Love Maps of Books.

Books are the most permanent, stable and reliable friends we have in life, so it befits us to make a love map of them. What is a love map? It's a basis for appreciation and affection. It's a map of what you love about a book. The idea comes from marriage scholar John Gottman, as a way of drawing couples closer together.

The kind of book suitable for a love map must be one you would want to spend all your life with. The writing of books is endless, but greatness remains rare. Choose only the greatest of books to do a love map of, and they will reward you with some of their magnitude.

Then, write the answers to the following questions:

1. What is the title? Pages? Divisions?
2. Who are the main characters?
3. What are the main relationships, briefly told?
4. Where is the action set in space? When is the action set in time?
5. What do the characters want most?
6. What do the characters hate most?
7. What happens in the beginning?
8. The middle?
9. The end?
10. What are the most important events in the novel? Why?
11. What is funny? Strange? Sublime? Beautiful? What affects me?
12. What foods are eaten in the book?
13. What opinions are expressed in the book? How are they still relevant?
14. What are the major tools, props, and physical markers of the book?
15. What color is the book overall, or specifically?
16. How do the characters handle conflict?
17. How do the characters recover from conflict?
18. What do the characters read or do for entertainment?
19. What jobs do the characters do? How do they occupy their time when not in the book?
20. What is to happen to the characters after the book ends? What happened to the characters before the book began?

Ask at least 20 questions, and write down the answers.

By now you will be better acquainted with the book than most literary critics, and have a more thorough knowledge with which to enjoy a re-reading of the book.

The books we love deserve to be treated with love and respect; making a love map of them is the best way to get closer to them.

How to Read a Difficult Book.

Thucydides is next on my reading list, and I'm highly motivated to read his book 'The Peloponnesian War'.

The problem is, it's a long and complex story. I read the two legendary passages in a previous pass - the Melian Dialog and the Funeral Oration of Pericles. Then I tried to read it through and got stuck. I need help.

So what I've done is great guidance for reading any difficult book.

Start by doing one of these two things first. Either:

- Read through the introduction and notes briefly looking for single words or phrases that praise the book, seeking to just appreciate the text and get a bit of positive emotion flowing. (For example, the intro to Thucydides calls his prose "muscular" - which I find interesting!)

Or:

- Simply count the number of pages of the actual text only. Don't count the opening pages, notes, and outside matter. For example, the introduction to Thucydides is 30 pages long. The text, minus the notes, ends at 600 pages. So the text to read it 570 pages long.

Either get an objective measure of how much you must read to complete the book, or generate a subjective sense of how much you could potentially enjoy the book. Simple!

After you've done that, then you can extend both the subjective and objective approach further.

I'll start with objective.

Thucydides' book is 570 pages long. He divided it up into eight books. How many pages per book roughly? Well, eight times seven is 56, therefore each of the eight books of Thucydides is on average seventy pages long. That's the size of a medium sized novella.

Now for the subjective:

If we examine how the writer organized the book itself into eight books, the book seems to suggest is that we read Thucydides not like a 570 page history, but like eight novellas about the same topic. Immediately I can feel relieved knowing I can read an eighth of the book and put it aside for a week to do something else. I don't have to hold the whole thing in mind. Instead of one huge book, Thucydides is now eight short books.

So, if the 'Peloponnesian War' is really 8 books in one, what are they about? How do they relate together?

There are three ports of call to answer this question: the table of contents, the opening paragraph of each book, and the closing paragraph of each book. Reading all of those will let me find nice dramatic interesting titles for each book. And notice it's a fun way to get subjectively engaged with the book, once again?

From a glance at book one, I wrote "Fear Brings War." That's my personal title for book one of Thucycides - the way I think about and feel about that text. This creates a sense of engagement and ownership of the meaning of the text. It's my book, not just any old book.

Book two - Noble Athens under pressure.
Book three - Civil war in Cocyra.
Book four - Athens kicks ass.
Book five - Athens violates integrity.
Book six - Athens versus Sicily, and the treachery of Alcidiades.
Book seven - War at sea.
Book eight - The end of democracy in Greece.

