The Last Place on Earth

Roland Huntford

When Nansen said that 'to do everything with human beings causes much work and much suffering' he was denouncing culpable stupidity; but to Sir Clements the squandering of human effort was the expression of an ideal. One aspect of the English romantic movement was to equate suffering with achievement. There was a virtue in doing things the hard way. Contemporary drawings show British bluejackets straining in serried ranks before grotesquely overladen sledges, like soldiers marching into battle; humbly heroic figures overcoming the power of Nature by brute force and sheer grit. Dogs interfered with this vision; they made things seem too easy. That really was their crime.

'Adventure' as the American explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson liked to say, 'is a sign of incompetence'

The Panda's Thumb

Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is irreversible; signs of ancestry are always preserved; convergence, however impressive, is always superficial.

In reading Schweber's detailed account of the moments preceding Darwin's formulation of natural selection, I was particularly struck by the absence of deciding influence from his own field of biology. The immediate precipitators were a social scientist, an economist, and a statistician. If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understand of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense--the debate about angels on pinheads--makes sense once you realize the theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number. In certain theological systems, the corporeality or noncorporeality of angels is an important matter indeed.

But I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation--and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. Few honest passions are not based upon some valid perception of unity or some anomaly worthy of note. The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.

Gould's work, in addition to being very accessible biology and natural history, also carries a valuable tone: Gould sounds impressively fair. Often when I read science or history, or almost anything that claims to be non-fiction, I am most struck by the human capacity to be wrong. It seems that given a choice, we always choose the wrong answer. Gould's value lies in his ability to see, without ridicule or pride, the folly of past generations. Gould chronicles the physiometrists of the nineteenth century, complete with their repulsive racism, and yet manages to find room for the context and thus to find the value in their bullshit. It is not so much a magnanimous stance that reviews the many points at which humans have chosen to stick their heads in the sand, but a humility that recognizes we are probably wrong on a good many counts ourselves. Gould recognizes that dismissing another person's thought is the easiest mode of life, but certainly not the pathway to wisdom. 

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse
Tr. Hilda Rosner

And Siddhartha said softly, as if speaking to himself: What is meditation? What is abandonment of the body? What is fasting? What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life. The driver of oxen makes this same flight, takes this temporary drug when he drinks a few bowls of rice wine or cocoanut milk in the inn. He then no longer feels his Self, no longer feels the pain of life; he then experiences temporary escape. Falling asleep over his bowl of rice wine, he finds what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape from their bodies by long exercises and dwell in the non-Self.

He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, strange and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting, and in the midst of it, he, Siddhartha, the awakened one, on the way to himself. All this, all this yellow and blue, river and wood, passed for the first time across Siddhartha's eyes. It was no longer the magic of Mara, it was no more the veil of Maya, it was no longer meaningless and the chance diversities of the appearances of the world, despised by deep-thinking Brahmins, who scorned diversity, who sought unity. River was river, and if the One and Divine in Siddhartha secretly lived in blue and river, it was just the divine art and intention that there should be yellow and blue, there sky and wood--and here Siddhartha. Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them. How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking on quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and the book of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion, I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened. I have indeed awakened and have only been born today.

And yet he envied them; the more he became like them, the more he envied them. He envied them the one thing that he lacked and that they had: the sense of importance with which they lived their lives, the depth of their pleasures and sorrows, the anxious but sweet happiness of their continual power to love. These people were always in love with themselves, with their children, with honor or money, with plans or hope. But these he did not learn from them, these child-like pleasures and follies; he only learned the unpleasant things from them which he despised.

The ferryman smiled again. He touched Siddhartha's arm gently and said: Ask the river about it, my friend! Listen to it, laugh about it! Do you then really think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Samsara? How? Through instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, which you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Samsara, from sin, greed and folly? Could his father's piety, his teacher's exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest.

When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have realized this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

The story of the Buddha who the people flock to in order to learn wisdom and how to live the good life is almost a cliche. The story of the ancient philosopher who gathers those who are seeking around him and who teaches the good way permeates our culture. The guru on the top of the mountain has had ten million people climb up to him, all seeking enlightenment. We want to know so we can live the good life.

