Emma

 

I mentioned in an earlier post that, some time ago, I experienced certain BookTubers talking about a thing called Jane Austen July. As I’d never read Jane Austen, but had heard prominent Canadian authors declaring Jane Austen one of English Literature’s greatest writers, I decided to set old prejudices aside and read her most famous of novels, Pride and Prejudice. I was not disappointed. Her prose is precise, exacting, and beautiful. Sense and Sensibility followed, the following year. Then Mansfield Park.

This year, I read Emma, her longest novel. Like all her novels, on its surface it is about single ladies finding their marital match after nine-ish or so months of trials, tribulations, and misunderstandings. Emma is about relationships, sexual mostly, not that Jane Austen would be so bold as to stoop to anything remotely overt or torrid. It is Georgian at its core, after all.

The novel begins with Emma Woodhouse’s former governess’ marriage, to which Emma takes credit, professing that it was she who made the match, followed by Emma’s earnest vow that she, herself, should never marry. Honestly, she would have already, given Regency expectations (she’s 21); but whatever she might say, the real reason for her not having married (not a huge surprise, given that there is a limited supply of eligible bachelors in her village of Highbury) is probably her devotion to, and her caring for, her aging valetudinarian father.

What follows is what one might expect in an Austen novel. Emma snobbishly decides that she knows best, about just about everything. Following her supposed success of having matched Miss Taylor (now Mrs. Weston), she sets about making matches for her lesser status friend, Harriet Smith. Things go awry. Her match marries another. She sets to match her with another, and that is also a failure, for reasons not disclosed here.

All the while, she flirts. She passes judgement on others. She decides on the merit of others’ character, usually wrong, given her limited experience of romantic love and society. Indeed, Highbury is too small to even have dances, until Mrs. Weston’s dashing stepson comes to visit.

Emma is very much a comedy of manners. Emma butts into others’ business. Mr. Knightley despises gossip, but passes judgement on others once Emma expresses her opinion of them on to him. Mr. Knightley, otherwise, is the paragon of patient virtue. Emma’s sister, and Mr. Knightley’s sister-in-law, Isabella, often has little desire to speak on any subject, except her own children. Jane Fairfield appears distant and aloof. Harriet is easily convinced that she might marry above her station (one must not yourself pass judgement on past prejudices; it is what it was). Reverend Elton and his wife are snobs of the first order, he a flirt before marriage, but interested primarily in station and dowry; she, boasting, pretentious, and vulgar. I might opine that Miss Bates, an aging spinster, may be the best of the bunch: she is written for comic effect, is garrulous by nature, and quietly ridiculed behind her back for it by Emma, is hopelessly optimistic, despite her fallen circumstances, always putting others’ wellbeing and happiness before her own.

There is much more to Emma than meets the eye, however. Of course there is. There is subtle nuance: gendered space, for instance. Women spend most of their time “imprisoned” indoors, mostly in drawing rooms. Men’s scenes are primarily outdoors. It’s all about boundaries, opportunities, constraints. There are subtle hints about the “Irish Question.” The women worry what might happen to the Dixons while in “Bally-craig,” in County Antrim, in Ulster, the site of a great deal of upheaval in 1798.

Jane Austen never comes out and pontificates on a subject, but the mere mention in her novels of slavery and Ireland and relatives being in the navy, and their long absences expected, of money troubles, of entailed estates, and inheritances, and doweries, speaks of greater depth than mere romances. Jane Austen is not chic lit.

Am I done with Jane Austen for the year now that July is coming to a close? Yes and no. I’ve begun a contemporary novel, The Murder of Mr. Wickham, by Claudia Gray. It’s something of a sequel to Emma. And Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park, and Sense and Sensibility. It’s one of a series of murder mysteries set in Jane Austen’s works, this one in Donwell Abbey, Mr. Knightley’s ancestral seat, about 20 years after the events of Emma. It’s an easy read, thus far (I’m only a couple chapters in), the prose good, with characters from the above works introduced without heavy-handed exposition. Ms. Grey (Amy Vincent) obviously loves Jane Austen’s works. Which is surprising, given her other works: She’s written several Star Wars novels. And Fantasy novels. One doesn’t expect a science fiction and fantasy writer to also write Agatha Christie inspired Jane Austen murder mysteries. But she does.

