Mason & Dixon

Thomas Pynchon

Boy, ye're sending me 'pon a damn'd fool's errand.

Ah--your first, Sir?

At this turn of his Life, Capt. Grant has discover'd in his own feckless Youth, a Source of pre-civiliz'd Sentiment useful to his Praxis of now and then pretending to be insane, thus deriving an Advantage over any unsure as to which side of Reason he may actually stand upon.

Ah! it might seek you out, mightn't it,--and, in the Monomania of its Assault, grow careless enough to allow my Agents at last to apprehend it. That would be the Plan, anyhow. Agreed, you must consider how best to defend yourself,--wear clothing it cannot bite through, leather, or what's even more secure, chain-mail,--its Beak being of the finest Swedish Steel, did I mention that, yes quite able, when the Duck, in its homicidal Frenzy, is flying at high speed, to penetrate all known Fortification, solid walls being as paper to this Juggernaut.... One may cower within, but one cannot avoid, --le Bec de la Mort, the.... Beak of Death.

Aye. As if we're Lodgers inside someone else's Fate, whilst belonging quite someplace else...?

Unfortunately, young people, recalls the Revd, the word Liberty, so unreflectively sacred to us today, was taken in those Times to encompass even the darkest of Men's rights,--to injure whomever we might wish,--unto extermination, were it possible,--Free of Royal advice or Proclamation Lines and such. This being, indeed and alas, one of the Liberties our late War was fought to secure.

Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,--Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin.... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,--nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,--her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,--that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,--not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,--rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.

Listen to me, Defecates-with-Pigeons. Long before any of you came here, we dream'd of you. All the people, even Nations far to the South and the West, dreamt you before ever we saw you,--we believ'd that you came from some other World, or the Sky. You had Powers and we respected them. Yet you never dream'd of us, and when at last you saw us, wish'd only to destroy us. Then the killing started,--some of you, some of us,--but not nearly as many as we'd been expecting. You could not be the Giants of long ago, who would simply have wip'd us away, and for less. Instead, you sold us your Powers,--your Rifles,--as if encouraging us to shoot at you,--and so we did, tho' not hitting as many of you, as you were expecting. Now you begin to believe that we have come from elsewhere, possessing Powers you do not.... Those of us who knew how, have fled into Refuge in your Dreams, at last. Tho' we now pursue real lives no different at their Hearts from yours, we are also your Dreams.

So will the Reign of Reason cheerily dispose of any allegations of Paradise.

I don't pray enough, Dixon subvocalizes, and I can't get upon my Knees just now because too many are watching,--yet could I kneel, and would I pray, 'twould be to ask, respectfully, that this be made right, that the Murderers meet appropriate Fates, that I be spar'd the awkwardness of seeking them out myself and slaying as many as I may, before they overwhelm me. Much better if that be handl'd some other way, by someone a bit more credible.... He feels no better for this Out-pouring.

It is possible, here comments the Rev'd Cherrycoke, that for some couples, however close, Love is simply not in the cards. So must they pursue other projects instead,--sometimes together, sometimes apart. I believe now, that their Third Interdiction came when, at the end of the eight-Year Traverse, Mason and Dixon could not cross the perilous Boundaries between themselves.

The old Astronomers sit for a while in what might be an Embrace, but that they forbear to touch.

You're safe, Charlie, she whispers. You're safe, She prays.

Some are bound by chains within to a bondage all the more terrible for it's invisible. Some strive to break these bonds and succeed only in ratifying their presence and invisibility. So to Love then, must all such prisoners cast their hopes. That there is some flaw in the awful logic of a fateful world that another would join us in our bonds, so close, so very close, that the restriction of chains becomes the union of souls. Upon Love do the doomed hang their dreams. Though with every move we tighten the bonds, realize our prison, hearts within these chains still hope upon lunacy. Even a prison may be a home.

Mason & Dixon, the story of astronomers, the story of fate, well told, even if everything seems to arrive a little late. Imagine: a man who suspects that he is a wet blanket, a stick in the mud, a bland sugarless doughnut, imagine a man who accepts the nickname Mopery. Such a man is Pynchon's Mason. Going through life, acceptant that he is not jolly, he is not a joker, he is not free to frolic for a many numbered total of reasons summed fate. Some people just aren't that way. Dixon, of course, is. Jolly, dashing, people who want this sort of thing call it raw. Dixon also is a much more interesting character. It's how it is. But then Mason isn't. Life sucks for Mason. But imagine Mason's mind, for he is intelligent enough to know himself for what he is. In fact, that may be one of the worst curses of melancholia, to be aware of the dampness of one's own soul. Mason is so aware and there are moments he tries to break out of it, moments when he would deny his own tragic flaw (what else makes a good story?). These moments are terrible. Even as he leaps for freedom, even as he strains against the chains, we see him falling short, we see him straining futile, and worst of all, we see in his eyes even as he tries that his own failure is all but known and only a little hope remains ignorant.

