, Stendhal (for whom he was “the noblest soul and the greatest genius that ever was”), de Tocqueville, and Schopenhauer were all admirers. To Hazlitt, he was a new Prometheus. Lytton Strachey said of the Confessions that it "started the vast current in literature and sentiment which is still flowing." A youthful Leo Tolstoy took to wearing a medal on which was engraved Rousseau's portrait; he read all of Rousseau’s works, but was captivated in particular by Héloise, Emile, and the Confessions. 

IF ROUSSEAU’S POSTHUMOUS reputation has ridden helter-skelter...one moment as a benevolent patron of equality and liberty, the next the warped mastermind of tyranny-Hume's has steadily climbed, though with the occasional hiatus. In America, the influence of his less theoretical writings (his essays and History) should not be overlooked. Among the United States’ founding fathers, for instance, James Madison was a staunch disciple, his version of federalism traceable to Hume’s thinking. Many American luminaries consumed Hume's History-including Samuel Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Rush (though Thomas Jefferson despised the work, labeling Hume a “conceited Scotchman”). 

In the nineteenth century, the historian began to make way for the philosopher. Hume’s History ceased to be the standard text, superseded by, among others, Thomas Macaulay’s. Meanwhile, the Treatise, the book that fell "dead born," came to be recognized as an enduring masterpiece. By the twentieth century, Hume's standing as one of the most significant thinkers of all time became firmly entrenched: there remain ongoing engagement with his skeptical conundrums, which still fascinate and unsettle, tease and bewitch. His philosophical style is hailed as an exemplar of clarity and a model of ingenuity. Bertrand Russell, an empiricist in the Humean tradition, acknowledged Hume’s supreme importance in his A History of Western Philosophy. The Vienna Circle, which for a time before World War II dominated the world of philosophy, was a legatee of the eighteenth-century Scot. This group of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers dismissed much of aesthetics, morality, and religion as meaningless metaphysics; to be meaningful, propositions had either to be verifiable through experience or true by definition. Two centuries earlier, Hume had famously concluded his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: 

If we take in our hand any volume: of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance: let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental masoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. 

Members of the Circle grappled with Hume's conundrum about induction, as did the Viennese-born Professor Sir Karl Popper. In his book about Hume, the philosopher Sir Freddie Ayer could confidently assert that Hume was the greatest of all British philosophers. Beyond the confined world of academic philosophy, Albert Einstein revered Hume, giving credit to the philosopher for transforming his powers of critical reasoning and ultimately with being a catalyst in his discovery of the theory of relativity. In a 1915 letter Einstein revealed that just before his fundamental insight, he studied Hume's treatise with eagerness and admiration.

and 

It was at this point that a disjunction in their intellectual personalities ensured that the division between them would be unbridgeable. Rousseau conceived a bold conclusion, and then filled in the details. Hume operated in the other way-starting with the facts, and using these to build a case. So Rousseau imagined the deadly and extensive conspiracy against him, before unearthing his corroborative evidence. Hume, in contrast, went straight to that evidence. By examination of each piece, he sought to discredit his attacker’s nightmare thesis, to persuade the public that there were more reasons to disbelieve than to believe it. Rousseau’s reliance on intuitive imagination disoriented and enraged his erstwhile benefactor. 

All this goes some way to explaining why Hume erupted so violently when he saw Rousseau’s allegations, and why he made such frenetic efforts to limit any damage from what he knew was plausibly the most potent and destructive pen in Europe, for he never lost sight of Rousseau’s genius. But the unremitting brutality of Hume’s reaction put his reputation in Paris more at risk than any claim of Rousseau’s: in effect he exchanged roles with his accuser in his search for vengeance. He also demonstrated how little he had assimilated the manners of the salons in which he was feted. Perhaps he had not been offered the opportunity to study the Rule of Life on Mme de Boufflers’s bedroom wall. 