I’ve also begun Lucy Worsley’s celebrated biography of Jane, Jane Austen at Home. Again, I’m only a chapter in, but it’s obviously meticulously researched, as one would expect of the Chief Curator for Historic Royal Palaces, and the host of God knows how many thought-provoking television documentaries. She is a self described Janeite.

Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago is, without a doubt, a masterpiece. That said, Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel is less known than David Lean’s 1965 film. Indeed, I expect most people who’ve seen the film haven’t read the novel. That’s a pity.

I say this because until recently, I was one of those people. For shame. I’ve no excuse. Pasternak’s novel sat on my shelves for years, an old copy, bought at a fundraiser book sale, picked up then with every intention of experiencing Lean’s tale in its original form. Dissatisfied with the old copy, I bought it again, anew (as I often do), in its most recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, theirs being expectedly modern in its prose, as I found them to be with their Crime and Punishment.

I love the film. It’s epic, both in vision and scope, typically David Lean, and for a long time it was my gateway to understanding the Russian Revolution. It’s also what I expect of Lean, he who gave us The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. I note that all his films I’m familiar with are adaptations: Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, Ryan’s Daughter, A Passage to India. All are excellent, in my opinion. So, it comes as no surprise that his version of Doctor Zhivago is, as well. I say “his version” because it is its own self. It is not the book. It hits all the salient plot points of the novel but, regardless how excellently it succeeds as a film, it is lesser than Pasternak’s book.

People who know me would nod sagely at this declaration and say, of course you’d say that, that the book is better than the film. I do, too; most of the time. I recall hearing somewhere that one can make a great film from a mediocre book, but that it is next to impossible to make a great film from a great book. There’s some truth in that. Perhaps there is a great deal of truth in that. But that is not always the case. Zhivago is one such case. So too most of Lean’s filmography. (I’m a Lean fan, obviously.) This does not mean that Lean’s film, however great, is the book’s equal. Lean’s film does an excellent job outlining Russian history concerning the period leading up to the Revolution and its civil war; it does an even better job romanticising Zhivago’s and Lara’s love affair. It fails, however, it charting Zhivago’s ideology, and his journey in becoming an inspired poet.

Lean’s film simplifies Zhivago’s life, insofar as it focuses on the love triangle as the core of its narrative. It glosses over the social commentary riven throughout, the privilege of the rich, the inequality of the poor and working classes, and the prior revolutions that ignited because of it; indeed, it even glosses over the Great War, the Revolution, and the years of civil war that followed. All are mere framework in preference of a story that would move American audiences: true love. Not cultural tidal forces, not muse.

Pasternak’s Zhivago has so much more depth. More formative characters (most largely excised in the film) who weave in and out of the story, each a necessary device to enlighten we readers who did not experience the events lived through, giving us firsthand accounts on how those who did endured the hardships and horrors. Certain characters, Komarovsky and Strelnikov, for instance, are far more nuanced, one more villainous, the other more empathetic. Both entail more in their effect than in page count. Honestly, I was surprised at how limited Lara’s presence is in the book, how much is inferred. Yet, she is his primary muse.

A note on names, just to muse on the novel’s depth, if only a little. Zhivago is not just Yuri’s surname. It is a metaphor for both his profession and his soul. Its Russian root is zhiv, meaning life. Larissa (Lara) is a Greek name meaning “bright, cheerful.” Komarovsky’s Russian root is komar, meaning mosquito. Yuriatin, where much of the story revolves around, is Russian for Yuri’s town. Strelnikov (Pavel Antipov), although a real surname, is shortened from Rasstrelnikov, meaning executioner.

The entire novel, if I may be so bold, is Yuri’s evolution into poet. It is why the novel carries on after his death, until his poems are collected and published. It is why his poems complete the novel, and are not scattered about within it. You don’t have to read them. Not really. Notes at the end of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation inform me that they are more lyrical in their original Russian, that we miss out on their rhyming scheme, even their meter, that they focused more on meaning than on adhering as closely as possible to literal translation. Perhaps that’s a good thing. One would have to ask someone who reads Russian, and has an ear for poetry, to find out if artistry was lost in translation. One can only judge what one reads. I read them. I'm a completest.

