What I Read in November 2012

Matthew Josephson, Zola and His Time. Overwritten and outdated (1928) biography of the author of tens of novels and the defender of Alfred Dreyfus.

Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict. Attorney Micky Haller was introduced to Connelly fans in The Lincoln Lawyer, which also became a movie. In this second book in the series, Haller defends an important murder suspect and also contends with detective Harry Bosch, from Connelly’s other detective series. It works — one of the best legal thrillers I have ever read.

Connie Willis, Passage. Is this science fiction or fantasy fiction with a big dollop of science? Two dedicated researchers try to understand the basis for near death experiences. Patients who begin to die but are revived report a dark passage and a journey toward a bright light. Is it a real place or a hallucination?

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels. The manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi embody a different path early Christianity might have taken, one in which the true Christian is the person with self knowledge and direct experience of the divine, rather than the faithful adherent of the Church.

David Lodge, Thinks... We think, therefore we are. Or perhaps we are, depending on the nature of consciousness. This entertaining novel takes the question of the inner life of the mind seriously. It is studied by (mostly male) scientists and contemplated by one somewhat-displaced (female) novelist.

Michael Sheldon, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. The enemy within Greene is Greene himself. Biographer Sheldon finds this enemy hiding in plain sight in Greene’s many successful fictions.

Ruth Suckow, The John Wood Case. In her last novel, Iowa writer Ruth Suckow explores what happens when a respectable, upright citizen is revealed to be a thief. The focus is on 17-year old Philip who is about to begin his future, and then everything changes.

Michael Connelly, The Reversal. Another legal thriller in the series with the Lincoln Lawyer and his detective brother, Harry Bosch. Why would an effective defense attorney switch to prosecution? Will he win his case? Compelling and convincing courtroom drama kept me up far too late. Connelly thrillers can be injurious to your health.

Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Not just the funny little man with the kite, Franklin was a giant in his time: scientist, civic do-gooder, diplomat, and writer. This full-scale biography does him justice.

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

When a jar full of manuscripts was discovered in Nag Hammadi in 1945, most of the documents had not been seen or read for over 1600 years. History is written by the winners. Who is an orthodox, right-thinking Christian and who is a heretic has been defined by those who survived from among the many cults of the time of early Christianity. They selected the contents of the New Testament and organized the rituals and hierarchy of the church.

Pagels shows the importance of certain doctrines for the Christians being persecuted by the Roman authorities. For example, the founders of the church emphasized a literal understanding of the crucifixion, as opposed to symbolic suffering.

 The orthodox who expressed the greatest concern to refute the “heretical” gnostic view of Christ’s passion were, without exception, persons who knew from firsthand experience the dangers to which Christians were exposed – and who insisted on the necessity of accepting martyrdom.

Their sufferings were real enough and gained meaning only if they were in emulation of Christ’s very real sufferings.

Pagels shows that religious doctrines have political effects and are reinforced by local situations. If we are suffering together, we feel great antipathy toward those who escape or devalue that suffering:

 Hippolytus’ zeal for martyrdom, like Tertullian’s, was matched by his hatred of heresy. He concludes his massive Refutation of All Heresies insisting that only orthodox doctrine concerning Christ’s incarceration and passion enables the believer to endure persecution….

As I understand Pagels’ explication of Gnosticism, it was less a set of doctrinal beliefs than an approach to religious experience. One became a true Christian not by a set of rituals and passive acceptance of certain beliefs, but by the sort of inner reflection which brings one to a direct experience of the divine.

 Instead, quoting a saying of Jesus (“By their fruits you shall know them”), they [the gnostics] required evidence of spiritual maturity to demonstrate that a person belonged to the true church.

To require such individual experience is not the way to build a long-living institution.

But orthodox Christians, by the late second century, had begun to establish objective criteria for church membership. Whoever confessed the creed, accepted the ritual of baptism, participated in worship, and obeyed the clergy was accepted as a fellow Christian. Seeking to unify the diverse churches scattered throughout the world into a single network, the bishops eliminated qualitative criteria for church membership. Evaluating each candidate on the basis of spiritual maturity, insight, or personal holiness, as the gnostics did, would require a far more complex administration.

