The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

One might, perhaps, ask Ivan Nikolayevich why he assumed that the professor would be precisely near the Moskva River and not anywhere else. But the trouble is that there was no one to ask this. The foul alley was totally deserted.

The citizen had nabbed the tom at a moment when the beast was proceeding with a stealthy air (and what can you do if this is the manner natural to toms? It's not that they are criminal, but that they are afraid of stronger creatures--dogs or men--who might inflict some harm or wrong upon them. And this is easily done, but, I assure you, there is little honor to be claimed from such an act, yes, very little!), and so, the tom was, for some reason of his own, proceeding with a stealthy air into a clump of weeds.

This book was not at all what I expected it to be. It's Faust, but really really wacky. As much as I love the Faust story, I was not too impressed by The Master and Margarita, which is saying a lot. This seemed a case of authorial self-indulgence as bad as any I've seen. I know authorial self-indulgence, I'm an expert at it. Bulgakov has his moments, but for the most part, this was not a read to put at the top of your list.

Nickel Mountain

John Gardner

Those fifteen people in New York City might be right in the end, but you had to act, and beyond that you had to assert that they were wrong, wrong for all time, whatever the truth might be. And it was the same even if you only thought you saw an old man being stabbed: You ran to the center of the illusion and you jumped the illusory man with the knife, and if it was empty, sunlit sidewalk you hit, too bad, you had to put up with the laughter, and nevertheless do it again the next time and gain and again. So Simon. It wasn't true that the world was about to end or that sinners were going to torment, but all the same he was right to go out with his crackpot pamphlets: Henry Soames would try to persuade him, but he wasn't going to stop him--except in the diner, because the diner, at least, was still his own.

A man doesn't need that sort of thing. Fact is, he doesn't need anything at all, except when he's young. When he's young a man wants something to die for--some war to fight, some kind of religion to burn at the stake for. He refilled his cup with whiskey, holding the bottle with both hands. But a man gets over all that. A woman's different. Woman's got to have something to live for. He toasted womanhood, a toast even more grand than the last, on his face the same dazed, miserable smile, then drew the cup very carefully toward his fleshy lower lip. When the cup was empty he set it down and at the last, very deliberately, stood up and started for the door.

Anything you make, he was saying, gripping Willard's arm, anything you make at all has got to be finding out what you want to make. I mean, finding out what you are. Maybe you'll draw cars or maybe you'll drive them, either way it's the same thing, you do what you do because of everything you ever did, or in spite of all you ever did--I don't know. I mean, it's love, it's like every kind of love you ever felt and the sum total of every love you ever felt. It's what poor old Kuzitski used to say: It's finding something to be crucified for. That's what a man has to have. I mean it. Crucifixion. His voice cracked--stupid, sentimental, Soames voice--and Willard Freund jerked back and laughed. Callie too seemed repelled by it, but she reached out to touch their arms, Henry Soames' and Willard's. Then she drew her hands back, for Henry was blundering on.

She never spoke of loving him but sometimes when they locked up the restaurant together she would hold his hand, or when he sat holding Jimmy, reading to him, she would pat the bald spot on his head. And so like a man half-asleep he thought about marriage, which was the same thing as love or magic or anything else he could think of (he could no more distinguish between what was happening from day to day between Callie and himself and what happened between himself and his son than he could tell the difference, except in degrees, between those and the way the restaurant changed him and he, in turn, the restaurant), and he knew, not in words, that it was true, as Emmet Slocum had said once, that people sometimes killed themselves because of the weather but nevertheless they killed themselves by choice.

He felt the way he had felt long ago when his father would ask him, Where have you been till this hour, young man? knowing he had been nowhere, as always, had done nothing as always, had driven his motorcycle around on the mountain roads in the vague hope that something new might happen, that the world might stand suddenly transfigured, transformed to a movie--a gangster picture, a love picture, anything but the tedious ruin it was, a worn-out country (not worn-out enough to be morbidly interesting), worn-out farmers, a worn-out sixteen-year-old boy partly too shy and partly too righteous (all things foul to his dry-rotted mind) even to look through car windows at lovers.