What I'm aiming at, though doing a poor job, is one of the most frightening things in the world. Many people never have to face it, and jolly good for them--such a one perhaps is Dixon--but others do not escape so luckily. To know of one's own failings, to try to fight them and yet to feel them triumphing over you--that tipping point is home to sickness's deep.

We read books to read ourselves. We write to write ourselves. Did Pynchon actually write any such characters?

Darkness at Noon

Arthur Koestler

Rubashov stood stiffly between the bed and the bucket, held his breath, and waited for the first scream. He remembered that the first scream, in which terror still predominated over physical pain, was usually the worst; what followed was already more bearable, one got used to it and after a time one could even draw conclusions on the method of torture from the tone and rhythm of the screams. Towards the end, most people behaved in the same way, however different they were in temperament and voice: the screams became weaker, changed over into whining and choking. Usually the door would slam soon after. The keys would jangle again; and the first scream of the next victim often came even before they had touched him, at the mere sight of the men in the doorway.

The old disease, thought Rubashov. Revolutionaries should not think through other people's minds.
Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to?
How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody?
How else can one change it?
He who understands and forgives--where would he find a motive to act?
Where would he not?
They will shoot me, thought Rubashov.

Rubashov bowed his head. A suspicion had risen in him which affected him almost as a physical pain and made him forget everything else. Was it possible that this unfortunate youth had in fact drawn the conclusions from his, Rubashov's line of thought--that he stood there before him in the glare of the reflector as the consequence incarnate of his own logic?

You and I are really in a similar situation, he said comfortably and emptied his liqueur glass. We both have outlived our time. Guinea-pig breeding is finished with; we live in the century of the Plebeian.

Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.

Citizen President, the accused Rubashov declared, I speak here for the last time in my life. The opposition is beaten and destroyed. If I ask myself today, For what am I dying? I am confronted by absolute nothingness. There is nothing for which one could die, if one died without having repented and unreconciled with the Party and the Movement. Therefore, on the threshold of my last hour, I bend my knees to the country, to the masses and to the whole people. The political masquerade, the mummery of discussions and conspiracy are over. We were politically dead long before the Citizen Prosecutor demanded our heads. Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust. I have only one justification before you, Citizen Judges: that I did not make it easy for myself. Vanity, and the last remains of pride whispered to me: Die in silence, say nothing; or die with a noble gesture, with a moving swansong on your lips; pour out your heart and challenge your accusers. That would have been easier for an old rebel, but I overcame the temptation. With that my task is ended. I have paid; my account with history is settled. To ask for mercy would be derision. I have nothing more to say.

Rubashov stood by the window and tapped on the empty wall with his pince-nez. As a boy he had really meant to study astronomy, and now for forty years he had been doing something else. Why had not the Public Prosecutor asked him: Defendent Rubashov, what about the infinite? He would not have been able to answer--and there, there lay the real source of his guilt....Could there be a greater?

Die in silence.

Dormir.

Communist revolutionaries are apparently no better than capitalists when it comes to missing the point of life; or should we say that both are human and therefore fallible? It remains that in a world so concerned with punishing crimes, we, the guilty, ignore the awful majority of crimes because we do not wish to be faced with the possibility that the world is topsy turvy: our hard is easy, easy hard, last first, and first last. We don't want to take the road that rises.
There is personal honor, and community honor and there is nobility which sees it's role in every case. There is Darkness at Noon and The Dark Knight but which is more accurate? For the sake of honor to be shown to the world, men have sacrificed their families, their brothers, their lives; for the sake of honor in the history books, men have sacrificed their futures, their pasts, their reputations, and their communities. But while Batman sacrifices his honor so that Gotham can keep pristine its heroes, Rubashov sacrifices his honor so that it may be used by his enemies--which is better? Are they different? Afterall, Rocky Sullivan went screaming to his the electric chair, not because he was a coward but because he was honorable. Man's honor or his society's honor? Well, maybe they are the same and it's only an issue of perception. Afterall, this song has been sung before.
All this can be bandied and argued, but you cannot escape from the last part: if you want to be an astronomer and deny yourself your vocation for the sake of the cause, your guilt might be greatest. This is the wisdom of childhood: a child knows that sometimes he must give up what he wants for the sake of doing good, but he would never consider renouncing the want itself. Smart is the child who knows that too much candy rots your teeth, but strange is the kid who refuses to want any sort of candy. This isn't about tastes, but the acknowledgment that we possess them. Yet here we go, a worldful of ascetics renouncing that we are selves, not denying the self of what it wants. We are eyes refusing to desire light, and ears denying our want of sound. We hide ourselves from our desires by trick, by barrage, by sleep, but always the sneaking voice is there. Because even when we take the easy course out, the shortest trip to oblivion, even when we sleep, we dream.