Complex, and maybe impossible. I am grateful to Elaine Pagels’ for her clear-headed account of how early Christians followed a diversity of paths and why those paths ultimately became one orthodox way to the truth.

Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns

When politicians – along with many of the rest of us — mourn the loss of manufacturing jobs today, surely they do not mean the sort of work describe in Arnold Bennett’s 1902 novel, Anna of the Five Towns. It is dusty, dull and dangerous, but it made possible the great pottery industry of Stoke-on-Trent in Victorian England.

Anna of the Five Towns is one of Bennett’s early novels, one of the many he set in this district, and the plot has a few rough edges. Still, the characters are real enough. Anna lives with her sister and her father, Ephraim Tellwright, usually referred to as “the miser.” He domineers over the girls as a matter of right:

 He belonged to the great and powerful class of house-tyrants, the backbone of the British nation, whose views on income-tax cause ministries to tremble. If you had talked to him of the domestic graces of life, your words would have conveyed to him no meaning. If you had indicted him for simple unprovoked rudeness, he would have grinned, well knowing that, as the King can do no wrong, so a man cannot be rude in his own house.

Bennett is equally clear-eyed in his depiction of Methodism, the fervent religion of the working and lower middle class people who attend chapel and the role it plays in their economic and social arrangements.

 Tellwright belonged by birth to the Old Guard of Methodism; there was in his family a tradition of holy valour for the pure doctrine: his father, a Bursley man, had fought in the fight which preceded the famous Primitive Methodist Secession of 1808 at Bursley, and had also borne a notable part in the Warren affrays of ’28, and the disastrous trouble of the Fly-Sheets in ’49, when Methodism lost a hundred thousand members. As for Ephraim, he expounded the mystery of the Atonement in village conventicles and grew garrulous with God at prayer-meetings in the big Bethesda chapel; but he did these things as routine, without skill and without enthusiasm, because they gave him an unassailable position within the central group of the society. He was not, in fact, much smitten with either the doctrinal or the spiritual side of Methodism. His chief interest lay in those fiscal schemes of organisation without whose aid no religious propaganda can possibly succeed.

These great themes work their way out in the actions of all the characters of the book: the difficulties of making a living in the competitive industrial environment, the role of religion in a closed community where everybody knows everybody else and, finally and most poignantly, the position of a daughter who has spent her life submitting to an unjust authority. Sentimental in spots, the tale is still far in advance of his time.

A Tale of Two Cathedrals

Wurzburg Cathedral, reconstructed, c. 1967

It was late in the day when we stopped in Wurzburg in upper Bavaria, on our way back to Frankfort where we would turn in our rental car and board our flight home. At the local tourist office we arranged for a hotel room. We knew nothing about Wurzburg, but the tourist office had an attractive brochure — in English. Most of Wurzburg was destroyed by bombing in 1945. The brochure tactfully described how the bombers came, but not who sent them. The bombing damaged the Romanesque cathedral so badly that it subsequently collapsed. We went for an evening walk and found the cathedral, standing again. It looked good, probably better than before its destruction. It had been rebuilt, wall by wall, by the Wurzburgers, starting during the lean years after the war and completed in1967.

I am thinking about rebuilding cathedrals after reading Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog. In this science-fiction novel, we are 50 years into the future and a philanthropist is reconstructing Coventry Cathedral. German incendiary bombs destroyed the roof and interior of the original Gothic cathedral in 1940. Like the Germans, the English rebuilt their cathedral. In Wurzberg they reconstructed what they had before; in Coventry they elected to embrace a modernist style. At this future time, with church attendance insufficient to support the building, it has been converted to a shopping mall.

The new Coventry Cathedral, c. 1962

But historians yearn for the Gothic original as it was in 1940 and for the emotions it evoked. A wealthy benefactor is reconstructing the destroyed building and deploying every available historian to go back, via their time machine, to check out all the details. They visit before the bombing, during the bombing, after the bombing, searching the rubble. What was actually there at the time of destruction? Authenticity is all.

Remains of Coventry Cathedral after the bombing of Coventry, November 1940

Historical research is not the only issue. If we can visit the past, what can we bring back? The theory of time travel is that what may be returned from the past must be  “insignificant”, having no effect on the continuity of space and time. You can bring the information in your heads (or in your recorder), the air in your lungs, the dust on your clothes. Beyond that, assumptions have been made which are now called into question. No spoilers here, as I leave to you to discover the limits. (Hint: think cats.)