Now they got gutter cleaners--seven thousand dollars they cost, and you got to pay for it month by month, summer or winter, whether or not you got hay in the barn, because banks don' t care about hay. We used to make it, in the old days, no matter how long the rain held off. But the way things are now, you can't compete without gutter cleaners and diesel tractors, combines, balers, crimpers, blowers, grain silos, motor-run unloading machines, hammermills, sorters, all the rest. Lou Millet bought that farm of his for four thousand dollars, house included. You know how deep he's in right now? A hundred thousand. Fact. Can't even sell it.

A little, he said. He got out his cigarettes and lit one. Reflected in the windshield, he looked like Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney or someone, and the recognition simultaneously pleased and disgusted him. Fake, he thought; sucker. And that too was from some movie. Even his self-hatred was second hand, cheap show. He blew out smoke and took a deep breath of air but seemed to get none, like Fortunato in the basement.

Really, there's only forgiveness. That's all there is. In the long gaping stretch of time, there is only forgiveness. It's natural, it's the way of things, a nature more deeply seated than all the rage and anger and hatred we think runs the world. Forgiveness is the old law, the true law of Nature. So says John Gardner in Nickel Mountain.

The Music School

John Updike

Sweetie, Richard blurted, will they hurt me? The curious fact was that he had never given blood before. Asthmatic and underweight, he had been 4-F, and at college and now at the office he had, less through his own determination than through the diffidence of the solicitors, evaded pledging blood. It was one of those tests of courage so trivial that no one had ever thought to make him face up to it.

The grape leaves outside my window are curiously beautiful. Curiously because it comes upon me as strange, after the long darkness of self-absorption and fear and shame in which I have been living, that things are beautiful, that independent of our catastrophes they continue to maintain the effect, which is the hallmark and specialty of Nature. Nature: this morning it seems to me very clear that Nature may be defined as that which exists without guilt. Our bodies are in Nature; our shoes, their laces, the little plastic tips of the laces--everything around us and about us is in Nature, and yet something holds us away from it, like the upward push of water which keeps us from touching the sandy bottom, ribbed and glimmering with crescental fragments of oyster shell, so clear to our eyes.

Updike reminds me of Ford Maddox Ford. Kind of a bitter guy. There seems to have been a period in American writing, after the Second World War and before the late Eighties (actually it might still be going on) when we were given a series of very tired, very jaded, almost catatonic writers who knew no other subject than familial trouble and ennui. I'm exaggerating a bit, but after The Music School with its repetitive hammer stroke themes, I feel a bit like exaggerating.

Carpenter's Gothic

William Gaddis

She came into the kitchen with the halves of the china dog from the mantel, found glue and stood there at the sink pressing the pieces together. An ear snapped off, and she walked more slowly to the trash, her thumb to her lips with a fleck of blood. Here in the top of the trash lay that harsh glimpse of boats off Eleuthera and, down wiping it clean of coffee grounds, a torn piece of a letter in a generous and unfamiliar hand drawn out in severed fragments, anyone's fault, the last thing I, for you to believe me, what else to do. Deeper down, under the wet batiste remnant shorn of its buttons, she found the torn half of the envelope with the Zaire stamp URGENT PLEASE FORWARD, picking it through till the phone brought her up with her thumb to her lips, tasting blood,--Mrs who...? No I'm afraid not, I'm not...Well it's a very small street and I mean I don't even know who lives...No now listen I can't join your march against cancer, I don't like cancer I don't even like to think about it that's all, now...yes you're welcome goodbye.

Never heard of, wait it might be the VA give me it, might be about my pension hello...? What...? No, twenty fifth, I was in the twenty fifth infantry what's the...platoon leader look, what's it about who...look, I...No look I, medical, eighty percent look how the hell did they get hold of my record, who...No well look now look I'm, I can't just told you I can't just too God damn busy I'm, got to be out of town be out of, out of the country just too God damn busy no I'm, goodbye no, goodbye... He held the phone tight for a moment, and then hung it up.--Liz?

And stop calling me that! That's, what's sorry no, that's what my father always did, saying I'm sorry and he'd pat me and try to give me a kiss no, it's always something else, saying I'm sorry it's always for the wrong thing that's why people say it. I'm sorry I disturbed you Mrs Booth, loading all those books on him and driving away filling his head with, with I don't know what, that whole show you put on for him in there from the minute he, the minute you found out his name, that his name was Vorakers. Fossils and brimstone and calling Reverend Ude the missing link so he could make fun of Paul why, why. Just to make it all worse between him and Paul? yes, and me?