One thing is true, at least to me, is that Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is a beautiful book, despite its themes of loneliness and disillusionment, perhaps because of them. It's sad. It's painful. It sometimes reads like a dream. The narrative frequently focusses on environment and emotion, on pathos, and not the epic struggles that herd the characters unto their ultimate fates. It follows observation and reflection and inspiration, not just cause and effect and aftermath. It does that, as well. But events are the lesser of the two, however poignant. All is seen through the eyes of an artist. A Poet.

Will it remain in print as long as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? I don’t know. Time will tell. It ought to, I believe. I hope. Pasternak, in my view, is their heir apparent in Russian literature. And that’s saying something.

There’s No Accounting for Taste: Literature

 

Light Reading

There really is no accounting for taste, is there? Preference migrates, culturally, individually, personally.

Indeed, consider what once dominated the shelves of bookstores, compared with now. Long ago, in a decade, far, far, away, I recall rows of slim Harlequin Romances striking provocative poses; Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey governing a now long banished Westerns section; World War 2 setting the stage for adventure thrillers; and classic literature retaining shelf space.

How things have changed. All the above are things of the past. Westerns appear to have disappeared. The last great spymaster would appear to have been John le Carre. I rarely see Dickens on the shelves, anymore. Signet Classics of Shakespeare, to say nothing of Coles Notes, have all but disappeared (Coles Notes, certainly). Science Fiction has taken a back seat to Fantasy; or shall I say Romantasy.

Not that these genres have completely disappeared. All the above are available, and perhaps even alive and well, on eBay and Amazon. And in superstores, I imagine. Superstores have very large selection; but that does not change a simple fact: stores stock what sells. And what sold then does not necessarily sell now. Thus, begun ye bestsellers of old!

Browsing online is not quite the same as haunting bookshelves, though. One must, usually, know what one is looking for to find it. So too, sometimes, in superstores. My memory always seems paralysed in superstores. I find myself pacing about, glancing at spines and covers of authors I've never heard of, overwhelmed, finally pursuing only those tried and true I do.

This is all neither here nor there, here. This is about reading taste: mine, particularly. Mine migrates, as you might have surmised from the first paragraph. All power to those who’ve found their true love decades and stuck with it; were that my experience. But mine is far from theirs. Honestly, I can’t account for how my taste in books has evolved. Maybe I can. More on that later.

I was not a reader when young. I struggled. I lagged behind my classmates; until I was held back in Grade 2. This is not to say that I read, even as my reading skills improved. I was an active kid. Perhaps overactive. Even when I did read, what I read was not what one might call enlightened: I recall books with badgers, and the like. Books with pictures.

It was not until I borrowed Arthur C. Clarke’s Islands in the Sky, in middle school, from my school library, that I caught the bug. I did not dive directly into SF, however. The next two books I read, that summer, were two novelizations of films I was too young, then, to be allowed entrance to: Alien, and Nightwing, both horror stories. The first was better than the second.

Those two books led me to Stephen King. I read a lot of King. I did not abandon SF. I read Clarke’s 2001, A Space Odyssey, then more of his ouvre. Then Asimov. And John Wyndham. I thank Mr. Scully, an English teacher, for keeping me in touch with SF. He was a rare breed of teacher, insofar as he chose to assign stories he thought his students would like, and thus read, and not just those school boards might prefer. Maybe he just liked SF, and loathed classics and contemporary “literary” literature. I don't know. I never asked him. It's not like a lot of teens like to talk to their teachers.

In latter high school I found my way to Fantasy literature because I was introduced to D&D. I read far too much of it. Some of it was good. Some of it was extraordinary: Le Guin, Moorcock, Tolkien. Most of it was bad. Some of it was bloody awful. Gory. Hypersexualised. Infantile. The Gor series, for instance. I suffered through six of them, if I remember correctly; and only because a friend loved them. Like I said, there's no accounting for taste.

My mother disliked my momentary Fantasy fixation (rightly so, I'd say now), and insisted I read other things. She offered to buy me a novel one day, but only if I chose one that was not Fantasy. I chose a Clive Cussler title: Raise the Titanic. I was a lifeguard, then, and the thought of reading a story about the sea and submersibles appealed to me. It was alright, good enough that I opted to read other books Cussler wrote. I began to read adventure thrillers alongside Fantasy titles (I expect that disappointed my mother - the continued consumption of Fantasy), books by Tom Clancy and Wilbur Smith, Jack Higgins, Robert Ludlum. You know the type.