In Coventry today, the rebuilding of the original cathedral is a novelist’s plot. They worship — those who still do worship — in a postwar building. In Wurzburg they may or may not worship in their Romanesque reconstruction, but it stands there in the center of the old city, a potent symbol of how much the people wanted to reconnect with their past.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi – I loved these books. The first one is subtitled The Story of a Childhood, while Persepolis 2 tells the story of Satrapi’s teenage and young adult years. Born in Iran Satrapi  identified with her family and culture, but she was sent at 14 to continue her education in Austria. Her parents were apprehensive about the trouble she was likely to get into with an increasingly repressive regime. They were right to be apprehensive. Satrapi was rebellious and the monitors could whip you for showing too much hair or wearing the wrong color socks.

Initially Satrapi’s liberal parents welcomed the revolution. Down with the Shah! What came after was just as bad. They passed from an extreme of imposed secularism and corruption to an extreme of imposed religiosity and corruption. This is similar to the story told in Reading Lolita in Teheran, where the restrictions also increased, step by stop.

As you can see from the sample here, the Persepolis books are graphic novels. I used to be rather sniffy about this literary form — adult comic books — until I read the Age of Bronze series by Eric Shanower which brings the time of the Trojan War to life with his drawings of people and places. Satrapi’s illustrations depict the emotional truth of the events she experienced. As a child, she saw and felt as a child. As a teenager, she became something else.

My angry feminist comment: This is what happens when men define what women are and what they ought to be. Women must cover their hair and shroud their bodies because when men see these desirable objects, they are sexually aroused and that is sinful. Their own responsibility is nowhere considered. It is all the women’s fault and so they must be strictly controlled to prevent men from sinning. Poor weak men! As Majane Satrapi’s grandmother said, if God knew that women’s hair would cause so much sin, he should have made them bald.

What I Read in August 2011

Howard Jacobson, Kalooki Nights. I’m not sure why I stayed with this book – all 450 pages of it – since I didn’t like it very much. By the author of The Finkler Question, it is a lengthy exploration of the lives of English Jews as observed and experienced by a disenchanted caricaturist (literally, he draws cartoons) in his middle years.

Charles H. Manekin, On Maimonides. This serves as a companion piece to Sherwin Nuland’s Maimonides and is a much tougher read. I comment on the two books, along with one of Maimonides’ perplexities in Maimonides Maimonides.

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimajaro. Since I enjoyed A Moveable Feast, I thought I would give Hemingway’s this collection of his short stories a try. Too male and too mannered for me, but I enjoyed The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber because of what happened to Macomber after he shot the buffalo.

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. Sarah, of A Rat in the Book Pile, and I have been reading this together and cross-posting in both of our blogs. So read and comment at either place:
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part II
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part III
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part IV

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Headless Corpse. Despite the grisly title, this is not a grisly book. It is a typical Maigret story. The Inspector considers a crime, he tries to understand the criminals, he eats a bit, he drinks a lot, he solves the mystery.

Martha Saxton, Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography. Not too modern any more, this biography. Published in 1977, it is a feminist take on Alcott’s sometimes difficult life. More comments may follow as I proceed with my Alcott project.

Emile Zola, The Masterpiece. Considered the most autobiographical of his novels, in The Masterpiece Zola gives us the lives of writers and artists in 188s Paris. We learn of the price of success, as well as the costs of failure.

Maimonides Maimonides

This fall I will be co-leading in a course – Believe It or Not – in which we examine various sources of belief. I intend to speak about Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, born 1138). He interests me as a subject because of his efforts to reconcile philosophic truth with revealed truth, as in the Torah.

To learn about the man, I started with Sherwin Nuland’s Maimonides. Nuland is a physician, best known for his book How We Die. After some historical and biographical background, Nuland passes rather rapidly over philosophy and theology to report on Maimonides’ medical opinions – not what I was looking for. I need some apparent conflicts between philosophy and revelation as a basis for discussion.