Took him out drinking half the night no, no I told you he took me I hardly got a word in, you think you have to teach the young outrage? Not just Paul not just your father no, he was outraged at everything, everybody who came before him you think eh left me out? that he had some kind of romantic picture like the, like you did? finding gold out there when I was his age do you know what he said? Just one more four fucking thousand foot hole in the ground they'll pack with black skins to dig it out for them oldest damned story there is, the new generation blames the old one for the mess it inherits and they lump us all together because tall they see is what we've become, lying in wait for you out there one misstep and they pounce, grab one straw of expediency and they're on to you for betraying yourself, betraying them, selling out like the ones writing bad books and bad everything who are doing the best they can? when we thought we could count on civilization? Two hundred years building this great bastion of middle class values, fair play, pay your debts, fair pay for honest work, two hundred years that's about all it is, progress, improvement everywhere, what's worth doing is worth doing well and they find out that's the most dangerous thing of all, all our grand solutions turn into nightmares. Nuclear energy to bring cheap power everywhere and all they hear is radiation threats and what in hell to do with the waste. Food for the millions and they're back eating organic sprouts and stone ground flour because everything else is poisonous additives, pesticides poisoning the earth, poisoning the rivers the oceans and the conquest of space turns into military satellites and high technology where the only metaphor we've given them is the neutron bomb and the only news is today's front page...

Gaddis very adequately captures miserable people doing miserable things to each other. In the midst of it all, there are moments when he manages to make these miserable people lovely and wonderful and to make you want to kiss them. It does take a magician to make people want to kiss lepers.

Reading Gaddis' dialogue is like trying to draw while driving over a very badly washboarded road: jarring. If you can manage a short novel of constant jarring, no rest and lots of lepers, Carpenter's Gothic is a good place to find one.

Poetic Diction

Owen Barfield

That the idea of Poetry and Science as two fundamentally opposite modes of experiencing Life should have taken firm hold of a generation which honours Aristotle, Bacon and Goethe, will, I believe, be as much a matter of wonder to our posterity as it will--if not re-adjusted--be a matter of tragedy to ourselves.

Oscar Wilde's mot--that men are made by books rather than books by men--was certainly not pure nonsense; there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare's 'meaning'.

Barfield's project in Poetic Diction, more a proposal, an outline, than exhaustive research, points to what will be one of the most fundamental crisis of the Internet Age. How many generations have absorbed scientific speech as a more precise, less figurative mode of speech than poetic? The Science-Poetry duality is second-nature to most of the Western World at this point, so that at its best Poetry is a way of discussing the things that are too wishy-washy for Science (thus far that is, Science fully expects to reduce the amount of wishy-washiness and with time fully eliminate the need for Poetry) and at its worst is cheap emotional off-gassing.

In most of Western culture, Poetry is allowed by Science to have some credibility in the realm of the unconscious but this is only because Science has not grown into its own quite yet. The necessity, even the meaning, even the worth of Poetry will vanish with each Scientific measurement. It is against this lunacy that Barfield raises his sword.

Barfield proposes that science cannot exist without poetics, indeed that scientific thought cannot be fully understood except through poetics. Based in the concept that scientific discourse cannot take place except in the forum of words*, Barfield launches into wordy warfare. Tracing words back to their first union with meaning, Poetic Diction argues that it is Poetry that has given words their meaning.

In 1928, at the time of Poetic Diction's publication, there were several schools as to how words originally gained meaning: one school was that words were once entirely literal. When a man used the word for tree he meant most completely specifically that tree over there next to the rock that looks like a dog picking its nose. Essentially this school argued that at one point all words were proper names. At some point then comes along an age of such poetic greatness that words are divorced from their specific name meanings and the concept of abstraction is born. The tool for this great divorce, they claimed, was metaphor.

The second school said claimed that all meaning had its root in metaphor. That words originally could not be anything other than metaphor. Since the vocabulary of early languages was so limited, metaphor was forced to be applied to almost all speech.