Now, many of these will be inaccurate or irrelevant; the point is not truth but stimulating interest and passion to read. The point is to engage with the text. At this stage of reading I just want a hook to get and keep me interested.

I will be dipping into the first book now looking for what interests me most. In a sense I will be creating the text in myself rather than passively allowing it to pour into me like historical sludge.

In conclusion, a hard book is not a hard book unless you read it in a hard way. If you read a hard book like you would read Harry Potter, by starting at the start and just pushing through, then you'll probably lose your way at the first difficult passage.

Instead:

1 - engage with the text in nonlinear ways
2 - move between gathering information on the structure of the book and appreciating the qualities of the book
3 - find words and ideas that get you excited and motivated to read on.

If you do this, you'll certainly enjoy the best books more and more, no matter how difficult they are to others.

On Henry James: 'the Simpler Manners of Men Live Forever'

In discussing Henry James' influences, Carl Van Doren in 'The American Novel' writes thus:

'Balzac, of course, James greatly preferred to either Flaubert or George Sand, for his great range and close texture: “He has against him,” James however added, “that he lacks that slight but needful thing—charm.” '

I laughed when I read this. How often have I read some clumsy attempt at graciousness in Balzac fall flat! You read it and say "Well, he tried!" but the fact is he kept trying and trying to charm and failing quite completely. The interest of the Comedie Humaine seems less in its charm than in its vitality. By attempting, Balzac would make it so. But words alone do not a novel make.

In concluding his brilliant commentary, Carl Van Doren writes this remarkable and lucid passage. It is written as a single par but I have broken it up for the medium of a blog:

'James’s essential limitation may rather accurately be expressed by saying that he attempted, in a democratic age, to write courtly romances.

'He did not, naturally, go back for his models to the Roman de la Rose or Morte d’Arthur or Sidney’s Arcadia or the Grand Cyrus. But he did devote himself to those classes in modern society which descend from the classes represented by the romancers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His characters, for the most part, neither toil nor spin, trade nor make war, bear children in pain nor bring them up with sacrifices. The characters who do such things in his novels are likely to be the servants or dependents of others more comfortably established. His books consequently lack the interest of that fiction which shows men and women making some kind of way in the world—except the interest which can be taken in the arts by which the penniless creep into the golden favor of the rich or the socially unarrived wriggle into an envied caste. James is the laureate of leisure. Moreover the leisure he cared to write about concerns itself in not the slightest degree with any action whatsoever, even games or sports. Love of course concerns it, as with all novelists. Yet even love in this chosen universe must constantly run the gauntlet of a decorum incomprehensible to all but the initiate.

'Decorum is what damns James with the public. In one of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances Lancelot, on his way to rescue Guinevere from a most precarious situation, commits the blunder of riding part of the way in a cart and thereby brings upon himself a disgrace which his most gallant deeds can scarcely wipe out. Sensible citizens who may have happened upon this narrative in the twelfth century probably felt mystified at the pother much as do their congeners in the twentieth who stare at the wounds which James’s heroes and heroines suffer from blunders intrinsically no more serious than Lancelot’s. How much leisure these persons must enjoy, the sensible citizen thinks, to have evolved and to keep up this mandarin formality; and how little use they make of it!

'Only readers accustomed to such decorums can walk entirely at ease in the universe James constructed. But they have the privileges of a domain unprecedented and unmatched in modern literature. It is not merely that he is the most fascinating historian of the most elegant society of the century. He is the creator of a world immensely beautiful in its own right: a world of international proportions, peopled by charming human beings who live graceful lives in settings lovely almost beyond description; a world which vibrates with the finest instincts and sentiments and trembles at vulgarity and ugliness; a world full of works of art and learning and intelligence, a world infinitely refined, a world perfectly civilized.

'In real life the danger to such a world is that it may be overwhelmed by some burly rush of actuality from without. In literature the danger is that such a world will gradually fade out as dreams fade, and as the old romances of feudalism have already faded. Elaborate systems of decorum pass away; it is only the simpler manners of men which live forever.'

