Cannery Row

John Steinbeck

I could give a little party, she insisted. Just a small affair. Nobody will dress. It's the anniversary of the founding of the Bloomer League--you didn't even remember that.

Mack and the boys, too, spinning in their orbits. They are the virtues, the Graces, the Beatitudes of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey and the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces. In the world rules by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the fight of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for the no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.

It has always seemed strange to me, said Doc. The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?

Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, "You love beer so much. I'll bet some day you'll go in and order a beer milk shake." It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he couldn't let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle the milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. Once the thing got into your head you couldn't forget it.

Cannery Row, one of the Steinbeck books that I got a hold of when just beginning to sprout my tendrils above the garden soil, has wielded a mightier grip over me than most books. Tortilla Flat, being similar in my mind, has an equally iron-fisted hold on the course of my dreams.
But if ever there were a motto for a life described by a book, Cannery Row's would be 'Simple as it should be.' The life of Mack and the Boys and Doc and Lee Chong and Dora and her girls is a life that sounds too idyllic to be true, but has enough realism to make you wonder. Steinbeck doesn't pull any punches; some of the saddest most heart-wrenching instances I've ever heard are in his writing, some are in Cannery Row, yet the life is one I would have, for all this.
Could a man be foolish enough to choose it?
Could a man be dreamily distracted enough (from ledgers) to notice the beauty of Nature's balance book?
There is one chapter towards the end of Cannery Row that deals with two characters who are alive only in a few brief pages. Mary and Tom Talbot. I know a girl who is like Mary, or who's inside, who's narrator, that girl not yet tied down beneath the world's webs, still strives for her parties.
Throw a party, Mary, infect the whole house with gaiety and use your gift as a weapon against despondency. More than anything in the world, Mary Talbot loved parties. She loved to give parties and to go to parties. Since Tom Talbot didn't make much money Mary couldn't give parties all the time so she tricked people into giving them. Sometimes she telephoned a friend and said bluntly, 'Isn't it about time you gave a party?' Regularly Mary had six birthdays a year, and she organized costume parties, surprise parties, holiday parties. Christmas Eve at her house was a very exciting thing. For Mary glowed with parties.
A life full of parties, this is what Cannery Row is about because there is so much that needs celebrating. But celebration with the richness of feeling that is this:

Even now
If I see in my soul the citron-breasted fair one
Still gold-tinted, her face like our night stars,
Drawing unter her; her body beaten about the blame,
Wounded by the flaring spear of love,
My first of all by reason of her fresh years,
Then is my heart buried alive in snow.

Even now
If my girl with lotus eyes came to me again
Weary with the dear weight of young love,
Again I would give her to these starved twins of arms
And from her mouth drink down the heavy wine,
As a reeling pirate bee in fluttered ease
Steals up the honey from the nenuphar.

Even now
My eyes that hurry to see no more are painting, painting
Faces of my lost girl. O golden rings
That tap against cheeks of small magnolia leaves,
O whitest so soft parchment where
My poor divorced lips have written excellent
Stanzas of kisses, adn will write no more.

Even now
Death sends me the flickering of powdery lids
Over wild eyes and the pity of her slim body
All borken up wtih weariness and joy;
The little red flowers of her breasts to be my comfort
Moving above scarves, and for my sorrow
Wet crimson lips that once I marked as mine.

Even now
They chatter her weakness through the two bazaars
Who was so strong to love me. And small men
That buy and sell for silver being slaves
Crinkle the fat about their eyes; and yet
No Prince of the Cities of the Sea has taken her,
Leading to his grim bed. Little lonely one,
You clung to me as a garment clings; my girl.

Even now
I love long black eyes that caress like silk,
Ever and ever sad and laughing eyes,
Whose lids make such sweet shadow when they close
It seems another beautiful look of hers.
I love a fresh mouth, ah, a scented mouth,
And curving hair, subtle as smoke,
And light fingers, and laughter of green gems.

Even now
I remember that you made answer very softly,
We being one soul, your hadn on my hair,
The burning memeory rounding your near lips;
I have seen the priestesses of Rati make love at moon fall
And then in a carpeted hall with bright gold lamp
Lie down carelessly anywhere to sleep.

Even now
I mind the coming adn talking of wise men from towers
Where they had thought away their youth. And I, listening,
Found not the salt of the whispers of my girl,
Murmur of confessed colors, as we lay near sleep;
LIttle wise words and little witty words,
Wanton as water, honied with eagernes.

Even now
I mind that I loved cypress and roses, clear,
The great blue mountains and the small gray hills,
The sounding of the sea. Upon a day
I saw strange eyes and hands like butterflies;
For me at morning larks flew from the thyme
And children came to bathe in little streams.

Even now
I know that I have savored the hot taste of life
LIfting green cups and gold at the great feast.
Just for a small and a forgotten time
I have had full in my eyes from off my girl
The whitest pouring of eternal light--

keep glowing with parties, m.

Oblivion

David Foster Wallace

Schmidt had a quick vision of all of them in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknown and -knowable to one another, and he imagined that it was probably only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the decorous dance of loneliness he'd watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see below the berg's cap's public mask and consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other's arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness within a grinding professional machine you can't believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact on an industry that you'd fantasize over and over about finally deciding that making a dark difference with a hypo and eight cc's of castor bean distillate was better, was somehow more true to your own inner centrality and importance, than being nothing but a faceless cog and doing a job that untold thousands of other bright young men and women could do at least as well as you, or rather now even better than you because at least the younger among them still believed deep inside that they were made for something larger and more central and relevant than shepherding preoccupied men through an abstracted sham-caucus.

I can remember certain exciting narrative tableaux based around the competitive, almost primitive connotations of the word breadwinner, which had been Mrs. Claymore's blanket term for our father's occupations. But I do not believe I knew or could even imagine, as a child, that for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year my father sat all day at a metal desk in a silent, fluorescent lit room, reading forms and making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of those calculations, breaking only occasionally to answer his telephone or meet with other actuaries in other bright, quiet rooms. With only a small and sunless north window that looked out on other small office windows in other grey buildings.

I do not know enough about the dynamics of a solid marriage to discern the difference between honesty and mere brutality, and that tact and circumspection play as large a part in an intimate relation as candor and 'soul baring,'

Wallace's collection of short stories feel like a repeated punch in the stomach. Although he has a penchant for absurdity (and most of the action in the stories is absurd) his stories are especially dismal because the characters feel just like we do. I'm hesitant to say that his characters have normal feelings only because the normal definition of normal is wrong, and you probably wouldn't catch my meaning. Wallace's characters feel lonely, they feel frightened, they feel insecure, they feel meaningless, and they feel fake--these are feelings that I'm becoming convinced dominate the lower reaches of everyone's emotional make-up.
This isn't to say that we are doomed. Nor do I believe that Oblivion is an attempt at proving our doom. Its stories simply don't do all the work for you; they require you look a little for the meaning. Like the italic phrases in the collections title piece, or the pensive endings of The Suffering Channel and Mister Squishy, Wallace provides stories that bring you to cliff-edges but leave you to decide whether or not they're worth jumping over. Some cliffs have dreamy pools at the bottom, others have sharp rocks.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Salman Rushdie

We are light from elsewhere.

You won't do it. Most of you won't do it. The world's head laundry is pretty good at washing brains: Don't jump off that cliff don't walk through that door don't step into that waterfall don't take that chance don't step across that line don't ruffle my sensitivities I'm warning you now don't make me mad you're doing it you're making me mad. You won't have a chance you haven't got a prayer you're finished you're history you're less than nothing, you're dead to me, dead to your whole family your nation your race, everything you ought to love more than life and listen to like your master's voice and follow blindly and bow down before and worship and obey; you're dead, you hear me, forget about it, you stupid bastard, I don't even know your name.
But just imagine you did it. You stepped off the edge of the earth, or through the fatal waterfall, and there it was: the magic valley at the end of the universe, the blessed kingdom of the air. Great music everywhere. You breathe the music, in and out, it's your element now. It feels better than "belonging" in your lungs.

Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art, or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it.

We have been here before.
This is a helicopter, hovering just above the broken ground. This is the woman I love, calling to me through the open door. I'm going, then. And I'm shouting back, I can't go. What? Go. Fuck you. What? Goodbye, Hope.
And this is what people are saying when they aren't saying what they mean.
I'm going, then. (Come with me, please, I need you, I can't believe you won't come with me.) I can't go. (My darling, I want never to let you out of my sight again, but goddamn it, you kick me around, you know that?, do you want to see the bruises?. and just this once I'm not putting you first. I'll be there soon enough, this time you can wait for me. If you want me, you'll wait. That's right, a test. Yeah. Maybe it really is.) What? (You bastard?, you think you can hold out on me? Oh Jesus, Rai, don't play games, not now, not today.) Go. (Okay, no games. I love you forever and beyond. But this is my work. I'll be there sooner than blinking. Go. I"m right behind you. I love you. Go.)
Fuck you. (I never wanted you o come to Mexico in the first place fuck you but you came anyway fuck you I guess that proves something yeah but I hurt you anyway I was mad I was wrong fuck you and then you helped me fuck you that really churned me up fuck you so I trusted you I really trusted you fuck you then the earth moved and you abandoned me fuck you you took your photographs I could have been dying I could have been broken and dying but you had your work to do fuck you and now you won't come with me fuck you now when I finally worked out that I need you fuck you I want you fuck you maybe I love you I do love you fuck you Rai I love you fuck you. I do.)
What? (What???)
Goodbye Hope. (Goodbye for a moment, you bastard, but after this I'm never letting you out of my sight. The next time I see you will be the beginning of the rest of our lives.)

I have heard many accounts of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth; love, art, civilization, life, humanity, fate--all these have been it's point. The people who seem to have it all have very little more than you or me. The people who are confident and at peace with themselves have no more confidence than you or me. The great stars of civilization, shining bright, are burning towards destruction just as fast as you or me.
We, humans, people, sons and daughters of God, children of apes, mortals, cousins of the angels, we have a devil of a time trusting each other. Perhaps from our massive ignorance, perhaps from our smothering insecurity, perhaps from our greed, perhaps from anything, comes our inability to trust. And in our lack of trust, we blind ourselves to all that is so similar amongst us. The very friends whose love we doubt, we undoubtedly give our own love to; the very family whose selflessness we cannot see, we continuously give our lives to; the very lovers who motivations we cast in the darkest light, we serve and love and live with in bright shining glorious free-willed choice.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet puts both hands into the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. It digs around in that fertile soil and comes up with all manner of treasures. Calvin and Hobbes recognized that treasure is everywhere, Salman Rushdie recognizes that the treasure is far more precious than we ever could have imagined.
When others do not trust us we are offended and yet we hardly trust. It takes a risk and it takes commitment to trust. It takes a releasing of our hold on the things we call our own (life, possessions, potential, future, fate, pleasure, burdens, freedom, wounds, scars, and our role). Trust is the unclutching of our fingers from all this and the open palmed extension of these things to the person we trust.
Rushdie reacts the Orpheus myth on an epic scale--telling the story of two world-famous rock stars and their love for each other and how it writhes beneath their mutual worry. If ever there were case studies of Jean Vanier's theories about wounding as children, Ormus and Vina are these. Both lovers bear ugly gaping wounds from their childhoods. As these wounds fester we see their pain boiling out into the happiness that seems by all rights to be theirs.
We live, without the blink of our untrusting eye, lives that trust everything but our brothers and sisters. We trust our systems, our mindless constructions that of all things are most likely not to last. We trust our banking establishment, we trust our rule of law, we trust our currency, we trust our utilities, and we trust science. How much better would it be to put our trust in the person sitting next to us?
There are many, many relationships in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, not one of them is characterized by the thing that is most essential to relationship: trust. Every single relationship demonstrates a failure to give full trust which is at heart a failure to fully give the self.
Trust is more than what we think it is. Trust is more than reliance; trust is commitment to another. Trust is more than believing someone will do what we consider the right thing; trust is believing that whatever someone does is the right thing. Trust is more than accepting as truth the words of a friend; trust is seeing a friend as truth. Trust is foolish.
There is some hope though, there is some goodness in Rushdie's analysis of the wretchedness of humanity. For all the trust we don't give, sometimes a character gives a little and that is beautiful.
Without trust we will all be pulled down to hell and the ground beneath our feet will forever be the thin, flimsy stuff of shadows.

Remembering Babylon

David Malouf

Is it not strange, this history of ours, in which explorers, men on the track of the unknown, fall dry-mouthed and exhausted in country where natives, moving just ahead of them, or behind, or a mile to one side, are living, as they have done for centuries, off the land? Is there not a kind of refractory pride in it, an insistence that if the land will not present itself to us in terms that we know, we would rather die than take it as it is? For there is a truth here and it is this: that no continent lies outside God's bounty and his intention to provide for his children. He is a gardener and everything he makes is a garden. This place too will one day, I believe, yield its fruits to us and to the great banquet at which we are guests, the common feast.

Loved. The word, which she had used as if there was nothing problematical in naming thus such a tumult of feelings, released a weight in him that he felt shift and fall away.

She pored over books, anything she could lay her hands on that offered some promise that the world was larger, more passionate, crueller--even that would be a comfort--than the one she was bound to.

He looked back once and saw that Gemmy too had turned, about sixty yards off, and they faced one another down teh white ribbon of track. They were too far off to be more to one another than figures whose eyes, whose real dimensions even, were lost to distance.

We expect the world to be something--the thing we are used to. We expect all of nature and life and people and civilization around us to be familiar. And when it isn't we turn mean. I don't understand why it is, in me as with all people, that we are so eager to hate. Our mean little spirits simply cannot stand that there be anything beautiful, anything good, anything noble that we have no dominant part of. Maybe humility is this: subjecting ourselves to those things which deserve to have power over us. I have heard humility called being content with who we are, knowing one's place. At it's heart, Remembering Babylon is a book about knowing one's place. Every character, as Malouf reveals the multitude of them (much more than you would think for a book of its size) becomes a character struggling with knowing their place.
Human beings glow the most when they stand where they are meant to.
The way Malouf writes about his characters shows them to you naked and without any covering for their selfish thoughts. It's a disturbing experience because we repeatedly recognize and sympathize with these characters--even when they are of the most rotten sort. Malouf is an expert in showing you the false glint of an eye that reveals in a second a whole life of wounding and hurt. Like an avalanche we are all sliding around and bashing into each other in our headlong tumble or the end--what is needed is a good deal of patience and grace to remember that most times we are giving as good as we get and the sudden conk on our heads is most always an accident.

On Love and Death

Patrick Suskind

The price paid for love is always the loss of reason, abandonment of the self, and thus the surrender of adult responsibility.

Orpheus, we must remember, is an artist, and like all artists not without vanity, or let us say not without pride in his art. And like many artists, particularly the performing arts, he relies on an audience to watch him, listen to him, applaud him or at least react to him in some way, an audience from whose behaviour he can assess the effect of his singing.

Suskind's examination of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth is the most attractive part of this little essay. There's a lot that is twisted in here, but there is also a lot that isn't. Love and death go hand in hand in the human tradition. It's good, sometimes, to think about them together, as Suskind does. Just be careful.

Nightwood

Djuna Barnes

Oh, he cried. A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart! But do I scream that an eagle has me by the balls or has dropped his oyster on my heart? Am I going forward screaming that it hurts, that my mind goes back, or holding my guts as if they were a coil of knives? Yet you are screaming and drawing your lip and putting your hand out and turning round and round! Do I wail to the mountains of the trouble I have had in the valley, or to every stone of the way it broke my bones, or of every lie, how it went down into my belly and built a nest to hatch me to my death there? Isn't everyone in the world peculiarly swung and me the craziest of the lot?--so that I come dragging and squealing, like a heifer on the way to slaughter, knowing his cries have only half a rod to go, protesting his death--as his death has only a rod to go to protest his screaming? Do you walk high Heaven without shoes? Are you the only person with a bare foot pressed down on a rake? Oh, you poor blind cow! Keep out of my feathers; you ruffle me the wrong way and flit about, stirring my misery! What end is sweet? Are the ends of the hair sweet when you come to number them?