Barfield contends that neither of these approaches is correct. Instead he says that the trend of speech is to become more and more abstract, which is to say precise, and that in the early stages of language, concepts and physical identities were not so distinct. To Barfield, a myth is a thing that embodies both metaphor and proper name and so Barfield believes that language once rolled and mixed these two together so entirely that neither was neither. The development of language has been the process of separating the two.

I have not done justice to Barfield's complex argument about a complex subject. Read the book if you'd like an unscathed understanding.

*As a note, I find it incredibly interesting that with electricity we have now converted words back into numbers...binary code and the like. This of course makes the system incredibly more complex. I'm sure that Kurt Godel has something to do with this at some point, but mostly the concept of mathematics as a language is interesting to me. Because with coding languages we now have a link from numbers to words and a language which can be converted into numbers and understood that way as well as understood as words. It wouldn't do to convert Crime and Punishment into binary code and show it to people. Not at all. But some people can read simple programming in its numerical state...

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas

Gertrude Stein

In explaining his unhappiness he told Gertrude Stein they talk about the sorrows of great artists, the tragic unhappiness of great artists but after all they are great artists. A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artists and he is not a great artist.

Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives of many geniuses.

It was a pleasure to meet, it was even an honour, but that was about all.

Fernande roused like a lioness defending her cubs. That is a brutality that I will never forgive him, she said. I met him on the street, he had a comic supplement in his hand, I asked him to give it to me to help me to distract myself and he brutally refused. It was a piece of cruelty that I will never forgive. I ask you, Gertrude, to give to me myself the next copies you have of the comic supplement. Gertrude Stein said, why certainly with pleasure.

But the gist of the matter was that Guillaume challenged the other man and Max Jacob was to be the second and witness for Guillaume. Guillaume and his antagonist each sat in their favourite cafe all day and waited while their seconds went to and fro. How it all ended Gertrude Stein does not know except that nobody fought, but the great excitement was the bill each second and witness brought to his principal.

One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all in all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself.

He says, she says, that I don't look it because I have more courage, but I don't think I am, she says, no I don't think I am.

I always say you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading never can do. A good many years later Jane Heap said that she had never appreciated the quality of Gertrude Stein's work until she proof-read it.

Constance Fletcher came a day or so after we arrived and I went to the station to meet her. Mabel Dodge had described her to me as a very large woman who would wear a purple robe and who was deaf. As a matter of fact she was dressed in green and was not deaf but very short sighted, and she was delightful.

Sunrises were, they contended, alright when approached slowly from the night before, but when faced abruptly from the same morning they were awful.

Then began a long correspondence, not between Gertude Stein and T S Eliot, but between T S Eliot's secretary and myself. We each addressed the other as Sir, I signing myself A B Toklas and she signing initials. It was only considerably afterwards that I found out that his secretary was not a young man. I don't know whether she ever found out that I was not.

About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.

I write for myself and strangers.

I have never read so many well-placed, even beautiful 'very's. If you ever question Gertrude Stein's ability as a writer, read The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. This book shocks you with the beauty of its sentences.

Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas is a testament to Gertrude Stein. Speaking for her friend about herself, Stein creates conversational ripples of voices spreading out from each anecdote into the whole of the work.

As my first experience with Stein, I had never before been confronted with Stein's reluctance to use commas. I admire her style, but cannot admire her paucity of commas: sometimes (far more often than Stein imagines) they are just useful.

I feel especially unworthy writing these thoughts on the book. She really is that good.

The Tin Drum

Gunter Grass

It's amazing how long a man can sit on a park bench; he sits till he turns to wood and feels the need of communicating with other wooden figures: old men who come only in good weather, old women gradually reverting to garrulous girlhood, children shouting as they play tag, lovers who will have to part soon, but not yet, not yet. The swans are black, the weather hot, cold, or medium according to the season. Much paper is dropped; the scraps flutter about or lie on the walks until a man in a cap, paid by the city spears them on a pointed stick.

It was this drought, this tearlessness that brought those who could afford it to Schmuh's Onion Cellar, where the host handed them a little chopping board--pig or fish--a paring knife for eighty pfennigs, and for twelve marks an ordinary field-, garden-, and kitchen-variety onion, and induced them to cut their onions smaller and smaller until the juice--what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it?