Although it is going out on a bit of a limb, I wonder if the reason most people seek after knowledge is to get at the good life. Many philosophers pursue understanding in order to discover this good life. I wonder if when it is sought at it's root, if the reason for all learning isn't to live the good life. People want to know so that they can live better.

How is it then, that our institutions of learning, Universities and colleges and schools, feel so different? Professors in schools are not interested in the good life. Or, if they are, the good life is apparently the academic life--which is to say, is not a life that everyone can live. When you look at our learned men and women you can't help feeling that there is quite a bit of difference between them and the guru's on the mountain's, the peaceful sage ferryman, and the great philosopher kings. Who among the professor's in our society is living the good life? An unfair question that asks you to judge and qualify things you couldn't really know, but all the same a question that gets at this root.

Most professors, the people who are learned, still submit to the institution of the academy which often times seems to be designed more by the flow of money than anything else. They teach classes and purvey their wisdom in the form of credits and class hours and assignments and letter grades and degrees. Is this learning? Is this wisdom? Credits and degrees may be good and wonderful, but it makes me feel like the learning we have is cropped and shallow. 

What are we pursuing learning for in the United States? Is it to get rich? Is it to be healthy? To be happy? To be famous or powerful? To make a difference? Aren't all these things encompassed in the good life? Why else would you seek riches unless you thought they could make life good; why else try to be healthy or happy? Why would you want to be famous or powerful or make a difference? We pursue learning in order to find the path to the good life, but we won't admit it.

Where is the learned sage who gathers round those who are seeking and lives this good life, rather than isolating it in their writings and having nothing to do with it in their lifestyles? I realize that I am resorting to questions to argue a point, but I feel that our understanding of learning is far too narrow. I am restrained to questions because the varieties of academic experience I see available are so pinched. I do believe that wisdom and learning can be helpful to living a good life and I would like to see learning recognized in a broader sense.

Essays Vol I

Michel de Montaigne

I felt compassion for the poor people who were taken in by these follies. And now I think that I was at least as much to be pitied myself. Not that experience has since shown me anything surpassing my first beliefs, and that through no fault of my curiosity; but reason has taught me that to condemn a thing thus, dogmatically, as false and impossible, is to assume the advantage of knowing the bounds and limits of God's will and the power of our mother Nature; and that there is no more notable folly in the world than to reduce these things to the measure of our capacity and competence. If we call prodigies or miracles whatever our reason cannot reach, how many of these appear continually to our eyes! Let us consider through what clouds and how gropingly we are led to the knowledge of most of the things that are right in our hands; assuredly we shall find that it is rather familiarity than knowledge that takes away their strangeness. 

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine understanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits. Now, what seems to me to bring as much disorder into our consciences as anything, in these religious troubles that we are in, is this partial surrender of their beliefs by Catholics. It seems to them that they are being very moderate and understanding when they yield to their opponents some articles in dispute. But, besides the fact that they do not see what an advantage it is to a man charging you for you to begin to give ground and withdraw, and how much that encourages him to pursue his point, those articles which they select as the most trivial are sometimes very important. We must either submit completely to the authority of our ecclesiastical government, or do without it completely. It is not for us to decide what portion of obedience we owe it.
Moreover, I can say this for having tried it. In other days I exercised this freedom of personal choice and selection, regarding with negligence certain points in the observance of our Church which seem more vain or strange than others; until, coming to discuss them with learned men, I found that these things have a massive and very solid foundation, and that is only stupidity and ignorance that makes us receive them with less reverence than the rest. Why do we not remember how much contradiction we sense even in our own judgment? How many things were articles of faith to us yesterday, which are fables to us today? Vainglory and curiosity are the two scourges of our soul.

Montaigne sees two sides to every story; or, he will always show you how your viewpoint fails to fully understand the opposing viewpoint. A continual thread that runs through most of Montaigne's essays is his desire to disarm our tool of dismissal. Montaigne recognizes the basic human desire to not meet what we do not understand or disagree with, but to circumvent it by ipso facto arguments. Society would rather deal with personality or culture or the color of a person's eyes than meet the logic of an argument. Therefore, as Montaigne's continual picking at our scabby opinions reveals, we tend to hide from reality by facing superficiality.