How to Buy Great Poetry Books Using Spot Criticism

Here's how to do on the spot criticitism of poetry books:

1. Go into a bookshop and pick out two to four books of poetry.
2. Buy a coffee and read the opening lines of the books. Read no more than twelve lines of each unless they are compulsive reading.
3. Imagine that you must decide whether or not the whole book is worth reading based on their opening lines.
4. Ask yourself about how you feel:
- Do I find the opening lines interesting or dull?
- Am I surprised by distinct impressions?

5. Ask yourself about the strategy of the poem:
- What is the strategy of the poet obvious from the poem's opening lines? Is it obvious?
- Can I predict how the poem will go?

6. Ask yourself about the precise nature of the poem by looking for its center:
- What is the emotional or intellectual center of the poem?
- Given all this, then, is this book worth pursuing further?

7. Take the book you learnt was worth pursuing. Dip into the openings of two to four poems within that book.

8. Ask yourself:

- Are these openings of the same quality as the first poem I read?
- Is this book good enough to buy?

And you're done!

Buy or not buy, following this strategy with speedily educate you about modern poetry and poets, and let you get on the inside track of poetry publishing.

On Reading the Gospel of Matthew.

I set myself the task of reading the gospel of Matthew as if I had never read it before.

This failed completely: I know so much about the gospel that the best I can hope for is a clear-eyed look at my own complete emmersion in Christian culture and society. The operative work here is "clear-eyed"; it yielded some fine stuff.

Let me say first up that the same uncanny mix of humor, myth, legend, epic, folk story, teaching, poem, and inspired visionary text that one finds in Genesis, one also encounters immediately in the first gospel - the book of Matthew. The form is the same, but everything is different.

Chapter One. The opening echoes the kingly lists of Chronicles, detailing distinguished lineage but this time in the utterly revolutionary context of the prophet Jesus. But already we are on strange land, because Jesus is a kingly prophet. It is as if Isaiah and Solomon were born in the one man. Nothing quite like it existed before. And then comes the divine omens.

Chapter Two. The gorgeous myth of the birth of Jesus is so mediaeval in its telling that one almost forgets it is not a stained glass window. How are we supposed to take this tall tale? The middle ages has colonized our imagining of the gospel. We cannot see beyond the images of those centuries to the true tale.

One thing we can say: this is not the normal style to be reading a miraculous birth-of-a-son-god type of tale; not at all; the tone around it is historical, factual, realistic even. The interpolation of the ooh and ahh of the miracle birth is surely not calculated to blemish the historical record; rather, the simplest explanation is that it is to stun the unquestioning pre-rational audience into acquiescence.

Augustine tacitly acknowledges this difficulty with the gospels in his autobiography when he confesses that the gospels must be read in a very simple and uncomplicated spirit. I agree. They are not addressed to a reasonable, scientifically educated, and literate middleclass. They belong to everyone.

But because of their universal quality we find ourselves in the deep time of human consciousness, looking through the pristine simplicity of Matthew's eyes at the unaccountable astonishment that was Jesus. Is it any wonder Matthew invented fancies to compel his bovine audience to some faint sense of the incredible nature of these events? It is no wonder that the out-wondering wonder of Jesus should attract the ornaments of myth?

Chapters Three and Four. The tale of John the Baptist and the temptation in the wilderness suddenly moves into fact from fancy. John's tale is so remarkable that it must be true, and yet it validates the prophetic angle of Jesus' ministry so perfectly that it simply piles up more compelling evidence of the man.

The three temptations of Christ clearly delineates, in a visual format, the actual advanced spiritual work that have been researched, described and corroborated in modern times by Doctor David R. Hawkins. This is simply how it is; one can question the visual images, but not the content which is pristine to the universal nature of advanced inner spiritual work.

So the opening 4 chapters work to present Jesus as an authority. Chapter one presents his kingly status. Two presents him as a prophet. Three presents his inner qualifications, for those in the know, as an spiritual entity of surpassing purity, having refused the temptations of power and personal gain. The masses are suitably stunned by the first two yarns, and the spiritual students ought to be suitably sobered by the third. Then come the teachings.