I read a lot more classic SF as my interest in Fantasy waned. It was the glut of TSR/Wizards of the Coast titles that largely turned me away from the genre. The more of them I read, the less I liked them. So too ever bloated, cliched, trilogies, like those of Tad Williams. To say nothing of series that never seemed to end, The Black Company, for instance.

It was about this time, now largely disgusted with Fantasy, that I turned to Hemingway. I believe I read The Sun Also Rises, first. Then For Whom the Bell Tolls. Then A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway led to F. Scott Fitzgerald: Gatsby. Fitzgerald led to The New Canadian Library, from Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart. It was the 90s and the growing I Am Canadian era. I wanted to read our own stories, our own history. And do to this day.

It’s been a merry ride since then. Ever more "high brow" literary lit. Victorian stuff. Turn of the century Modern. Histories. A few memoirs, and biographies. These days I’ve dipped my toe into philosophy. And the Greeks and the Romans. Also postmodern and ergodic lit.

How’d I come to choose the things I did? Taste. I was attracted to what I knew and liked. I grew up watching Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, The Night Gallery and Kolchak, The Night Stalker. The Outer Limits. The Hulk. Doctor Who. The Six Million Dollar Man. Epic miniseries, like Shogun, Roots, The Winds of War. Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Star Wars, CE3K, and 2001. But also, more westerns and war films than one might imagine. So, it comes as no surprise that I was drawn to the fantastic and the supernatural fare, at first. But I also grew up watching “classic” film with my parents on Saturday nights; it also comes as no surprise then, that I was drawn to 1920s expat writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to Steinbeck, Dickens and Twain, to Harper Lee, to Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. Salinger. And also, to Ray Bradbury and Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.

It has become impossible to pin down what I like. I like good prose. Poetic language. Even poetry, now; something that I’d hitherto neglected. I suppose what I’m drawn to story, tales that explore the human condition, narratives that, however long or short, have insight into the human soul.

As you might expect, I do not read Fantasy, anymore.

 

The Road

 

There are quite a few apocalyptic stories: On the Beach, I Am Legend, The Stand, Oryx and Crake, Station Eleven; the list goes on. In them, the world parishes by nuclear fallout, disease, climate disaster; it burns, it drowns, it bakes, it starves. It matters not, in this genus, how it dies that fascinates; it is how we cope during its dying.

This one, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, is fascinating in that regard. It details the journey of a father and son, unnamed, travelling south to the sea. Where they began their journey is as undisclosed as their names. So too is the method by which the world is dying. All we know is that their world is by all accounts dead, burned and blackened, adrift in black soot that shifts underfoot, its sky as grey and colourless as the bleached buildings they pass. It’s perpetually twilight. Choking. Dust, kicked up, takes its good time settling. Perpetually astir. No amount of rain cleans the air. It remains acrid and gritty, regardless how much falls from the relentless blanket of clouds that all but block out the sun and moon. The man coughs, despite his always wearing a rag mask to filter out the soot, its inner face as bloody from his breath as the outer is black by what it can never wholly hope to filter. The boy fares better; perhaps because the man tends to his every want and need, abstaining his own comfort and safety, even his own sustenance, in hope that his child will survive, even if he, himself, may already be doomed. Food is scarce, starvation always mere days away. Far more immediately dangerous, however, are the gangs of murderous maneaters roaming the same roads they do.

Have I enticed you to read this masterpiece? Probably not. How can you read something like that, you ask? But you should. McCarthy paints a far more vivid picture than any other who’ve approached the same canvas. J.G. Ballard attempted a similar desperate world in The Drought, albeit his was as sunburnt and dry as McCarthy’s is duskish and wet. But where both depict desperation in what appears to be the end-of-days, Ballard’s prose does not reek of it like McCarthy’s does. Cannibalism is hinted at in The Drought, whereas in The Road it is held up to the light. In The Drought, the cast of characters retain the semblance of civilisation, despite their need. Their presumed cannibalism does not horrify; indeed, one character has grown fat on it, yet remains altogether amiable to its protagonist. Not so in The Road. Predatory humans prowl the road, armed with homemade mediaeval weapons. Their slaves haul waggons, are locked in cellars, their amputated limbs cauterised to keep the meat alive for perhaps weeks of judicious paring. The victims are as dehumanised as their wardens. It’s all terribly horrifying. Yet our glimpse of these horrors is sparing. The true horror remains the landscape, the environment, and impending starvation. The man and the boy subsist on what can be scavenged: canned food, scrapings of seeds and flour and cornmeal, all of it suspect until ingested. The fatigue of hunger looms over them. As does injury and infection. Perhaps the greatest horror of all, though, is the hopelessness of their seemingly pointless journey.