The color of a person's eyes, like their skin, may matter, but not for the reasons generally given. Democrats say that you shouldn't vote for Republicans because they are war-mongerers and support the rich and are racists, not because Democrats believe that wars won't achieve what they think they will nor because wars are evil, and not because they believe that tax cuts will not benefit low-income families as much as they will benefit those with higher incomes. The Republicans say you shouldn't vote for Democrats because they want to give control of the country to other nations, because they play to the victim mentality and don't believe in good honest hard work, not because presenting a strong presence on the international level will benefit US interests nor because continuing unemployment benefits enables people. We--and you can define this term however you feel necessary--have become adept at telling strong stories that preempt logical arguments. Immigrants are illegal drug-running aliens who all probably belong to a gang; laws against abortion curtail women's rights and extend male hegemony; and the people who blew up the World Trade Towers are terrorists who cackle evilly and enjoy destruction. If you can find the right name, the right story, for your opposition, you don't have to worry about what they say at all. If you need any more proof of this, have you ever heard a cogent explanation of 9-11 from the people who did the bombing? Contrast the paucity of such explanations with the vast effort we expend explaining why we are in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

However, I think it's equally dangerous to fall into the trap of meeting only the argument and ignoring the color of eye and skin and faith. It seems to me that we are eager to dismiss these colors because when it comes down to it, we don't understand them. They point out to us that there really are differences among humans. In a perfect world of logic, if we knew all the information, and had all the clarity of reasoning power at our disposal, no one in their right mind could disagree with anyone else. But you only have to look at a person's eyes and note the color there, to be assured that no amount of reasoning is ever going to bring about such broad agreement. At least for now, these things remain to remind us that there is still so much that we do not comprehend.

The Creators

Daniel J Boorstin

These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story--a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination. Here I have chosen creators who appeal to e, who have brought something new into the arts. But each of us alone must experience how the new adds to the old and how the old enriches the new, how Picasso enhances Leonardo and how Homer illuminates Joyce. 

I used to believe that there was no such thing as originality. I was convinced that there was nothing new beneath the sun and I read Ecclesiastes as the greatest expression of the futility of searching for something new. But I couldn't help enjoying all the many stories I read, and I did keep reading stories, old ones and new ones (speaking chronologically). Somehow, in the reading of all the many stories, I have become convinced that there really is such a thing as originality. That there can be a new story.

Boorstin's primer of the history of European (see end note) art has convinced me all the more of this truth. Although Boorstin's review of art quickly becomes a review of great artists, it none-the-less leaves you with the feeling that there is a chance that someone might make something new, that the forms of beauty and imagination, though they are all based off of the same subject matter, somehow hold the potential for genuine creation.

I was convinced that nothing new could exist because the only source we have is that which has already existed. If this was the case, I thought, it would be unreasonable to believe that something new could be managed since new would seem to entail not having existed before. It isn't new if it's old. I believed that all art was trying to reach back to truth or to reach back to depicting nature (by which I probably mean truth) in its fullest revelation. To me, that necessarily meant nothing was new.

I do still believe that art is attempting to depict truth (as opposed to reality or facts). But newness becomes real when we understand truths which we had not understood before. Truth being eternal, I don't think it can be new or old, but our understanding of truth is hardly eternal. The history of human understanding of truth is a history full of newness and originality (and also a good deal of missteps). So I do believe in originality. You have only to look at art to come to this belief. 

End Note. Boorstin subtitled this work A History of Heroes of the Imagination. A suitably grand subtitle for such a topic, it leaves me with a unpleasant taste in my mouth as I finish the work and find that it was much more accurately a history of heroes of the European imagination. Boorstin makes nods at other cultures, adds odd chapters in which he condenses the art of entire cultures (cultures which have lasted longer than the Europeans) into quick blurbs. This is frustrating. His subject is admittedly of gigantic scope and it would be impossible to discuss the entire history of art without leaving out many important figures, but in light of his consistent decision to focus on the art of Europeans, really Western Europeans, I feel that Boorstin should re-market the work as a European history of imagination.