In Charles H. Manekin’s On Maimonides, I find an example:

With respect to creation, however, Maimonides and his philosophical authorities are on opposite sides of the fence. For his most admired authority, Aristotle, held that the world always existed in the way it does now, that it did not come into existence after not existing. Moreover, Aristotle’s conclusion seemed to follow inexorably from principles of his science….

Aristotle’s science was based on the concept of the celestial spheres and is outdated, but the issue is still relevant. If the findings of science seem to conflict with the revelations of your religious tradition, what can you believe?

Maimonides, faced with Aristotle’s opinion that the world is eternal, had to consider the opening verse of Genesis:

 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

In my edition of the Bible, the note says

 Verse 1 is a majestic summary of the story of Creation: God is the beginning, nay, the Cause of all things.

This note seems to evade the eternity question. Surely if the Hebrew word actually means beginning, then it indicates a definite point in time and therefore “the heaven and the earth” did not exist previous to that. Seeking the translation of the Hebrew, I consulted knowledgeable in-laws and received this response from Cousin Isaac.

I think I can help a bit, starting with literal translation. The closer we get to Maimonidean philosophy, the further we’ll get from anything I can say anything useful about.

“In the Beginning” is a valid basic translation of “Bereishit,” according to traditional interpretations. That’s essentially how Onkelos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkelos) translates it in his authoritative, tradition-based Aramaic translation. The root of the word, I think most would agree, is R.A.Sh. (as opposed to B.R.A in the next word), which means “head.”

The next word, “Bara,” is I think universally taken to be the verb “created,” with the subject being God and the objects being the heaven and the earth.

I’m pretty sure that traditional normative Jewish belief and interpretation of this verse is indeed that God existed (as much as one can say that) before anything else, and that the Universe did not exist until He created it, as reported here.

That is what Maimonides thought also, and he stood his ground, Aristotle to the contrary. So God is eternal, but the universe is not eternal, since it had a beginning and to be eternal is to have no beginning or end. Now we drill down to a deeper problem with language. We assign words to concepts we do not really understand and which therefore we cannot define with other words. As Cousin Isaac says, ”God existed (as much as one can say that) before anything else”.  If I understand (!) Maimonides, we can say a stone or a man exists, but to say God exists draws on a different sense of exists. The stone or the man may cease to exist, so existence contrasts being with non being. Ceasing to exist is not possible for God because God is eternal. But then again, eternal is just a word we use. Since it doesn’t apply to anything we have experienced, we cannot conceive of its meaning.

What I Read in July 2011

Leora Tanenbaum, Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality. Reporting and analysis of the struggle by women who, committed to a traditional religion, want recognition and leadership positions within that tradition.

She interviewed members of the three dominant faiths — Christian, Jewish, and Muslim — those who were ordained and those who wanted to be. She attended their meetings, read their publications and carefully analyzed the power structure and the texts and traditions cited to deny them equal standing with men.

Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. This best seller does not disappoint, which its examination of elements of the conventional wisdom which are not supported by examination using the tools developed by economists.

Theodore Dreiser, The Titan. This is the second in the series of three novels about the schemes and adventures of Frank Algernon Cowperwood: financier, collector, lover of women, and “titan.”

Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater. This novel, from the 1960′s, may or may not be a fictionalized account of the author’s life with husband John Mortimer (Rumpole of the Bailey and other entertainments). It was chaotic. I found Penelope’s persona – veteran of four husbands and obsessed with her own fertility – very difficult to like. Jake (John?) had my sympathy.

Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl. Pretty Polly shows us how to be happy though poor. This story for girls was written after the success of Little Women.

Gabrielle Donnelly, The Little Women Letters. A contemporary novel, set in London, centers on  the lives of three sisters, descendants of Josephine March of Little Women.

Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. Armstrong describes the origins and attitudes of fundamentalist movements in three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Alexander McCall Smith, The Full Cupboard of Life. This is number 5 in the series about Precious Ramotswe, head of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, who privately and discretely investigates affairs in Botswana.

H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau. The mad scientist is not mad exactly. He just pursues his researches without regard to consequences to himself or others.

Louisa May Alcott, Under the Lilacs. Children’s story by the author of Little Women. Well-crafted but conventional tale of two little girls, the young wanderer they adopt, his clever dog, and various benign adults.