And what teachings they are!

Hawkins calibrates the level of consciousness of humanity at Jesus' time as 100. I would argue that Jesus, being a teacher of all humanity, addressed humanity at exactly the level we were at. In other words, imagine Jesus speaking directly and lovingly to a very very scared entity called "humanity". Imagine Jesus speaking to a frightened being, a being lost in terror and darkness of fright and horror, a being run like a robot on its own wishes to avoid further pain. That is the level of consciousness Jesus addresses in his first teaching. And what he says corroborates this presumption: he speaks of the poor, of the meek, of the grieving - all levels of consciousness below 100. On the Hawkins scale, he is speaking about the apathetic and the grief-stricken - those who have been shattered by life and cannot have any illusions about the human hell of that age. Jesus is speaking about those who have broken down denial about the frightening reality of human nature in his age. He is speaking TO the fearful, reminding them of their brothers and sisters who are lost IN grief and apathy. His words, so strange at first hearing, are simply an outpouring of compassion and well-wishing for those who have seen the terrible truth about human nature being hopelessly stuck.

Jesus reminds his listeners of those less fortunate than themselves, who also have less illusions about reality. He blesses people who are free of illusion, but also bereft of hope. Then he turns to integrity. And what does he say?

He blesses those who desire for integrity. Now desire is the level immediately above fear. Jesus is consciously contextualizing human consciousness within the levels below and above it. The entire field of potential for human consciousness receives his attention. Next he blesses those who are merciful, in other words those who give up anger, the level of consciousness above desire; next he blesses the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted. What do all these have in common? They are all social expressions of integrity - making peace, being persecuted. Jesus is talking about being at the level of pride, the level of looking good rather than being good, the level of hypocrisy.

In one dazzling passage, Jesus has recontextualized human consciousness in a totally new light. The grieving and apathetic have seen the truth. Those stuck in desire are really hungry and thirtsy for truth. Those stuck in anger are really seeking mercy. Those stuck in pride and hypocrisy are really only after a pure heart, peacemaking and feeling justified in their victimhood. Notice how Jesus does not condemn these negative energy fields - he simply sees them as love, love in action, love in intention, love in expression. He sees love in human consciousness, and thus it is.

Versus 11 to 16 describe the world of level of consciousness 200, which Jesus calls heaven. It is hard to imagine that human consciousness today, here and now, is at the remarkable level of consciousness overall of 206. That means that we the living of the modern world are in a world which to the humans of Jesus time would seem like heaven. One can hardly underestimate the shocking difference between human nature in Jesus' time and human nature in our time. It is like night and day.

Versus 17 to 37 seems to me like sound traditional morality. Was it anything new in Jesus time. No; Jesus say it is the law of the prophets. Is it just me, or has Jesus just finished with the carrot and now is applying the stick? Certainly he shows sound motivational psychology with his warnings. But let's take a close look at the rhetorical intention.

The opening verses of the sermon from the start to 16 recontextualize human consciousness as love in the process of unfoldment. Then the moralistic verses from 17 to 37 warn about being very moral using fear as a motivating tool. The level of consciousness of the listeners is Fear, level 100 on the map of consciousness. So first Jesus recontextualizes all the levels of consciousness AROUND fear, and second Jesus leans quite heavily on the fear stick and makes a big impact, no doubt, on his fearful audience. He first loosens up the field around fear, then he uses fear to stimulate moral behavior. Or so it seems. But look at what he does next:

"Love your enemies". "Turn the other cheek". This is the value of unconditional love. Where on earth does this come from? Suddenly we have moved from instilling fear of ethical failure to instilling a visionary economic program, without any warning. I think a few of the links in Jesus chain of thought are missing at this point personally. Where is the link between conventional moral scrupulosity motivated by the animal fear of hell, and the humanistic ethos of universal brotherhood, other than in Matthew's torrid ethical imagination?