You Bright and Risen Angels

William T Vollmann

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality's brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles. 

An owner of an apple orchard has a bad year because his apples aren't selling. He believes that the reason they aren't selling is that people have suddenly started eating more oranges. At a town-hall meeting, he tells a group of community members who don't know much about orchards, What we're talking about is oranges, not apples. The implication of this statement is that most people think the important issues is apples, and while they matter, the true professional knows that there is something else going on.

In a recent interview with Barbara Walters, General David Petraeus, US head of command in Afghanistan said, What we're after is increasing security for the population, not trying to kill or capture every single Taliban in the country.

The implication here is that most people believe the US is trying to kill or capture every single Taliban in Afghanistan. The last time you heard about people trying to kill or capture everyone in a specific group, didn't it sound like genocide? Though we do not always think about what we say, Petraeus' comment reveals something very disturbing to me in how America thinks about its War on Terrorism. Petraeus' comment was not a harsh correction or a firm reminder; he spoke calmly and it did not seem that capturing or killing every single Taliban in Afghanistan was a thing that should be avoided, only that it wasn't as good a goal as providing security to the population. One got the sense that capturing and killing every single Taliban in Afghanistan would be a nice by-product, but regrettably it was not as important as security.

It's dangerous when any nation or group of people decide that another group needs to be captured or killed. This is a very troubling idea to me. Few Americans would have difficulty digesting the statement: Our mission is to kill every terrorist. Yet, terrorist is a term that we reserve the sole power of applying. I'm willing to bet that Osama, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamic extremists do not think of themselves as terrorists. When they get together at Ramadan for family reunions, and mom asks what Osama is up to now days, the answer is not, Oh, he's still a terrorist, probably will stick with it for a few more years, there's a lot happening in the field right now. Since we have the right to apply the label and the label removes its bearer's right to life, shouldn't someone be asking some questions about this?

Beatrice and Virgil

Yann Martel

He has another one that morning, while Beatrice is still sleeping. Virgil remembers how their miseries started. Started in his mind, that is, the moment when he realized what was happening to them. He acts it out. He's reading his morning paper at his favorite cafe and his eyes are drawn to one of the headlines. The headline announces a government edict concerning new categories of citizens--or rather, as the article makes clear, a category of citizens and a new category of non-citizens. Virgil reads with increasing astonishment as he realizes that he--he himself personally, in all his specific details, this monkey sitting in a cafe reading a paper, such an ordinary thing--is the exact and intended target.

Yann Martel writes with burning realizations. I've read three works by him now, and in all of them, the reader is exposed to a slow welling into sudden realization of some awfulness. It's not as simple as saying he uses twists or a gimmick in every novel, although one wonders if he hasn't trapped himself with the fame of his famous twist. Martel's burning realizations are like strings holding back sharp blades while candles are placed to burn through them. You get a sense of what is going to happen, sometimes a very detailed and clear sense, but it's nothing compared to the sudden whoosh of the blade swinging down.

When I started Beatrice and Virgil, I worried that it was going to be Life of Pi all over again. A story of animals signifying things too horrible to tell factually, things that required the truth more than they required the facts, and of course, I also worried that there would be a twist at the end--that sudden jerking away of the screen that shows everything in a new light. But, and this is the but you will be happy to hear, it is not the case.

Beatrice and Virgil is an adequate continuation of Martel's work. He doesn't try to do Life of Pi over again, he writes a novel knowing that he has written that famous novel, and he resists making the spectacle of this the awesome spectacle of that.

Interestingly, there still may be a giant shocking twist in this novel. But it is only revealed by the cover. If you remember that most of what Martel writes confuses fact and fiction, confuses stories and history--in fact most of what he writes suggests that everything is story--and if you remember this, his calling Beatrice and Virgil a novel is very interesting. It's a story about an author who wrote a very famous book and then didn't really write any others. The author is from Canada. The author wrote a book that had animals in it. The author has a son named Theo. The author moved to a new city after he couldn't write any more. A good question to ask is can a biography be turned into fiction by calling it a novel?