Why are they headed south? The man tells the boy that it will be better down there. It will be warmer. He does not outwardly suggest that there will be more food – he knows that there won’t be. It is implied, however. How can there be? The world is burnt, after all. It remains unchanged, no matter how many miles and months they travel. If anything, it gets darked. Colder. Snowier. And wetter. I suspect the only reason they are headed south is because all hope had been depleted from wherever it is they began from, and to give the boy hope.

I will leave their fate undisclosed. Being a McCarthy novel, it is as painful and uncertain as all his are. But, it's a beautiful book, nonetheless, despite its bleak narrative. It is striking in its style. Its prose is as terse as Hemingway’s, succinct, sharp. Its grammar is explicitly McCarthy’s. His use of contractions is not what I would call conventional. He disdains dialogue punctuation. Dialogue is terse, seemingly pointless, yet pregnant with emotion. There is stream of consciousness. Sentence fragments. It does take a moment to get accustomed to, but it is always clear, as Faulkner’s (similarly stylistic, to my eye) rarely is to me.

This might be McCarthy’s best novel (I’ve not read them all, so take this with a grain of salt). I’m not saying this because The Road won the Pulitzer Prize, I’m saying this because I found it the most horrifying and emotionally gripping of all his that I’ve read.

The Drought

 

“He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time.” ― J.G. Ballard, The Drought

For someone who’s taken pride in my love of SF, I must humbly admit that I was wholly ignorant of the works of J.G. Ballard, until recently. For shame, some may say. In my defence, I might mention that my choice of reading material, living in Northern Ontario, might have been described as limited. To be fair, we did/do have a bookstore, albeit a chain. We even had an independent bookstore, for a while, too. Neither was all that large. Neither was small either – I’ve been in used bookstores whose selection beggared both combined. So, it goes without saying, before the internet, what we saw was what they had. And that was what we knew, that and word of mouth, and those lists of titles available from the publisher we might find in the paperbacks purchased. We, here, also live in the American sphere of influence, further limiting what might be had – its America-centric, but I guess you figured that out (indeed, even Canadian authors are not as widely known here in Canada as they ought to be). So, it comes as no surprise then that British authors would/could be somewhat unknown to us/me.

That’s no excuse, you might say, citing it’s been a long time since the internet made titles and authors once largely unknown in that foggy, mythical land of Before available. All true. But tastes and interests migrate. And it’s only now, in these years of nostalgia, that I’ve been looking back, revisiting old loves, and discovering new ones along the way.

I can’t say that I’m all that familiar with Mr. Ballard, even now. I know of a number of books that he wrote, that he’s a celebrated member of the New Wave of science-fiction, and that his Empire of the Sun is autobiographical. I also know that Crash was adapted to the screen, a Cronenberg film that baffled me then, and confuses me still. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me some time to read Ballard. But Ballard kept coming up in YouTube videos I was watching, largely praising this, to me, unknown master of speculative fiction. It was their praise that convinced me to give him a try, despite my tepid dislike of Crash.

Was The Drought (1965, originally published in the UK as The Burning World, 1964) my first Ballard? It was not. That was The Drowned World (1962). Both are part of Ballard’s apocalyptic tetralogy, beginning with The Wind from Where (1961), culminating in The Crystal World (1966). In each, the world as we know it has come to an end (or is in the process of) from destructive winds, from solar disturbances that melt the ice caps, from industrial pollution bringing an end to rain over landmasses, or by the crystallisation of the world. Each stand alone. One need not read them in order, or in total, either.