Sherwin Nuland, Maimonides. A contemporary American physician and writer tells the story of Moses ben Maimon — Maimonides — the 12th century Jewish physician and philosopher.

The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism

In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong provides us with a history of fundamentalism as it has been experienced in three different monotheistic religious traditions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity. It’s a large undertaking, especially as she begins in 1492. Her account offers a dizzying array of people, programs and political developments. What ties them together is her analysis of why people who follow conservative religious traditions have felt displaced in the modern age. She begins with myth.

 We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence…. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning.

We no longer believe in or take comfort from myth in the old ways. Myth has been set aside in modern thought by logos. In earlier times,

 Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enables men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective.

Because rational analysis and scientific processes have been so successful, people today try, mistakenly, to apply them to myth. If we cannot find evidence of the ten plagues visited on the Egyptians before Moses led his people out, then we conclude that the story of the Exodus is not “true” and has nothing to tell us. As a rabbi once said when commenting on the story of Jonah, “Don’t get hung up on the whale – this is a story that makes a point.”

Armstrong traces the relationship between mythos and logos as Islam, Judaism and Christianity adopted and adapted to modernism. Modernism was also experienced as part of a political process, especially in the Middle East. As to how religious people and their leaders respond, some adapt their religious beliefs and practices, some abandon them, and some reject the modernism which threatens their identity and way of life. That rejection takes place in a very real fear of extinction. Armstrong documents many examples of the cycle of rejection. First, within a dominant religious group those who reject changes in favor of clinging to the “fundamentals” experience conflict within that group. Next, if they are not successful, they either subside (often temporarily) or withdraw to a splinter group. Then, as they build their strength they may engage in outreach to others or, perceiving those others as evil and dangerous, they go on the attack.

 They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself…. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identify by means of selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these “fundamentals” so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action.

Fundamentalists look to the past, but they act in the present.  Armstrong’s book is devoted to these “not impractical dreamers” and how their fears and action plans have affected all of us.

The Road into the Open by Arthur Schnitzler

We are in Vienna and the year is 1908. It is bitter sweet. World War I is going to happen and sweep this life away, but neither the author nor his characters know that. What do they do? They meet at each other’s houses, walk in the park, bicycle in the countryside, stop at inns, talk, compose music, sing, talk, have love affairs and talk some more.

Athur Schnitzler was a medical doctor and a Jew, the son of a medical doctor and a Jew. Father and son experienced the freedom of the liberal years in the Austro Hungarian Empire and the antisemitism which increased after the Dreyfus Affair. It was the Vienna of Freud and Herzl. Schnitzler’s interest was not in medicine but in literature, and he became a successful writer of stories and plays, best known today for his story which became the basis for the movie  LaRonde. He was interested in sex and in ideas, in love and in death.

His central character Georg, the Baron, is of the minor nobility, living off the remnants of family wealth and avoiding the need to get to work and develop his musical talents. Georg’s interest in love and death is without emotional force. He tells his friend,

“I even feel that I have a certain inclination to sentimentality, which I have to resist.”

“Yes, that’s it. Sentimentality is something that stands in direct opposition to feeling, something with which one compensates for one’s lack of feeling, one’s inner coldness. Sentimentality is feeling that one has bought, so to speak, for the purchase price. I hate sentimentality.”

“Hm, and yet I think you’re not entirely free of it yourself.”

“I’m Jewish. It’s a national illness with us. Decent people try to turn it into anger or rage.”

While he looks for his road into the future, “the open,” Georg has love affairs, one of which results in a pregnancy. That is the story, but the plot is not the point. The many characters, drawn to represent different attitudes toward their changing world, — they are the point. Georg is at the center as a young man who doesn’t know who he is and knows even less who he wants to become. Antisemitism is not his problem, but it is real in the life of his many Jewish friends. Some shrug and get on with their loves, some contemplate emigrating to the Holy Land, some consider converting. Some get angry and some cultivate indifference. Written after the first Zionist Congresses, the author doesn’t know the outcome waiting only 30 years in the future, but he understands this is a problem that is not going away. A road into the open should serve Vienna as well as Georg. Where is it? Georg doesn’t know and Schnitzler doesn’t know and we don’t know either. but we know how much they need to find it.