Note
Criticism is not figuring out what the author intended or the meaning a reader can take from a work; criticism is writing a new book. Each reader reads a thing the author never could have written. In fact, each reader can actually be said to write a new book. When we make connections or see images, feel emotions and imagine characters, we are not playing a game where we try to align ourselves as closely as possible with what was happening in the author's head as he traced his words on the page. No, we are performing an equally creative act. Unless criticism is seen as a creative act, it will be empty. Criticism is not reactive, it is creative. More than this, criticism is creation.

Waiting

Ha Jin

Once alone in a toilet stall, he tried to sort out his thoughts. Manna must have hoped he would spend two thousand yuan to buy off Bensheng at that time, though she had never made her wish explicit to him. He remembered clearly that she refused to share such a cost. Then why did she call him 'miser'? He felt something clutching his lungs, and a pain gnawed him in the chest. Had he had that much money, he would certainly have brought about the divorce sooner. He had told her that he only had six hundred yuan in the bank, and she wouldn't even reveal to him how much she had saved. She must have thought he was a rich man and could easily afford two thousand yuan. After so many years, how come she still didn't believe him? Why on earth had she always kept her secrets from him, never allowing him to see her bankbook?
In his mind a voice replied, Because money's more precious and more effective than love. If you had spent the money, everything would have worked out all right and you could have enjoyed a happy marriage.
No, it wasn't that simple, Lin retorted.
It was simple and clear like a bug on a bald head, the voice went on. Say you had owned ten thousand yuan and spent one-fifth of it on your brother-in-law, counting that as a loss. Then you could have married Manna a decade ago. If so, she wouldn't have harbored a grievance against you. You see, isn't money more powerful than love?
That's not true, Lin countered. We needed no money to help us fall in love, just as we need no money to consummate our marriage.
Really? Then why did you spend eleven hundred yuan for the wedding? Why have you kept separate bank accounts?
Lin was at a loss for an answer, but he suppressed that cold voice. For a long while he remained in the bathroom, which was the only quiet place where he could be unobserved. Now he was sitting on the windowsill with his back against the wall, absentmindedly watching the backyard. It was already dark; beyond the screen mosquitoes were humming and fireflies were drawing little arcs. From a dormitory house a harmonica was shrieking out "The Internationale" disjointedly. A truck driver was burning oily rags at the corner of the garage, a bucket of water standing by him. Far away on the hill a cluster of gas lamps were flickering in a temporary apiary. Some beekeepers were still busy collecting honey over there despite nightfall.

Ha Jin's story of a man waiting to get married stumps you. What are you to do with this? A man waits to be with the woman he loves because he's already married by an arranged marriage to a woman who, let's face it, isn't all that bad, although she does have bound feet and is a bit of a peasant, but all the same she takes care of his aging parents and serves him and is faithful and raises their daughter and works really hard and at the end of the story she seems like a pretty wonderful woman all-round, yet still this man is determined to marry this other woman, the one he loves, only he doesn't feel forceful enough about it to be harsh and compel his wife to divorce him, nor does he feel passionate enough to break the rules and have an affair with this woman he loves, so instead he waits twenty years or so and then divorces his first wife and marries this woman who becomes his second wife. What do you do with this guy?

Lin (this wishy-washy guy) comes across as a repugnant wimp, yet you can't really be angry with him because he has good motives. He doesn't want to hurt his first wife, because while he doesn't necessarily love her, he does care about her. He doesn't want to hurt his second wife by having an affair with her because he's conscious of the laws of culture enforced in China during the Cultural Revolution and doesn't want either of them to lose their jobs. Really, he just can't make a decision. The story is one that vividly characterizes indecision.

But Ha Jin, like every good writer, knows the importance of a bathroom. I am convinced that there is no more thoughtful place than a bathroom. Lin's strongest moments occur in the bathroom. I would like to point to the cliche: shit or get off the pot, which is what one wishes someone had yelled at Lin earlier on in the story, but he manages to figure something out in the bathroom.