MORE PERPLEXING IS Hume’s persistent mendacity-his utter falsehoods, his economies with the truth, his deviousness. Before the “plot” coalesced, these included the false impression he gave that he was ignorant of the King of Prussia letter; his holding back its authorship from Rousseau, then telling him that Walpole had intended it to remain secret; his not forwarding letters to Rousseau from de L’Espinasse and (later) d’Alembert; the exaggeration of his role in winning Rousseau’s pension. 

The affair of the faux retour chaise is illuminating. Surely this was subterfuge with the purest of motives, for he was supporting the indigent and concealing the charity.

Hume was just as unlikely to give the ploy a second thought When it came to the truth, he had an instrumentalist outlook, telling his publisher, in August 1770: “You see I am a good casuist, and can distinguish cases very nicely. It is certainly a wrong thing to deceive any body, much more a friend; but yet the difference must still be allowed infinite between deceiving a man for his good and for his injury." 

That attitude, to Rousseau, was anathema. As so often, there are puzzling inconsistencies in Rousseau’s pronouncements, but his gut instinct was to recoil at any form of deception. For Rousseau, a white lie was still a lie, an act that both slighted its target and sullied its creator. Even if Hume was not the originator of the trick over the chaise, his awareness of it, in Rousseau’s eyes, made him complicit; his private judgment as to what was in his guest’s best interest was both condescending and contemptuous. 

In the Fourth Walk of the Reveries, where he confesses to having sometimes lied out of shame or embarrassment, he writes, “The lies we call white lies are real lies, because to act deceitfully in one’s interest or that of others is no less unjust than to act deceitfully against the interests of others." Rousseau saw himself as the apostle of truth: for him, the truth was of paramount importance, for him his “horror of falsehood outweighed all other things." 

PERHAPS THE MORAL of the whole sad encounter is that while m men cannot make madman sane, madman an make sane men mad. In his momentary madness, fury, and panic, Hume never grasped the root of Rousseau’s complaint: that though Hume I'M carried out the obligations of a friend in practice, he was constitutionally incapable of doing so in spirit. Rousseau expected his fnends to be entirely straight with him, to open their heart, to be motivated purely by love. Friendship required a special form of understanding. He wanted Mme d'Epinay: “My expressions rarely have the usual significance, for it is always my heart that communes with you, and some day maybe you will realise that its language is not that of other hearts." The nature of friendship is something Rousseau returns to time after time. In the Confessions, he reveals the bar of suspicion potential friends had to hurdle.

Rousseau had a visceral grasp of Aristotle's analysis of friendship m the Nicomachean Ethics.“What is just is not the same for a friend towards a friend as towards a stranger.” Friendship involves a basket of mutual emotions-respect, trust, warmth, a desire for that penal. happiness and success, a desire to be in that person’s company-rein. forced by action. And friendship is sustained over time. Do not expect friendship to ripen too quickly, Rousseau admonished young Flam Coindet in 1758. Friendship “is something that must mature slowly ovuthe years, so that true friends are friends long before they use the word ‘friend.’ ” 

Hume was baffled by Rousseau’s fondness for Sultan, “his affection for that creature is above all expression or conception." But Round: relationship with the canine gives us some insight into Rousseau’s relationship with his fellow humans. Friendship for Rousseau was achievable only by equals, who were independent of each other. A true friend had every claim on his heart but none on his liberty. During Boswell’s pilgrimage to Rousseau in Motiers, Rousseau maintained that a person’s attitude to cats was a vital test of character. Those of a despotic nature “do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave." A relationship with a dog, too, should not be one of ruler and subject. About the predecessor to Sultan, Rousseau mote. “My dog himself was my friend, not my slave: we always had the same will, but it was not because he obeyed me." As for Sultan, though he was a source of endless trouble, he could never be mendacious; he could never be disingenuous, insincere, hypocritical, or patronizing. Sultan was incapable of disloyalty.