There is a certain belligerence in a room in which a woman has never set foot; every object seems to be battling its own compression--and there is a metallic odour, as of beaten iron in a smithy.

Felix bending forward, deprecatory and annoyed, went on: I like the prince who was reading a book when the executioner touched him on the shoulder telling him it was time, and he, arising, laid a paper-cutter between the pages to keep his place and closed the book.
Ah, said the doctor, that is not a man living in his moment, that is a man living in his miracle.

Matthew answered.: The excess of his sensibilities may preclude his mind. His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown. If I were you, the doctor continued, I would carry that boy's mind like a bowl picked up in the dark; you do not know what's in it. He feeds on odd remnants that we have not priced; he eats a sleep that is not our sleep. There is more in sickness than the name of that sickness. In the average person is the peculiar that has been scuttled, and in the peculiar the ordinary has been sunk; people always fear what requires watching.

One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life--darkly seen, the condition my son lives in.

So I, Doctor O'Connor, say, creep by, softly, softly, and don't learn anything because it's always learned of another person's body; take action in your heart and be careful whom you love--for a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave. Be humble like the dust, as God intended, and crawl, and finally you'll crawl to the end of the gutter and not be missed and not much remembered.

Nightwood is a book that requires multiple readings. I have only read it once, so I shall refrain from commentary. If you want a book that insists you read it again, soon, read Nightwood. Beware, though, it is difficult.

Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

Let us establish this quite clearly: a butler's duty is to provide good service.

As I remember, Giffen's appeared at the beginning of the twenties, and I am sure I am not alone in closely associating its emergence with that change of mood within our profession--that change which came to push the polishing of silver to the position of central importance it still by and large maintains today. This shift was, I believe, like so many other major shifts around this period, a generational matter; it was during these years that our generation of butlers 'came of age', and figures like Mr Marshall, in particular, played a crucial part in making silver-polishing so central.

What do you think dignity's all about?
The directness of this inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. 'It's rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,' I said. 'But I suspect it comes down to not removing one's clothing in public.'

I remember coming here years ago, and there was this American chap here. We were having a big conference, my father was involved in organizing it. I remember this American chap, even drunker than I am now, he got up at the dinner table in front of the whole company. And he pointed at his lordship and called him an amateur. Called him a bungling amateur and said he was out of his depth. Well, I have to say, Stevens, that American chap was quite right. It's a fact of life. Today's world is too foul a place for fine and noble instincts. You've seen it yourself, haven't you, Stevens? The way they've manipulated something fine and noble. You've seen it yourself, haven' t you?
I'm sorry, sir, but I can't say that I have.

But, then, I rather fancy it has more to do with this skill of bantering. listening to them now, I can hear them exchanging one bantering remark after another. It is, I would suppose, the way many people like to proceed. In fact, it is possible my bench companion of a while ago expected me to banter with him--in which case, I suppose I was something of a sorry disappointment. Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in--particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

My respect for Mr. Ishiguro grows with every book of his I read. The man is a brilliant writer. His control over the language and the diverse use of style (read Never Let Me Go and compare it with Remains of the Day) are impossible to comprehend. I have often thought how similar the Japanese and English cultures are, but in Mr. Ishiguro we find them synthesized. And in no story have I found this more evident than Remains of the Day. His masterful use of meiosis results in some of the most poignant passages you will ever read.
The narrator of Remains of the Day passes over his life and his current journey with a respectful downplaying that makes you perk up your ears and say, wait! this can't be! this man must be feeling something, he must be screaming inside! And because you are looking for it, you find it. There are many places where you hear the butler Stevens' voice quietly talking over a raging caged goblin that is his soul.
I'm having trouble knowing just what to say about this book. There are so many themes wrapped together in it. Dignity, peace--in one's heart as well as on an international level--, old age and looking back at one's purpose in life. If you are old, reading Remains of the Day (I think) probably makes you feel weak and wish to sit down and perhaps makes you rebel strongly against the weakness of your age and desire to take up anew the standard of your life--whatever it has been--and carry it proudly over one last hill. If you are young, Remains of the Day will probably knock you to your knees and set your teeth to chattering--you'll ask yourself, must I end this way? must I too feel this weight of insignificance and waste when I have walked through the greater portion of my life? It will make you promsie yourself anew to never settle for the mediocre and the pointless, but it will also leave a little bitter taste at the back of your mouth that whispers: you don't have much control over mediocrity or not. It'll seize you no matter what you do. For on the edge of the grave, can any life seem more than half lived?
There is only one point in Remains of the Day where Ishiguro lets his narrator reveal his heart's passion. In one sentence, a sentence so cliche and simple you would pass over it in any other book without a thought, the butler Stevens tells us all his insecurities about how he has lived his life. What if...

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed--why should I not admit it?--at that moment, my heart was breaking. Before long, however, I turned to her and said with a smile.

Did you catch it? It was towards the end there. A whole novel full of controlled, gilded statements and then this one, this one statement about his heart and the whole thing is shattered. What if bantering is the key to human warmth?

An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro

But I do not think it an exaggeration to say that a great many of those living here before the war would be familiar with it, for it did receive much praise at the time for its vigorous brush technique and, particularly, its powerful use of colour. But I am fully aware, of course, that 'Eyes to the Horizon', whatever its artistic merits, is a painting whose sentiments are now outdated.

It is not, I fancy, a feeling many people will come to experience. The likes of the Tortoise--the likes of Shintaro--they may plod on, competent and inoffensive, but their kind will never know the sort of happiness I felt that day. For their kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeavour to rise above the mediocre.

We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost. It's just that in the end we turned out to be ordinary men. Ordinary men with no special gifts of insight. It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times.

When I am an old man, when I look back over my life and see I have devoted it to the task of capturing the unique beauty of the world, I believe I will be well satisfied. And no man will make me believe I've wasted my time.

Can an entire generation be condemned? What is a nation to do when it gambles for greatness--and this probably means a good deal of evil--and fails? What did the aging generations of post WWII Japan and Germany do? How could they walk the streets? They who pushed their nations on in their conquests? They who stood in support of everything those regimes stood for? Most of this generation is gone now, but what must their waning years have been like? To have to live out the rest of your life knowing that it is the universal decision of the world to condemn your generation as evil--how does one live with that?
And then there is Art. What if an artist allows (or even uses) his art to push on and support such endeavors? Is the art to be disregarded? Should his paintings be burned? Should the memory of his greatness be wiped away? Reading An Artist of the Floating World puts you in the shoes of an aging Japanese artist in post-war Japan as he watches his children and the younger generation tip-toe around him and what his generation has done. Not only do you get the feel that this man has been subjected to a great indignity (which perhaps he did earn) but he is simultaneously experiencing the indignity of a mind and body collapsing about him. You want a startling narrative of aging...An Artist of the Floating World will give it to you. Can a man of such a generation have pride in himself and his life? Can he live without pride?

The Violent Bear It Away

Flannery O'Connor

Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

Children are cursed with believing.

I only meant to drown him, the boy said. You're only born once. They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled in the water. He shook his head violently as if to scatter his thoughts.

I had never read Flannery O'Connor but had her recommended to me by many people, almost always because she was Catholic. But I truly don't know what to say about The Violent Bear it Away. Like all Southern fiction for me, it feels as though I should live through a desert of some forty or fifty years before I read it, and come to it with a great weight of life and dry, yellow memory.
O'Connor's stories are deceivingly calm like summer afternoons in the South. They lull you into a lazy fog of simplicity, but lurking beneath is an intricate and delicately knit structure of thought and idea as complex as any metropolis. They are stories of 'and's rather than commas and yet these 'and's provide the same depth and intellectualism as commas but make it seem smoother and more droning.
As you may be able to gather, The Violent Bear it Away has left me dizzy and sweating and wishing I could sit in a rocking chair for the duration.