I can’t comment on the first and last, but the middle two are good. Some might refer to them as masterpieces. I preferred The Drowned World, personally. I found The Drought to be a little uneven; indeed, I found the main character of The Drought to be less a protagonist than an observer. He barely plays a part in even his own narrative. Granted, he’s in shock; and despite his being a doctor, his skills are in limited use, considering the lack of materials and facilities available to him as society brakes down and the populace is in a destructive, predatory, self-preservation, downward spiral. Relationships are largely disposable, understandably, each out for themselves, for the most part; but this is a novel, and narrative arcs are what hold a story together. Story ought not to drift, as the characters here would be expected to do, unearthing water sources and food supplies. As they understandably would. There ought to be an actual plot beyond mere survival. That said, the horror of surviving in this dying world is only hinted at, glossed over, even comic in its portrayal; unlike how vivid those horrors are depicted in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Ballard's survivors are far less horriying in their loss of humanity as are McCarthy's. I expect that is why McCarthy's apocolyptic world is the greater and more famous of the two.

The Drought, by Criss Foss

I might add that I was somewhat distracted by the world itself. It is imaginary. Though British, Ballard’s Burning World is not England. It is not the continent, either. The characters all have English names. They travel hundreds of miles south to the sea (a ludicrous direction on an island nation), leading me to believe that this book must take place in a fictional North America, and that the riverbed they follow must be the Mississippi (otherwise why not head north to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, or east towards the coast). Yet the book is replete with English jargon, leaving me wondering from time to time, what the hell is a…. So too flora and fauna. We have precious few rooks here in North America, for instance. He was obviously writing for his English audience and peppering his books with things he and they would recognise.

I did enjoy it, however, despite my grievances. In fact, I'm glad I've found him and his voice. Ballard reminds me of Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham, insofar as his stories are not really about tech or even how the world came to drown or burn, his books are about how people would be affected by what if happening to them, on how they might cope with their new paradigm: altruistically, predatorily, or even catatonically. Perhaps that is why J.G. Ballard remains popular, decades after his death.

I recommend you have a dictionary hand while reading Ballard, or a search engine, just so that you can translate his Britishisms, if you are not familiar with his vernacular. Don’t be put off by that, either; the British have likely had the same criticisms of American vernacular, too.

 

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

 

I have to wonder of this was a prophetic read, however old this book may be. That sounds bleak, doesn’t it. And polarising, depending on your politics. I have hopes, though, that things are not as they were in 1934; and that the panic I sometimes feel, when consuming 24-hour diatribes on our “news” networks, is merely a natural reaction to their bid for Neilson ratings, and not the imminent rise of the end of days. That is neither here nor there, here.

What’s germane here is my sense of accomplishment at having finally read this brick that has loomed over my bookshelves for many a year, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. When I say year, I mean decades. I mean that literally. I bought this tome back in the Eighties, and after a rather lackluster first stab at its nearly 1500 pages of fairly fine print (my attention span was, shall we say, shorter then), I set it aside for lighter reading, daunted by its heft, believing that it would take as many months to complete as that long ago war waged. Little did I know how long it would remain perched on my shelves. Indeed, it would remain on those shelves even after a move, even after those selves were upgraded to larger, loftier, units. Before long, I wondered if I ever would read it cover-to-cover; always telling myself… someday….

One day, rather recently (in relation to the length of my not-too-short life), in a lock-down, far, far away, I decided, I would finally give Shirer’s epic history its long-awaited go. And give it a go I did. This is not to say I succeeded. I did manage far more pages than I did in that first attempt, but I did not plow through Rise and Fall… as I had intended. I did not fail, entirely, though. I managed to not set Shirer’s history back on the shelf, merely burying it under “more pressing” volumes on my end table. After a time, I picked it up again, sure that this time was indeed the time I would riffle through it. This time, I decided, I would not fail; that I would have a strategy: I would read ten pages a day, every day, whilst I read other books. I succeeded in this. And before long, as I watched my bookmark inch along the spine, those 10 pages grew to 20. And, before I knew it (not as quickly as this sounds, however), I found myself very near the end. And then, finally, I did come to the end. I felt like I’d scaled the Matterhorn!

Was it worth it? Yes. Very much so! It’s a remarkable work, as detailed and as insightful as only someone who lived through those dark days could expound.