Billy Budd

Herman Melville

Though our Handsome Sailor had as much of masculine beauty as one can expect anywhere to see; nevertheless, like the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne's minor tales, there was just one thing amiss in him. No visible blemish indeed, as with the lady; no, but an occasional liability to a vocal defect. Though in the hour of elemental uproar or peril he was everything that a sailor should be, yet under sudden provocation of strong heart-feeling his voice, otherwise singularly musical, as if expressive of the harmony within, was apt to develop an organic hesitancy, in fact more or less of a stutter or even worse. In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet Earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card, as much as to remind us--I too have a hand here.

In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main road, some bypaths have an enticement not readily to be withstood.

Master of tangent, Mr Mellville also knows the sound of inevitability. Characters sinking in a quicksand unrelenting, that despite their struggles they still do sink deeper down. Are Melville characters' actions as futile as seem his tangents? Maybe neither is either.
The paradox, of course, is that futility is realized in the striving for it's opposite: how else could a captain justify the execution of an innocent man, if not in order to serve some higher purpose? So one life is turned futile, one career too, but the Navy remains meaningful, it is powered, like all institutions of man, by futilizing lives.
But what can we do? Can we give a man who kills another the clemency he does not deserve? Can we forgive the ill-fortune of a knight who leaves a wake of destruction, even though it is a rightful curse? Can we let an old politician die in peace though his death be necessary for the preservation of our ideals? When it comes down to it, the only way to meaning is the way that does not make sense. Mercy, forgiveness, compassion, humility--these are illogical and do not make sense. But if we be ruled by logic, we'll find we are futile. If we do what makes reasonable sense, we'll find ourselves stranded on the tip of a fast melting ice-berg.
Billy Budd dreams of eye-winks and yells God Bless the Captain.

The War of the End of the World

Mario Vargas Llosa

He thought of Jurema. Was she a thinking being? A little domestic animal, rather. Diligent, submissive, capable of believing that statues of St. Anthony escape from churches and return to the grottoes where they were carved; trained like the baron's other female servants to care for chickens and sheep, to prepare her husband's food, to wash his clothes, and to open her legs only for him. He thought: 'Perhaps she'll be roused from her lethargy now and discover injustice.' He thought: 'I'm your injustice.' He thought: 'Perhaps you've done her a service.'

Nostalgia is an act of cowardice, Gall.

Gall looked at him, disconcerted, and found no truth or lie to offer him in reply.

But the soldiers fired point blank at the two adversaries and then threw themselves upon her, grunting, and dragged her into the dry underbrush. Badly wounded, the tracker and the phrenologist went on fighting.

You struck him in the face, Rufino, Jurema thinks. What did you gain by that, Rufino? What use was there in getting your revenge if you've died, if you've left me all alone in the world, Rufino? She does not weep, she does not move, she does not take her eyes from the two motionless men. That hand on Rufino's head reminds her that in Queimadas, when to the misfortune of all of them God willed that the stranger should come to offer her husband work, he had once felt Rufino's head and read its secrets for him, just as Porfirio the sorcerer read them in coffee grounds and Dona Cacilda in a basin of water.

It's something...difficult to put into words. Too unreal, do you follow me? It seems like a conspiracy in which everyone played a role, a total misunderstanding on the part of all concerned, from beginning to end.

The important thing in these dispatches are the intimations, the metallic, incisive, high-pitched voice said. Not what they say but what they suggest, what's left to the reader's imagination. They went to Canudos to see English officers. And they saw them. I talked with my replacement for an entire afternoon. He never once lied deliberately, he just didn't realize he was lying. The simple fact is that he didn't write what he saw but what he felt and believed, what those all around him felt and believed. That's how the whole tangled web of false stories and humbug got woven, becoming so intricate that there is now no way to disentangle it. How is anybody ever going to know the story of Canudos?

With all due respect, he murmured, I would like you to be my wife.