The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje

Drawn by desire of Lord Suffolk, by his student Lieutenant Kirpal Singh, 10 May 1941

I am a man who did not enjoy poetry until I heard a woman recite it to us.

Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote, I fell in love.
Words, Caravaggio. They have power.

Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you.
The rest of the time I feel it doesn't matter
if I ever see you again. It isn't the morality,
it is how much you can bear.

He has been disassembled by her.
And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?

Hana is quiet. he knows the depth of darkness in her, her lack of a child and of faith. He is always coaxing her from the edge of her fields of sadness. A child lost. A father lost.
"I have lost someone like a father as well," he has said. But she knows this man beside her is one of the charmed, who has grown up an outsider and so can switch allegiances, can replace loss. There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not. If she asks him he will say he has had a good life--his brother in jail, his comrades blown up, and he risking himself daily in this war.

I am a man who fasts until I see what I want.

They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.

This, I don't think, has much to do with Ondaatje's book but it came to my mind when reading The English Patient. There is a tendency in the US to paint our history with a golden brush. I am thinking specifically of the World Wars. For some reason, perhaps because my knowledge of this time in our history comes from Hollywood, World War II has never seemed as evil, as vile, as terrifying, or as scream-inducing as the (non) wars since the 50s.
But in reading The English Patient it occured over and over to me that that war, above all wars, must have been hell. It seems that the purity of our mission in that war works as a protective diaper to hide us from all the shit. As if because we had a clear enemy and that enemy was evil people didn't feel as much pain when they died, didn't scream as loud when their arms were blown off, didn't wallow in hospitals without skin for as long, and didn't grown in response to shredded nerves.
Time doesn't only provide an insulating factor; it allows truth to become maleable. With the loss of specificity that much time brings, also comes a simplicity and clarity that could not have been there. And so when we think about our current wars, it wants a good deal of chin-rubbing. Do we just look back on wars we won and call them glorious triumphs against the forces of evil, while the wars we lose we shake our heads and condemn the generations that started them as misguided imperialists or war-mongers. The Spanish-American war--that generation is laughable. Few history books have completmentary things for them. Korea and Vietnam (we must admit Korea has fallen into Vietnam's shaddow and doesn't seem to be mentioned by anyone at all anymore) we shake our heads and draw down our mouths in grim frowns of disappointment. How could our fathers and their fathers have been so misguided? And what will we look like when our children and the generations that come after them glance back at this page?
If we don't win (keeping in mind that winning may be as delicate a thing as the correct semantic argument--forgive my cynicism) we'll be subject to the same tight faces of chagrin. If we win...will it get white-washed with the same brush of righteousness that has coated every other war America has been victorious in? The victors do write history afterall.
As to The English Patient? Excellent. Strangely, it is a love story without feeling like one. I'm not sure who is or was falling in or out of love with who, but all the characters in The English Patient are full of love. Think about that when you read it. There are many pebbles and stones in Ondaatje's field, so take your heavy duty plow to this one.

Invitation to a Beheading

Vladimir Nabokov

So we are nearing the end. The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there were still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and--O horrible!

Everything has duped me as it fell into place, everything. This is the dead end of this life, and I should not have sought salvation within its confines. It is strange that I should have sought salvation. Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw. I have discovered it. I have discovered the little crack in life, where it broke off, where it had once been soldered to something else, something genuinely alive, important and vast--how capacious my epithets must be in order that I may pour them full of crystalline sense...it is best to leave some things unsaid, or else I shall get confused again. Within this irreparable little crack decay has set in--ah, I think I shall yet be able to express it all-the dreams, the coalescence, the disintegration--no, again I am off the track--all my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples. Oh, if only I had known that I was yet to remain here for such a long time, I would have begun at the beginning and gradually, along a high road of logically connected ideas, would have attained, would have completed, my soul would have surrounded itself with a structure of words....Everything that I have written here so far is only the froth of my excitement, a senseless transport, for the very reason that I have been in such a hurry. But now, when I am hardened, when I am almost fearless of...

To finish writing something, whispered Cincinnatus half questioningly but then he frowned, straining his thoughts, and suddenly understood that everything had in fact been written already.

I realized in reading Invitation to a Beheading that John Barth's Floating Opera has the same basic element: the agony of an imminent but postponed demise. Death lurking around the corner. But where Barth was on the whole whimsical or at least sarcastic, Nabokov is downright evil. Every time I encounter his work I get the distinct feeling he is reaching into my mind and attempting to make things into mush there.
Invitation to a Beheading should terrify you. If it doesn't that probably means you are transparent and not real like Cincinnatus. Be careful.

The Pearl

John Steinbeck

Juana dragged herself up from the rocks on the edge of the water. Her face was a dull pain and her side ached. She steadied herself on her knees for a while and her wet skirt clung to her. There was no anger in her for Kino. He had said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man. Although she might be puzzled by these differences between man and woman, she knew them and accepted them and needed them. Of course she would follow him, there was no question of that. Sometimes the quality of woman, the reason, the caution, the sense of preservation, could cut through Kino's manness and save them all. She climbed painfully to her feet, and she dipped her cupped palms in the little waves and washed her bruised face with the stinging salt water, and then she went creeping up the beach after Kino.

Stories are like houses. Some are made of mud bricks and some are made of wood and some are made of stone and are great big castles. Stories are good as they are; there are times we want a lean-to of a story and there are times we need a Victorian mansion. But Steinbeck has the faculty of using building materials more precious than most. The Pearl is a story made of delicate but solid granite timbers. Each sentence holds the weight of the world in it and each sentence will bear all the force you can push against it with.
The Pearl is like a parable and like a fable but has got more story than either.

Zorba the Greek

Nikos Kazantzakis
Tr. Carl Wildman

A little child had fallen into a well, said the story. There it found a marvelous city, flower gardens, a lake of pure honey, a mountain of rice pudding and multi-colored toys. As I spelled it out, each syllable seemed to take me further into that magic city. Once, at midday, when I had come home from school, I ran into the garden, rushed to the rim of the well beneath the vine arbor and stood fascinated, staring at the smooth black surface of the water. I soon thought I could see the marvelous city, houses and streets, the children and the vine arbor loaded with grapes. I could hold out no longer; I hung my head down, held out my arms and kicked against the ground to push myself over the edge. But at that moment my mother noticed me. She screamed, rushed out and caught me by my waistband, just in time...

Now whatever is this red water, boss, just tell me! An old stock grows branches, and at first there's nothing but a sour bunch of beads hanging down. Time passes, the sun ripens them, they become as sweet as honey, and then they're called grapes. We trample on them; we extract the juice and put it into casks; it ferments on its own, we open it on the feast day of St. John the Drinker, it's become wine! It's a miracle! You drink the red juice and, lo and behold, your souls grows big, too big for the old carcass, it challenges God to a fight. Now tell me, boss, how does it happen?

You can't understand, boss! he said, shrugging his shoulders. I told you I had been in every trade. Once I was a potter. I was mad about that craft. D'you realize what it means to take a lump of mud and make what you will out of it? Ffrr! You turn the wheel and the mud whirls round, as if it were possessed while you stand over it and say: I'm going to make a jug, I'm going to make a plate, I'm going to make a lamp and the devil knows what more! That's what you might call being a man: freedom!

Why don't you laugh? Why d'you look at me like that? That's how I am. There's a devil in me who shouts, and I do what he says. Whenever I feel I'm choking with some emotion, he says: 'Dance!' and I dance. And I feel better! Once, when my little Dimitraki died, in Chalcidice, I got up as I did a moment ago and I danced. The relations and friends who saw me dancing in front of the body rushed up to stop me. 'Zorba has gone mad!' they cried, 'Zorba has gone mad!' but if at that moment I had not danced, I should really have gone mad--from grief. Because it was my first son and he was three years old and I could not bear to lose him. You understand what I'm saying, boss, don't you--or am I talking to myself?