It is dated, though. It’s a work of its time: a top-down history. Today, most histories are bottom-up. What’s the difference? Top-down is fact and event oriented. It may contain excerpts from letters and diaries, but only insofar as those entries add detail to the events related. Bottom-up is far more personal. More immersion. Letters and diaries entries are integral to giving the reader what feels like firsthand experience to the events as they unfold. A great many bottom-up histories will follow only a few “diarists,” so as to give the most dramatic experience possible, allowing the reader to empathise with those living through the events related. Shirer, however, has no wish for us to empathise with his diarists. His were the generals and the architects of the Third Reich. Even hapless conspirators who professed to end Hitler’s reign, if doing nothing. Or failing. His intent is to unveil that heinous regime in all its horror, for what it was, and not, in any way, apologise for their actions. He does that with great skill.

I will not detail the events within this weighty tome. Most people alive are already well acquainted with the events of the Second World War and all its horrors. Or should I say, I hope they are. I do wonder, at times, though. If they are not, I would wish this book were required reading. For everyone. It is still, I believe, one of the best histories of the War. But it is Reich-sentric. Let’s be clear about that. What happens outside Germany is merely mentioned, only insofar as it is relevant to what is unfolding within the Reich. Thus, the United States does not loom large here; indeed, it is barely mentioned until it begins its convoys to beleaguered Britain. Britain and the Soviet Union are far larger players in the Reich’s narrative; probably because they were of greater concern to Nazi Germany than even it's allies, Mussolini’s Italy, and Imperial Japan (which hardly factors in, at all). What is of greatest weight is Shirer’s firsthand accounts: He was an American journalist within the Reich, until he had to exit from there upon America’s entrance in the war. His “Berlin Diary” is as important to this work as it is in its own right; as is his having reported on the Nuremberg Trials. It was these writings that allowed this work to be as personal as it is. And as insightful. No one else (then, anyway) could have given us the book he did.

I obviously recommend this book, however daunting it may appear; but if the reader is not well versed with the overall history of WW2, I would recommend they look elsewhere first, overarching documentaries, perhaps, before diving in.

So, why would I say this book is prophetic? Because, to my mind, anyway, there are worrisome parallels today around the world to those early days before Weimar Germany became Nazi Germany. Is it just fearmongering? Is it that we, as humans, find patterns everywhere, even if there are none? Perhaps. I do hope, though, that no country finds itself travelling down the road of autocratic totalitarianism ever again. Or that anyone should ever have to experience such horrors as the people then did. Or those who do now do.

Not to belabour the point, but,

“No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.” ― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Regardless my polemic, William Shirer’s spic history is likely one of the most important contemporary histories ever written, I would wish that everyone read it.

In Search Of…

 

I’ve reached an age where I wonder: what’s it all about? And, how’d I get here? “Here” being me in the here and now. I expect that’s rather common. But I suspect most people search for their answers in wildly different places. And I’ve little doubt that they, each of them, come to as many conclusions are there are people.

Then again, perhaps not. I know a great many people who look no further than their family; and find little meaning elsewhere. If they do, look elsewhere, they keep their quest to themselves. Outwardly, they speak only about their family, parents, children, grandchildren. That’s fair, given how much they’ve invested in it. There are others who converse only about sports. Or politics. To each his own. Sports is an easy subject: it ruffles few feathers. Politics is another matter; if there is a more divisive subject, I don’t know what it is.

Sadly, I may be in that latter camp. Recently, though, I’ve begun to realise that there is little point in expressing any opinion on the subject, however much I wish to: no one, I’ve come to realise, will ever change anyone else’s opinion. Ever. Regardless how exacting one’s argument might be, regardless how insightful they might believe theirs is, it matters not a jot; the listener will only double down on their belief, not matter how ill-thought-out or erroneous the speaker may find it.

Perhaps that’s my first spark of illumination, my first glimmer of wisdom. More to follow, maybe.

Where might one find wisdom? Most people once gained what passed as that illusive state listening to their elders, a process begun at birth. It’s what we do: we observe, we collate, file away, and filter everything we see and hear through the sieve we were taught. One only observes the world through tinted lenses, as it were. Sadly, not all lenses are equal. Some lenses are cracked. Some are gloriously kaleidoscopic. Most are merely banal.