LANKES: Oh, all right, if you put it that way. This is how I figure it. When this war is over--one way or another, it will be over some day--well, then, when the war is over, the pillboxes will still be here. These things were made to last. And then my time will come. The centuries...(He puts the last cigarette in his pocket.) Maybe you've got another cigarette, sir? Thank you, sir...the centuries start coming and going, one after another like nothing at all. But the pillboxes stay put just like the Pyramids stayed put. And one fine day one of those archaeologist fellows comes along. And he says to himself: what an artistic void there was between the First and the Seventh World Wars! Dull drab concrete; here and there, over a pillbox entrance, you find some clumsy amateurish squiggles in the old-home style. And that's all. Then he discovers Dora Five, Six, Seven; he sees my Structural Oblique Formations, and he says to himself, Say, take a look at that, very, very interesting, magic, menacing, and yet shot through with spirituality. In these works a genius, perhaps the only genius of the twentieth century, has expressed himself clearly, resolutely, and for all time. I wonder, says our archeologist to himself, I wonder if it's got a name? A signature to tell us who the master was? Well, sir, if you look closely, sir and hold your head on a slant, you'll see, between those Oblique Formations...
BEBRA: My glasses. Help me, Lankes.
LANKES: All right, here's what it says: Herbert Lankes, anno nineteen hundred and forty-four. Title: BARBARIC, MYSTICAL, BORED.

You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly, backward and forward. You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distance and, when the whole thing is done, proclaim, or let someone else proclaim, that you have finally, at the last moment, solved the space-time problem. Or you can declare at the very start that it's impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your own back so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels. I have also been told that it makes a good impression, an impression of modesty so to speak, if you begin by saying that a novel can't have a hero any more because there are no more individualists, because individuality is a thing of the past, because man--each man and all men together--is alone in his loneliness and no one is entitled to individual loneliness, and all men lumped together make up a 'lonely mass' without names and without heroes. All this may be true. But as far as I and Bruno my keeper are concerned, I beg leave to say that we are both heroes, very different heroes, he on his side of the peephole, and I on my side; and even when he opens the door, the two of us, with all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being a nameless, heroless mass.

It was in this picture that I first arrived at a decision which I have had no reason to alter. It was then that I declared, resolved, and determined that I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less a grocer, that I would stop right there, remain as I was--and so I did; for many years I not only stayed the same size but clung to the same size.

However, there is something very strange and childish in the way grownups feel about their clocks--in that respect, I was never a child. I am willing to agree that the clock is probably the most remarkable thing that grownups ever produced. Grownups have it in them to be creative, and sometimes with the help of ambition, hard work, and a bit of luck they actually are, but being grownups, they have no sooner created some epoch-making invention than they become a slave to it.

I toppled the cut-out disk into the interior of the showcase. It fell with a quickly muffled tinkle, which however was not the tinkle of breaking glass. I did not hear it, Oskar was too far away; but the young woman in the threadbare brown coat with the rabbit collar heard the sound and saw the circular aperture, gave a start that sent a quiver through her rabbit fur, and prepared to set off through the snow, but stood still, perhaps because it was snowing and everything is permitted when it is snowing, provided it is snowing hard enough. Yet she looked round, suspicious of the snowflakes, looked round as though behind the snowflakes there were something else beside more snowflakes, and she was still looking round when her right hand slipped out of her muff, which was also made of bunny fur.

The showcase of Bansemer's jewelry store was not overcrowded. A few choice watches, Swiss quality articles, an assortment of wedding rings on sky-blue velvet, and in the center six or seven of the choicest pieces. There was a snake in three coils, fashioned in multicolored gold, its finely chiseled head adorned and made valuable by a topaz and two diamonds, with two sapphires for eyes. I am not ordinarily a lover of black velvet, but the black velvet on which Bansemer's snake lay was most appropriate, and so was the grey velvet which created a provocative quietness beneath certain strikingly harmonious articles of hammered silver. There was a ring with a gem so lovely that you knew it would wear out the hands of equally lovely ladies, growing more and more beautiful in the process until it attained the degree of immortality which is no doubt the exclusive right of jewels. There were necklaces such as no one can put on with impunity, necklaces that wear out their wearers; and finally on a pale yellow velvet cushion shaped like a simplified neck base, a necklace of infinite lightness. Subtly, playfully woven, a web perpetually broken off. What spider can have secreted gold to catch six small rubies and one large one in this net? Where was the spider sitting, for what was it lurking in wait? Certainly not for more rubies; more likely for someone whose eye would be caught by the ensnared rubies which sat there like modeled blood--in other words: To whom should I, in conformity with my plan or the plan of the gold-secreting spider, give this necklace?