During the regiment's brief stay in Salvador, Dr Gama showed Teotonio around the medical school at the University of Bahia, in the Praca da Basilica Cathedral, and opposite the yellow facade with tall blue ogival windows, beneath the coral trees, the coconut palms, and the crotons, the doctor and the student had sat drinking sweetish brandy in front of the kiosks set up on the black-and-white mosiac pavement, amid the vendors hawking trinkets and women selling hot foods from braziers. They went on drinking till dawn, which found them, besides themselves with happiness, in a brothel of mulattas. As they climbed onto the train to Queimadas, Dr Gama had his disciple down an emetic potion, to ward off African syphilis, he explained to him.

Don't you see? the nearsighted journalist said, breathing as though he were exhausted from some tremendous physical effort. Canudos isn't a story; it's a tree of stories.

But Abbot Joao didn't let him. Was what he did his fault? he said, transfixed. Was it his fault that he committed countless cruelties? Could he do otherwise? Wasn't he paying his mother's debt? From whom should the Father have sought retribution for those wicked deeds? From him or from the duchess? His eyes were riveted on the Dwarf, in terrible anguish. Answer me, answer me.

I had never heard of Canudos before I read The War of the End of the World. Such is my ignorance. The very idea of a rebellion that doesn't seek to invade or expand or attack but denies the authority of the state in whose confines it finds itself, should have been familiar to me. After all, such was the founding of my own country. Perhaps. Except there are differences. Is it a rebellion if a group of people begin living in an abandon places far off in the backlands of a country and refuse to acknowledge the authority of the government? I guess. But not a terribly visible one. Yet Canudos itched.

Does it threaten a government if some group of people under the sway of that government deny it? It would be a threat to several governments (city, county, state, federal) for me to form a group of people and saw that we deny the government's authority here. But that is because I survive by the authority of the government. This life would not be possible without government. In Canudos however, they had isolated themselves from the rest of Brazil. They did not partake of the resources of the government, so perhaps they had the right to deny it's authority.

Whatever you think, the reality is, governments are not in the business of shrinking. For the same reason that the US Civil War was fought, the same reason Puerto Rico can never leave the US, the same reason that the UK's prominence and power began to wain with the relinquishment of the colonies, governments fail if ever they shrink. Or at least so firmly believe this that never will they shrink of their own accord. It's not their nature.

There's a lot going on out there.

When We Were Orphans

Kazuo Ishiguro

I know full well what you've been thinking all this time, Lieutenant! I could see it in your eyes. You believe this is all my fault, all this, all of it, all this terrible suffering, this destruction here, I could see it in your face when we were walking through it all just now. But that's because you know nothing, practically nothing, sir, concerning this matter. You may well know a thing or two about fighting, but let me tell you it's quite another thing to solve a complicated case of this kind. You obviously haven't the slightest idea what's involved. Such things take time, sir! A case like this one, it requires great delicacy. I suppose you imagine you can just rush at it with bayonets and rifles, do you? It's taken time, I accept that, but that's in the very nature of a case like this. But I don't know why I bother to say all this. What would you understand about it, a simple soldier?

Now we are grown, we can at last put things right.

It seems like some of the best books in the world, I cannot write anything about them. When We Were Orphans is not one of the best books in the world. Not even high up on the list. But I think Ishiguro is close to being a great author. He would be great if he could find more than one voice in his throat. Any one of his books would stick with you longer than most books, but if you read more than one of his books you'll find yourself wondering if he's really that good after all. It's the similarity, you see.
But back to not being able to write. There are many reasons a book will leave me speechless of the written word; sometimes, and this is the most common, the book inspires me to write and I end up writing something that isn't a review at all, sometimes it makes me want to say something so profound that I trap myself with the pressure and never get anything out at all, sometimes fills me with too many things to say and none of them closely connected. In every case, I usually let time pass and the feeling fade or deaden itself, slow gas escaping, like flat soda.
When We Were Orphans will make you squirm a good deal. And then some. Prepare for that.

The Dubliners

James Joyce

I think he died for me, she answered.

Artists think with sassy badness they can plunge and already have and leave their readers behind to catch them if they can, but mostly they're interested in creating the feeling of trying to catch so that they haven't got to produce the goods to be caught. And that's how to tell a true one from the false, from the poser. True Artist spends the time, same as Poser Artist, developing the feeling of wanting to catch; True Artist spends the time running rabbit from you so that you'll chase. But comes a time when True Artist and Poser Artist are separated. This time, True Artist turns and confronts the chasing dog Reader and says bite me. And Reader does. Then! Test. True Artist is revealed in the contrast between what True Artist dangles before Reader's eyes and what True Artist actually tastes like. Poser Artist never has the moment where they turn, sacrifice themselves, let their self be eaten by Reader. Poser Artist never gets inside Reader. Poser Artist asks Reader to get inside them. Of course that can't work.