Which is mine? That might depend on the listener. Given the response I receive from the limited audience I observe, mine is largely out of step with those around me. We just don’t see eye to eye. We consume different news, and indeed different entertainment. I watch sports, like a great many other people I cross pass with, but am bored by the endlessly repetitious discourse surrounding it. Besides, what wisdom can be mined from it? Perseverance, for one; that might be its most important lesson. That and giving one’s all to a cause. I find sports riven with tribalism, however. That heated arguments should ensue over the colour of one’s preferred jersey baffles me. More damning, and this is my prejudice, far too many of the “weak” have been bullied by golden god “jocks,” for reasons apparent to only those predatory perpetrators, for me to enjoy their company, should they ever let slip they were ever one of their number. Enough said on that.

I prefer to find wisdom from another source: the humanities (the humanities, simply put, are the study of human society and culture, the engagement in philosophy, religion, literature, and the performing and visual arts). This is not surprising: I was largely raised by my mother, a reader. My father would have preferred that I had been more active in sports than I was: He took pride in my successes in track and field; but he would have preferred I play hockey, that being his first love when young. But he made his living in sales, and spent a good chunk of his working life on the road; so, his influence was limited. Thus, my mother’s love of the arts was more influential. She painted, joined crafty clubs, and read. It’s no wonder, then, why my interests lie where they do.

I read. It was a struggle, I recall. I lagged behind my peers. But I persisted. Thing is, when one persists, one invests a great deal of time in that persistence. I found myself spending more time than others with my nose in a book. I won’t say that what I read, early on, was particularly enlightening: I read a lot of supernatural fiction, at first, Stephen King, and the like. Then fantasy. It was only in science fiction that I recognised my first glimmer of philosophy on the page. It was replete with ideas and opinion, if one saw beyond the warp drive, the phasers and blasters, and the monsters on the page and screen. I did not read philosophy in its pure sense. I did begin to read the classics, however, in university. Fantasy led to history and Greek mythology. Classic film led to Hemingway and other contemporary literary prose.

Recently, I’ve actually begun to consume more classic literature, and history, and biography and memoirs. And poetry. And philosophy.

One wonders which is more valuable? One might imagine that philosophy is; unless you disparage it as useless twaddle (which some do, most notably those who believe that everything must have immediate economic value, or is not worth attention; or those who wonder what use it has on their practical day-to-day lives). One might also assume that non-fiction is more valuable than fiction. Or that anything Greek or Roman is hopelessly outdated, and has no bearing on modern existence. I beg to differ. The ancients were still modern humans; they grappled with the same existential questions that plague and baffle us still. True, their political lives and experience were vastly different, so too their religious beliefs; but that does not invalidate their questions or their answers to those questions. Gilgamesh grappled with Pride, Loss, and Death. As to non-fiction, non-fiction is not necessarily fact: the perspective and opinion of someone extolling neo-liberal beliefs and values will come to radically different conclusions than someone on the radical left. “Fact” is in the eye of the beholder. And their “truth” may be onerous, if not criminal, to those not in their echo chamber.

I have, in conversation, expressed the opinion that truth can be found in Fiction. That has ruffled certain feathers and raised ardent criticism. How can fiction be truth, they disagreeable cry! Simply thus: an author ponders the truth of their time. That truth is filtered through the lens of their time, their experience, and their culture; but it is truth, all the same. Of a sort. Hemingway’s view of the world was very different from Faulkner’s. Jane Austen’s observations were different from Emily Bronte’s. So too Timothy Findley’s from Cormac McCarthy’s. Each will see the world in very different light, depending on upbringing and experience. Each is as valid and the next. Granted, an author’s views must be vetted: someone writing in the antebellum South may have views and prejudices that are decidedly abhorrent to your own. But one can learn from that. Call it time travel. Or immersion.

I’ve read that reading fiction fosters empathy. It allows you, the reader, to get into someone else’s head, and to know them (the fictional character, and perhaps even the author) more intimately than you could ever know your closest acquaintances. One can never truly know another’s heart and mind, after all, however long you’ve known them. We humans are complex beings. We change. In that light, we may never truly even know ourselves. Our understanding of our world will never be complete, either. But characters in a novel are. They are the creation of the writer. And they are aspects, fragments of their inner consciousness. If one can gain such insight and empathy from fictional characters, and engage in social commentary from decades, even centuries past, one wonders what one might glean from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, or from Plato and Epicurus, or Homer and Aeschylus. Or Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

It’s all grist for the mill in terms of Wisdom, to my mind.