Well, as I was saying, this Hussein Aga was a saintly man. One day he took em on his knee and placed his hand on my head as though he were giving me his blessing. 'Alexis' he said, 'I'm going to tell you a secret. You're too small to understand now, but you'll understand when you are bigger. Listen, little one: neither the seven stories of heaven nor the seven stories of the earth are enough to contain God; but a man's heart can contain him. So be very careful, Alexis--and my my blessing go with you--never wound a man's heart!

My father was a real Palikari. Don't look at me, I'm only a breath of air beside him. I don't come up to his ankles. He was one of those ancient Greeks they always talk about. When he shook your hand he nearly crushed your bones to pulp. I can talk now and then, but my father roared, neighed and sang. There very rarely came a human word out of his mouth.
Well, he had all the vices, but he'd slash them, as you would with a sword. For instance, he smoked like a chimney. One morning he got up and went into the fields to plow. He arrived, leaned on the hedge, pushed his hand into his belt for his tobacco pouch to roll a cigarette before he began to work, took out his pouch and found it was empty. He'd forgotten to fill it before leaving the house.
He foamed with rage, let out a roar, and then bounded away towards the village. His passion for smoking completely unbalanced his reason, you see. But suddenly--I've always said I think a man's a mystery--he stopped, filled with shame, pulled out his pouch and tore it to shreds with his teeth, then stamped it in the ground and spat on it. Filth! Filth! he bellowed. Dirty slut!
And from that hour, until the end of his days, he never put another cigarette between his lips.
That's the way real men behave boss.

See boss, what a cunning creature is woman! She can even twist God round her little finger!

We are little grubs, Zorba, minute grubs on the small leaf of a tremendous tree. This small leaf is the earth. The other leaves are the stars that you see moving at night. We make our way on this little leaf examining it anxiously and carefully. We smell it; it smells good or bad to us. We taste it and find it eatable. We beat on it and it cries out like a living thing.
Some men--the more intrepid ones--reach the edge of the leaf. From there we stretch out, gazing into chaos. We tremble. We guess what a frightening abyss lies beneath us. In the distance we can hear the noise of the other leaves of the tremendous tree, we feel the sap rising from the roots to our leaf and our hearts swell. Ben thus over the awe-inspiring abyss, with all our bodies and all our souls, we tremble with terror. From that moment begins...

A brother tells stories to his younger sister, great stories of marvelous imagination that conceive the world in all the brightest colors. She believes these stories.
A people tell lies to themselves in order to explain the wonders of the universe. The rain is not precipitation but the tears of the gods. The raging storms of the sea are Poseidon's wrath and no function of entropy. They understand these stories and understand their world.
A culture joins together to tell a collective lie to its children and this lie becomes the central story of a great winter festival. The children believe this lie at the pressure of their parents; they are bribed to believe it and is this wrong?
Is it wrong to understand the world in a way that is different from the "factual scientific" understanding that is forced on us now? What is more truthful: that the Narcissus evolved because of its specific environment or that it is a young man turned into a flower because of his pride? Truth doesn't always have to be factual reality. They are not the same. It's a fact that I am composed of atoms and cells and you can read about how all this works in a textbook. It's the truth that there's magic in these bones and you can read about that in a book, too.
Facts like the ones we are so proud of as a nation and culture now are only our temporary understanding of Nature and the world we live in. The truth is not found in these facts. Truth is found in myths and is more permanent.
Do you see your thumb as a miracle or a collision?

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He is ugly and sad, she said to Fermina Daza, but he is all love.

They continued to put his soap in the bathroom, his monogrammed pillowcase on the bed; his place was always set at the table, in case he returned from the dead without warning, as he tended to do in life. But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate, after having renounced not only their family name but their own identity in exchange for a security that was no more than another of a bride's many illusions. They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality.

He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.

But it was a useful lesson, and not for him alone. Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

No, not rich, he said. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

I think I am going to die.
She did not even blink when she replied.
That would be best, she said. Then we could both have some peace.
Years before, during the crisis of a dangerous illness, he had spoken of the possibility of dying, and she had made the same brutal reply. Dr. Urbino attributed it to the natural hardheartedness of women, which allows the earth to continue revolving around the sun, because at that time he did not know that she always erected a barrier of wrath to hide her fear. And in this case it was the most terrible one of all, the fear of losing him.

With surprising skill, she rolled a cigarette from the little box of tobacco that he had brought her. She smoked it slowly, with the lit end inside her mouth, not speaking, and then she rolled another two and smoked them one right after the other. Sip by sip, Florentino Ariza drank two thermoses of mountain coffee.

There are many profound lines in Love in the Time of Cholera but there are also many uncomfortable itches that do not get scratched. First and most annoying, the mystery of the first chapter is dropped from the story. What Garcia Marquez spends almost fifty pages developing, he drops in the next 300. Really the story could begin at chapter two. We forgive him this though for the sake of the rest of the story.
For Love in the Time of Cholera is an exciting story. Garcia Marquez takes that imagining of the heart and turns it into reality. What if love is a lingering disease, one of those that cripples and maims but does not kill? Most stories, in order to bow to plot and drama give you love the lightning cancer cut it out or it will eat your brain and heart and spine version, but Garcia Marquez delivers love the disease that is slower than old age.

Villa Incognito

Tom Robbins

What are we talking about when we talk about the soul? Well, pop culture to the contrary, the soul is not an overweight nightclub singer having an unhappy love affair in Detroit. The soul doesn't hang out at a Memphis barbershop, fry catfish for supper, and keep a thirty-eight Special in its underwear drawer. Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise.
On the other hand, Stubblefield continued, the soul is most definitely not some pale vapor wafting off a bucket of metaphysical dry ice. For all of its ectoplasmic associations, it steadfastly contradicts those who imagine it to be a billow of sacred flatulence or a shimmer of personal swamp gas.
Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why, when we ponder--as sooner or later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They're mistaken.

It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute.

There is a difference between an author and a writer. By virtue of being published, Robbins is an author. By virtue of the first line of Villa Incognito he is both a hack and an aspiring genius. There are many moments in Villa Incognito when Robbins rouses himself to what would be great heights but he inevitably ruins these moments by letting us see how hard he is trying, and it is very hard.
There is something about all of Villa Incognito that rings sour in my ear. Like the last quote above, which is the first of the book, you always have the feeling that Robbins is trying to make up for something by giving you outrageous subject matter. The dancing bears will receive applause as long as they are mutant bears or cross-dressing bears, or have unusually large genitalia, never mind if they dance badly. Tom Robbins dances badly.

The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien

That can be answered, he said. There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.

He disappeared the next morning on his bicycle and when he came back very dusty and travel-worn at the end of three days, he told me that everything was all right and that four barrels of better porter could be expected on Friday. It came punctually on that day and was well bought by the customers in the public house that night. It was manufactured in some town in the south and was known as 'The Wrastler'. If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win. The customers praised it highly and when they had it inside them they sang and shouted and sometimes lay down on the floor or on the roadway outside in a great stupor. Some of them complained afterwards that they had been robbed while in this state and talked angrily in teh shop the next night about stolen money and gold watches which had disappeared off their strong chains. John Divney did not say much on this subject to them and did not mention it to me at all. He printed the words--Beware of Pickpockets--in large letters on a card and hung it on the back of shelves beside another notice that dealt with cheques. Nevertheless a week rarely passed without some customer complaining after an evening with 'The Wrastler'. It was not a satisfactory thing.

The 'Codex' (first so-called by Bassett in his monumental De Selby Compendium) is a collection of some two-thousand sheets of foolscap closely hand-written on both sides. The signal distinction of the manuscript is that not one word of writing is legible. Attempts made by different commentators to decipher certain passages which look less formidable than others have been characterised by fantastic divergencies, not in the meaning of the passages (of which there is no question) but in the brand of nonsense which is evolved. One passage, described by Bassett as being 'a penetrating treatise on old age' is referred to by Henderson (biographer of Bassett) as 'a not unbeautiful description of lambing operations on an unspecified farm'. Such disagreement, it must be confessed, does little to enhance the reputation of either writer.

Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.

My second foray into Flann O'Brien. He is still unique. The Third Policeman was not quite as enjoyable a read as At-Swim-Two-Birds but I put this down to the former's more mundane topic. Surely hell is intriguing--The Inferno is always more Popular than Paradisio--but when hell is policemen on bicycles who are more concerned with headlamps and bike pumps, hell loses all of its draw and becomes the most terrifying thing it could be: eternally boring.
On a completely different note, O'Brien technique of manufacturing his own world of footnotes and scholarship is one that I admire greatly and have seen imitated in authors like David Foster Wallace. O'Brien carries on a very technical discussion of the great (and imaginary) philosopher De Selby. One footnote carries over filling almost two full pages. The dead pan with which O'Brien achieves this--beautiful. I don't think this style would work unless someone approached it both with the seriousness and ridiculousness of O'Brien. The theories propounded by De Selby, which we hear of through the footnotes, are so incredible, they bring a depth and readability to the story that makes them anything but footnotes. That truly would be hell: The Third Policeman without footnotes.

The Dead Father

Donald Barthelme

A halt. The men lay down the cable. The men regard Julie from a distance. The men standing about. Pemmican measured out in great dark whacks from the pemmican-whacking knife. Edmund lifts flask to lips. Thomas removes flask. Protest by Edmund. Reproof from Thomas. Julie gives Edmund a chaw of bhang. Gratitude of Edmund. Julie wipes Edmund's forehead with white handkerchief. The cable relaxed in the road. The blue of the sky. Trees leant against. Bird stutter and the whisper of grasses. The Dead Father playing his guitar. Thomas performing leadership functions. Construction of the plan. Maps pored over and the sacred beans bounced in the pot. The yarrow sticks cast. The dice cup given a shake. Shoulder blade of a sheep roasted and the cracks in the bone read. Peas agitated in a sieve. The hatchet stuck into a great stake and its quivers recorded. First-sprouting onion caught and its peels palpated. Portents totted up and divided by seven. Thomas falls to the ground in a swoon.

The man in the mask said that I was wrong and had always been wrong and would always be wrong and that he was not going to hurt me. Then he hurt me, with documents.

Schemed, mostly. Scheming away night and day, toward the achievement of ends. I woke up angry one morning and stayed angry for years--that was my adolescence. Anger and scheming. How to get out. How to get Lucius. How to get Mark. How to get away from Fred. How to seize power. That sort of thing. And a great deal of care-of-the-body. It was young. It was beautiful. It deserved care.

I will never be reconciled, the Dead Father said, never. When I am offended, I award punishment. Punishment is a thing I'm good at. I have some rather fine ones. For anyone who dares trifle. On the first day the trifler is well wrapped with strong cords and hung upside down from a flagpole at a height of twenty stories. On the second day the trifler is turned right side up and rehung from the same staff, so as to empty the blood from his head and prepare him for the third day. On the third day the trifler is unwrapped and waited upon by a licensed D.D.S. who extracts every other tooth from the top row and every other tooth from the bottom row, the extractions to be mismatching according to the blueprint supplied. On the fourth day the trifler is given hard things to eat. On the fifth day the trifler is comforted with soft fine garments and flagons and the attentions of lithesome women so as to make the shock of the sixth day more severe. On the sixth day the trifler is confined alone in a small room with the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the seventh day the trifler is pricked with nettles. On the eighth the trifler is slid naked down a thousand-foot razor blade to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the ninth day the trifler is sewn together by children. On the tenth day the trifler is confined alone in a small room with the works of Teilhard de Chardin and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the eleventh day the trifler's stitches are removed by children wearing catcher's mitts on their right and left hands. On the twelfth day

Your questions are good ones, he said. Your concern is well founded. I can I think best respond by relating an anecdote. You are familiar I take it with the time Martin Luther attempted to sway Franz Joseph Haydn to his cause. He called Haydn on the telephone and said, "Joe, you're the best. I want you to do a piece for us." And Haydn just said, "No way, Marty. No way."
You have got the centuries all wrong and the telephone should not be in there and anyway I do not get the point, said Edmund.
You see! Thomas exclaimed. There it is! Things are not simple. Error is always possible, even with the best intentions in the world. People make mistakes. Things are not done right. Right things are not done. There are cases which are not clear. You must be able to tolerate the anxiety. To do otherwise is to jump ship, ethics-wise.

If At-Swim-Two-Birds was difficult and Agape Agape was even harder, The Dead Father is more difficult still. Don't read this expecting to figure it out. You know that nagging feeling that accompanies you at the beginning of most stories, the feeling that keeps whispering, Don't worry, I know all this doesn't make sense right now, but if you read along far enough, if you keep on flipping them pages at some point there is going to be an aha moment where you finally figure out why that one girl was taking off her shirt or why what that big thing is that they are dragging along the ground with cables or who the guy named Thomas is. Well, this feeling is one that it is best not to hold hands with when you read The Dead Father. As the story goes along the feeling will shrivel and shrink and starve to death and ultimately disappear. Because it doesn't make sense.
I have some theories about what The Dead Father means but I don't care to share them. Read it yourself if you don't mind mystification.

Agape Agape

William Gaddis

No but you see I've got to explain all this because I don't, we don't know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I've brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled and cut up again my damn leg look at it, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese armour in the dining hall feel like I'm being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn decisions and distractions I've got the papers land surveys deeds and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleared up and settled before everything collapses and it's all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes like everything else because that's what it's about, that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see?

And now even untrained person can do it! Back with Plato's chance persons pouring out Fur Elise without a flaw till the last perforation in the roll passes over the corresponding hole in the tracker bar and democracy comes lumbering into the room with the piano player hunched over the keyboard half as big as the piano itself.

The history of the piano as a soci-technological criticism of the West--written by a dead man. I've been reading a lot of difficult books lately--Agape Agape would count as one of these. There are no pauses, there is less punctuation, Gaddis' stream of consciousness style jumps tracks so often it takes continual focus to follow the story, but it is worth it. Don't be daunted.
You'll come away from Agape Agape wondering just how wonderful the Progress is that we have made. Especially when one considers Art and creativity, Gaddis is poking at the intelligence that has taken the meaning out of intelligence. If any better proof is needed, this blog surely is sufficient. A musician was once needed to provide music. Then just a piano. Now we only need an arrangement of electrical circuits. Good thoughts once went through much rigor. Now foolish little boys can think and their thoughts can flow out their fingers and through wires and into a box and out into the world of boxes where they are readily available and readable by the whole world, or at least all of it that counts (which definition proves Gaddis' point: no internet, no count--only people who are safe). I don't have to be intelligent, I don't have to think, I don't have to make sense or be in any way coherent in order to publish. This isn't as good as we thought it was. Shouldn't there be some level of filter, shouldn't there be something that keeps every yahoo like me from taking shits on paper and calling it art? If we don't keep our standards and the rigor of our art (something that technology and our wonderful democratic spirit is trying to destroy) we lose our right to have any art at all. Art isn't just what people want it to be. Art is the objective, objective beauty, objective skill, objective value. Art is not what I think it is. Nor what I say it is. Art is art.

At Swim-Two-Birds

Flann O'Brien

It was stated that while the novel and the play were both pleasing intellectual exercises, the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters. The play was consumed in whole-some fashion by large masses in places of public resort; the novel was self-administered in private. The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic. In reply to an inquiry, it was explained that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. It was undemocratic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living. This would make for self-respect, contentment and better service. It would be incorrect to say that it would lead to chaos. Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before--usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature. Conclusion of explanation.
That is all my bum, said Brinsley.

What is wrong with Cryan and most people, said Byrne, is that they do not spend sufficient time in bed. When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body. Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.

Sweeny the thin-groined it it
in the middle of the yew;
life is very bare here,
piteous Christ it is cheerless.