How wonderful that this cupboard should be there with its heavy, scarcely breathing woolens which enabled me to gather together nearly all my thoughts, to tie them into a bundle and give them away to a dream princess who was rich enough to accept my gift with a dignified, scarcely perceptible pleasure.

Greff needed a good three-quarters of an hour for his hole. Don't ask me, please, how I know. Oskar knew just about everything in those days, including the length of time it took Greff to dig his hole in the ice. Drops of salt sweat formed on his high, bumpy forehead and flew off into the snow. He handled his ax well; its strokes left a deep circular track. When the circle had come full circle, his gloveless hands lifted a disk, perhaps six or seven inches thick, out of the great sheet of ice that extended, it seems safe to say, as far as Hela if not Sweden. The water in the hole was old and grey, shot through with ice-grits. It steamed a bit, though it was not a hot spring. The hole attracted fish. That is, holes in the ice are said to attract fish. Greff might have caught lampreys or a twenty-pound cod. But he did not fish. He began to undress. He took off his clothes and he was soon stark naked, for Greff's nakedness was always stark.

Close to this stretch of wall, which gave the impression of being new, as painfully white as Leo's rumpled shirt, Leo became very active. He took great long strides which he appeared to count; at all events, he counted aloud and, as Oskar believes to this day, in Latin. Whatever this litany was, he chanted it as he had no doubt learned to do at the seminary. Leo marked a spot some ten yards from the wall and also set down a piece of wood not far from the white washed portion, where, it seemed pretty obvious, the wall had been mended. All this he did with his left hand, for in his right hand he held the cartridge case. Finally, after interminable searching and measuring, he bent down near the piece of wood and there deposited the hollow metallic cylinder, slightly tapered at the front end, which had lodged a lead kernel until someone with a curved forefinger had exerted just enough pressure to evict the lead projectile and start it on its death-dealing change of habitat.

What do you want of me? I'm just a man taking a walk with this dog I borrowed to take a walk with?

There is no doubt that we should be in tears. We have every right to break down and sob. A brief survey of the last century, a playlist of its greatest hits (WWI the Great Depression Spanish Civil War WWII Stalin Pakistan India Anti-Communism Korea Vietnam Cultural Revolution The Shah Ethiopia Berlin Wall Burma/Myanmar Bosnia Mogadishu Iraq...) is not even needed. There's a lot to cry about. So here is the shocker: no one is crying. I'm not crying. I don't see people crying (except occasionally on tv, but that's a spectacle, not normal). Are you crying?

Gunter Grass imagines an onion bar. You step into the grungy cellar, past the bouncer, past the coat check, into the murky interior, stylishly dilapidated and together with thirty some other odd guests you get to cut into your own onion and cry. The bar supplies onion, knives, and cutting boards, you bring the tears. What an idea Grass has. The Tin Drum is worth reading just for the onion bar.

Onion bars are only a part of what is going on in The Tin Drum (see the first quote above). Boredom, not necessarily to blame, but entirely to blame. What happens to a soul when it no longer feels useful? Not only does it give itself and others reason to cry, it cannot even find the tears when the time comes. Of the many thoughts inspired by The Tin Drum one was this: everyone, if any rights they have, has the right to be useful.

Though I struggle with the very idea of rights, the plight of the man of empty time sitting on a park bench. For a human to have no purpose but to pass the time, for a person to have no life but to get through it, this is a failure of everything I can think life to be. To unseeing eyes this has meaning for the handicapped, the damaged, those who are somehow un-whole in the world, but I think with seeing eyes its meaning can be found for and in everyone.