Grey branches have hurt me
they have pierced my calves,
I hang here in the yew-tree above,
without chessmen, no womantryst.

I can put no faith in humans
in the place they are;
watercress at evening is my lot,
I will not come down.

I'll see you damned first, said the Good Fairy excitedly.

Do anything to spoil the good yarn you have made of it so far, and I will arise and I will slay thee with a shovel. Eh, boys?

The vocation of the pooka, said the Pooka, is one that is fraught with responsibilities, not the least of these being the lamming and leathering of such parties as are sent to me for treatment by Number One, which is the First Good and the Primal Truth and necessarily an odd number. My own personal number is Two. As regards the second objection you make about the tail, I mus state that I personally belong to a class that is accustomed to treat with extreme suspicion all such persons as are unprovided with tails. Myself I have two tails in the bed here, my own tail of loose hair and the tail of my nightshirt. When I wear two shirts on a cold day, you might say that I appear to have three tails in all?

Perhaps more than Joyce, Flann O'Brien captures a lyrical limerick-like speech that is most like you'd imagine Irishmen to speak if Irishmen were allowed to speak. I doubt if you go to Ireland, you will hear many men or women speak like Flann's characters. Maybe if you go to a pub where beers with names such as 'The Wrastler' are served. But give the Irish some time to get soused and pound down a couple of pints of a good dark porter or perhaps a mealy stout and their speech turns to the lilt O'Brien captures. Like a primal instinct or an urge of nature, the poetical discourse of the Irish people is rooted deep and it will take many generations of English and American tyranny to abolish it. Perhaps never.
But books like At-Swim-Two-Birds are doing their best to stem the tide of the hegemony of foreign discourse on the green isle. It takes a good deal more work to read something by Flann O'Brien than it does by Mark Twain, but O'Brien's payoff is better. The form may bewilder you. The storyline may lack sense. The wording may be excessive and more stuck on itself than any prima donna, but you'll never find something so pleasing to the ear and stomach. The words in At-Swim-Two-Birds go deeper than most. The small intricacies of the book are more pleasant for the fact that they don't serve too many purposes. They are there because they weren't put elsewhere, especially nowhere.
How can you not love a book that audaciously begins with Chapter 1 and forgets to ever put in another chapter?

Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner

He believes that all serious writers have a vocation, a sort of mystical call. What they exploit is not intelligence or training, but a glorious gift that is also an obligation.

To have all of one's physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one's mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard's steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing doors down the cellblock and know that one needn't be concerned, one still had months to serve--who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game. In the next two weeks we spent a few dollars on white paint and dotted swiss, and were settled. The storeroom next to the furnace, warm and dry, would by my study until Junior arrived. I set up a card table for a desk and made a bookcase out of some boards and bricks. In my experience, the world's happiest young man is a young professor building bookcases, and the world's most contented couple is composed of that young professor and his wife, in love, employed, at the bottom of a depression from which it is impossible to fall further, and entering on their first year as full adults, not preparing any longer but finally into their lives.

Eden. With, of course, its serpent. No Eden valid without serpent.

Does this bother you? he said. Kick me if it does. But I admit I've taken a kind of comfort from your bad luck. I've seen someone else tied and helpless, though for very different reasons. You've been constant, a rock, and I've admired you for that. But I've wondered what your life might have been if Sally hadn't got polio. You were upward bound when we first knew you, headed up like a rocket. Success might have taken you away from her--you wouldn't have been the first one. You've done a lot anyway, but maybe not all you might have done if you hadn't had the greater obligation of looking after her. I think your marriage did to you something like what mine did to me.

But in this script there will be no such ending.

Of all the people I know, Sid Lang best understands that my marriage is as surely built on addiction and dependence as his is. He tells me what under other circumstances would infuriate me--that he takes some satisfaction in my ill luck, that it gives him comfort to see someone else in chains. He says too that he would not be unchained if he could, and he knows I wouldn't either. But what he doesn't understand is that my chains are not chains, that over the years Sally's crippling has been a rueful blessing. It has made her more than she was; it has let her give me more than she would ever have been able to give me healthy; it has taught me at least the alphabet of gratitude. Sid can take his guilty satisfaction in my bad luck if he pleases. I will go on pitying for what his addiction has failed to give him.

This is in my mind a beautiful story of marriage. Not because it is the firmest or most solid or cleanest or most smooth marriage, but because come the end of the story, they are still together and discovering that they are happier because of it. Even in the difficult characters of Sid and Charity (a marriage that would surely be what we call failed) we see a desire towards mutual understanding and help.
Most gloriously though is the commonality of this story. These people are not extraordinary. They live lives somewhat charmed (but no more than an idyllic lunch or time spent with someone you love or moments in a warm chair with a book) and they grind out the struggle beneath a weight of misfortune. Shit does, it turns out, happen but it does not taint us. We don't have to use perfume to disguise the world from ourselves. We just have to shovel it.
I wish I could say these things better. But at the moment I can't. Only, if you read The Good Soldier, do not consider the book finished without reading this, Crossing to Safety.

The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

You can't kill a minuet de la cour. You may shut up the music-book, close the harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the white satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but surely the minuet--the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?

Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it--the husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile fears--for I was such a fool that I should never have known what she was or was not--and the blackmailing lover. And then the other lover came along...

For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
So, for a time, if such a passion came to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar ; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.
And yet I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman--or no, that is the wrong way of formulating it. For every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good. He will travel over no more horizons; he will never again set the knapsack over his shoulders; he will retire from those scenes. He will have gone out of the business.

Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got Rodney Bayham, pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn't really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad.

And no doubt, she had her share of the sex instinct that makes women be intolerably cruel to the beloved person.

I don't know. I know nothing. I am very tired.

In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor--a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one's character or in one's career. For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one's small meannesses. It is really death to do so--that is why so many marriages turn out unhappily.

If ever you feel the need to be depressed by a picture of four very confused, clutching, petty, and vain people, The Good Soldier is for you. This perhaps puts it a little harsh, and I do not want to sound like a prude. But my reasons for such a harsh castigation of Ford's two couples are clearer: it's not that they are like so many pauper children mucking about in the sewers--we all of us aren't much better than that--nor is it that they are selfish people who don't care for much outside of themselves--I don't think I could recognize a human who wasn't selfish--nor is it even that they glory in their own vanity--I believe most people are secretly as consoling and petting of their persons; no, what is most dismal about The Good Soldier is that not one of the four tries. There is not even a feeling to inspire. No one is reaching for the shining sun, those lighter realms of the atmosphere where love is pure and kindness exists. It doesn't matter so much how far the stretching fingers are, but it does matter that fingers stretch.
The Good Soldier is incredibly well written--the story drips out of Ford's fist like so much sand, he relates the tale with more control than many and far better style than more. For that reason alone it's almost worth reading, only, it would be such a dreary story.
Thankfully, I bear some charm which I cannot explain. The book I read immediately after The Good Soldier was the antidote to everything that was poison in Ford's book. Look up to see what I mean.

The Centaur

John Updike

The Founding Fathers, he explained, in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. I am a paid keeper of Society's unusables--the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant. The only incentive I can give you, kid, to behave yourself is this: if you don't buckle down and learn something, you'll be as dumb as I am, and you'll have to teach school to earn a living.

That some forgotten artist in an irrevocable sequence of hours had labored, doubtless with authentic craft and love, to produce this ugly, dusty, browned, and totally ignored representation seemed to contain a message for me which I did not wish to read.

Haste and improvidence had always marked our domestic details. The reason, it came to me, was that our family's central member, my father, had never rid himself o the idea that he might soon be moving on. This fear, or hope, dominated our home.

This was my first experience with Mr. Updike. It won't be my last, but I am not feeling a fire to search him out in print with any hurry. The Centaur is a good book; well-written, good for reading, good for thinking, and with just enough touch of mystery and high-handed thought to keep you searching, thinking, and feeling humble.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of The Centaur was Updike's willingness to blend the ancient myth of Chiron into his story rather than just use it as the basis for his story. I entered this book imagining that it would be a retelling of the old myth; The Centaur was a retelling but also just a telling. Updike moves from the modern era to the mythological era in the space of sentences and blends the life of our hero with the life of Chiron--so much that the narrative often speaks as if our hero were a centaur and the characters he interacts with were indeed various pillars of Greek mythology. Updike even helpfully provides an index at the back of the book to link which characters with which myths.
\If you haven't noticed the reason I'm referring to "our hero" is because I can't remember the main character's name.\
But if you do choose to read this book, be careful for you take a heavy load upon your shoulders. The main character, our not so memorable hero, seems to be slowly dragged down throughout the pages, to be caught in the thickest of mires of deep black goo. He seems tired of life--as you might expect from the Chiron myth--but to see it brought to reality in a man, especially a school teacher is numbing.
Interesting style and interesting story combine to give a force to the emotion of the story. It's worth checking out.

A Mathematician's Apology

G H Hardy

I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. I have helped to train other mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have helped them to it, as useless as my own. Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value.
The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.

If you've ever talked with someone who is a genius to the point of distraction, reading A Mathematician's Apology will be a little familiar to you. Hardy is blunt and almost harsh in his theorizing about life and art. But his clarity is especially helpful since it is directed at something that doesn't generally get that much clarity at all: art. He provides a helpful and unique view into the argument about the purpose of art.

The Poor Mouth

Flann O'Brien

The Old-Grey-Fellow cocked an eye at me and announced:
-Tis hot, son!
-There's an awful lot of heat in that fire truly, I replied, but look, sir, you called me son for the first time. It may be that you're my father and that I'm your child, God bless and save us and far from us be the evil thing!
-Tisn't true for you, Bonaparte, said he, for I'm your grandfather. Your father is far from home at the present but his name and surname in his present habitation are Michelangelo O'Coonassa.
-And where is he?
-He's in the jug! said the Old-Grey-Fellow.
At that time I was only about in the tenth month of my life but when I had the opportunity I looked into the jug. There was nothing in it but sour milk and it was a long time until I understood the Old-Grey-Fellow's remark, but that is another story I shall mention it in another place in this document.

Here then, reader, is some evidence for you of the life of the Gaelic paupers in Corkadoragha and an account of the fate which awaits them form their first day. After great merriment comes sorrow and good weather never remains for ever.

Here is a book of true Irish tradition. Enjoy it in its fullness and its lilt. Become a child in the ashes, growing up according to the old Gaelic tradition.

Narcissus and Goldmund

Herman Hesse

But how will you die when your time comes, Narcissus, since you have no mother? Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.

One thing, however, did become clear to him--why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing--mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery.

Continue, said Narcissus. You promised; you must keep your promise. You are not to think about whether God hears your prayers or whether there is a God such as you imagine. Nor are you to wonder whether your exercises are childish. Compared to Him to whom all our prayers are addressed, all our doing is childish. You must forbid yourself these foolish child's thoughts completely during the exercises. You are to speak the Our Father and the canticles, and give yourself up to the words and fill yourself with them just the way you play the lute or sing. You don't pursue clever thoughts and speculations then, do you? No, you execute one finger position after another as purely and perfectly as possible. While you sing, you don't wonder whether or not singing is useful; you sing. That's how you are to pray.

You should not envy me, Goldmund. There is no peace of the sort you imagine. Oh, there is peace of course, but not anything that lives within us constantly and never leaves us. There is only the peace that must be won again and again, each new day of our lives. You don't see me fight, you don't know my struggles as Abbot, my struggles in the prayer cell. A good thing that you don't. You only see that I am less subject to moods than you, and you take that for peace. But my life is struggle; it is struggle and sacrifice like every decent life; like yours too.

Goldmund, the Abbot whispered into his ear, forgive me for not being able to tell you earlier. I should have said it to you the day I came to see you in your prison in the bishop's residence, or when I was shown your first statues, or at so many other times. Let me tell you today how much I love you, how much you have always meant to me, how rich you have made my life. It will not mean very much to you. You are used to love; it is not rare for you; so many women have loved and spoiled you. For me it is different. My life has been poor in love; I have lacked the best of life. Our Abbot Daniel once told me that he thought I was arrogant; he was probably right. I am not unjust toward people. I make efforts to be just and patient with them, but I have never loved them. Of two scholars in the cloister, I prefer the one who is more learned; I've never loved a weak scholar in spite of his weakness. If I know nevertheless what love is, it is because of you. I have been able to love you, you alone among all men. You cannot imagine what that means. It means a well in a desert, a blossoming tree in the wilderness. It is thanks to you alone that my heart has not dried up, that a place within me has remained open to grace.

I began this book and wondered just what the hell I was reading. It did not seem to be anything more than a young man wandering around the medieval German countryside seducing women. Yet, by the end I was convinced that Narcissus and Goldmund was a very holy book. Hesse scratches the soul of an artist into being in between the two poles of Narcissus and Goldmund.
We are given the difference between a man who thinks and a man who feels. But the reason Hesse paints this difference is to make us think about a different opposition: great art and small art. We all have created some thing of our one, once, and marveled at the little parts of it that hint at a greater artistic mystery, but usually these small creations of ours, for varied reasons, never latch into us with the fullness of Art. But most of us have also seen some true relic of great Art. We have read some story, seen some painting, heard some music which rings in us the moment it enters and never really leaves--this sort of art tunes us a little to it. And we recognize the vast difference, the impossible chasm between our little hints at this and the true specimen before us. This is what Narcissus and Goldmund will pull out of you. And once you begin to understand this, once it begins to become a part of you, Hesse gives you yet another mystery to contemplate--the last lines of the book which are the first lines I quoted above. I have a feeling that to understand, or perhaps to feel, these lines is to be an artist and not just to think about art. But I wouldn't know, because I don't understand them.

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

John Milton threw open whole new vistas filled with charming, inexhaustible possibilities that promised to ward off monotony forever. Major Major went back to Washington Irving when John Milton grew monotonous.

He was never without misery, and never without hope.

Yossarian thought he knew why Nately's whore held him responsible for Nately's death and wanted to kill him. Why the hell shouldn't she? It was a man's world, and she and everyone younger had every right to blame him and everyone older for ever unnatural tragedy that befell them; just as she, even in her grief, was to blame for every man-made misery that landed on her kid sister and on all other children behind her. Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to imperiling them all.

The first time I read this book of lies I thought it was really very funny and laughed. Unwitting and in bliss, the dark sap of the book seeped between the pores of my brain and dripped down through my various vessels and nerves into the safe of my soul. But of course, I wasn't paying any attention to any of this, so I only laughed and wondered if the movie was as good as the book. This isn't to say there aren't a good deal of wonderfully emotional points in Catch-22. It's a book that brings me closer to crying than many other more serious volumes.
But then I read it a second time and discovered that I could feel the sap within me clinging and sucking and pulling at me. This book, though full of many fingerprints and freckles and moles--the signs of the true recognition of humanity--this book is too full of desperation to escape. Heller throws all life to the winds as he scrabbles up the steep ditch sides of his dirt pit prison. Only such a lusting after freedom could bring with it the wild and genius twists of mental contortionism that so mark Catch-22. When the truths you trust are paraded before you and as things to trust and suddenly pulled away with faceful accusations before once again being turned into pillars of trust, but this time only because Heller tells you to trust them, and then once more they are removed, but again this time because of a contradiction seemingly born out of the very truth you once trusted--well, the soul hasn't much of a wall left anymore.
By the end of it all, you'll wonder if there is any point at all to this strange dance. And when Heller finally gets around to giving you some hope, it isn't hope in life, it's hope in death. Hope that in death he can finally conquer life. Hell rises out of the earth, off the page and walks around you through the last few chapters of Catch-22, bring your sword, your special blanket that you used to suck on as a child, your favorite teddy-bear, your subcompact 9mm and everything else you might have that gives you a feeling of safety. You'll need them all.