Chapter Six begins with Jesus teaching his frightened cattle-humans the principle of anonymity. Don't do good acts to be seen in public, he says. Small words for clear images of real things - no further evidence that Jesus is talking to men of little brain is needed than this remarkably lucid explanation of the power of personal anonymity. If no human notices me doing a good act, Jesus explains, then God sees it. A toddler could comprehend this.

The principle of anonymous prayer brings up the basic Christian teachings on prayer: don't try to program God to give you stuff, just ask for what you need today, make sure you stay straight with your fellow humans, and remember to ask God to lead you into a positive energy field because you can't find your way there on your own. Which is all simply factual if you are open to the research on prayer by Doctor Hawkins.

6:14 and 6:15 describe the right relationship between me, God and others. If I'm good with others, then God will be good with me. Real simple. But if I'm not good with others, then God won't be good with me. Karma in one easy lesson!

6:19 to 6:23 I don't understand. Are they esoteric references to light bodies? What are "treasures in heaven" precisely? I am going to assume, from the discussion preceding it directly, that Jesus is talking about karma still. Treasures in heaven means karmic merit. The light of the eye is referring to consciousness itself: literally if I do ill, my consciousness becomes dark and I cannot understand spiritual matters automatically, and if I do good my consciousness is lit up, again literally. I don't think they are esoteric references: I think Jesus is being dead literal about spiritual and karmic fundamentals.

6:24 to the end of chapter six I have often read as anti- or non-materialistic references by Jesus, and in the light of Jesus' status as a wandering mendicant faith healer, this is easy to assume. But I think by putting these references in the context of his audience a different picture becomes clear.

Jesus' audience is at the level of fear. With the addition of the energy field of Jesus himself, as well as Jesus' recontextualizations and inspiration and teachings, they will quickly ascend to the higher energy field above fear of desire. And in that precise instant the downside of desire, greed and lust for gain, will take hold. So Jesus is, as it were, heading them off at the pass. He is trying his best to block off any excuse or evasion of integrity in his audience.

His audience is to avoid showing off (thus dismantling Pride, 175); they are to forgive everyone (thus processing out Anger, 150), and they are to avoid greed (thus minimizing the downside of Desire at 125). His audience are at 100. If they take on board everything he has just said and apply it, they cannot but end up over 200, the crucial line of integrity. Another way of putting this is that if someone in fear takes to heart these few lines, he or she can move into courage by simply applying them to their situation. This is a pretty remarkable claim, an enormous leap by any standards in consciousness from fear to integrity, and Jesus accomplishes it in fewer words than most people take to share dinner with their family.

Chapter Seven consists of various legendary admonishments. Jesus warns people who fail to apply his teachings with the "house built on sand". He warns against occult gyrations with those who cast out demons but don't have integrity so are not recognized by God in Heaven - ie, as integrous. He warns against fake spiritual teachers in a beautiful phrase "wolves in sheep's clothing". Jesus is obviously really trying to make sure his hearer get what he is saying. Integrity, Jesus is saying, integrity integrity integrity. And his audience is responding "Baa-aaa!"

Chapters 8 and 9 are sundry miracles. In these chapters the ooh and ahh factor of the miraculous birth is intermingled with sage titbits from the Master. It functions kind of like an integration of the miraculous and the historical. Then in 10 the real ministry begins. Jesus gives instructions to his disciples. They are extraordinary, bizarre instructions.

Jesus might as well have suggested his disciples go forth wearing fruitbowl hats and dancing traditional Hawaiian dances as suggest what he actually says. Is this guy for real? A life of poverty, dirty clothes, faith healing and testimony is in store for the 12. No wonder the harvest was great but the laborers few: Jesus was a tough boss!

I also find it remarkable that none of the disciples puts up his hands and asks for some exemption from the rules. Either we are to suppose Matthew was portraying Jesus as far more hard-arse than he actually was, OR we must assume that Jesus selected the 12 out of a prior organisation that they were already part of. Given the political implications of John's ministry and Jesus' birth, the possibility one considers is that the 12 arose out of the political organization of which Jesus was the focus. But Jesus tells the 12 to heal and teach, not organize sit-ins and sign petitions. So what Jesus is explicitly doing with this ministry is, it would seem, taking people from a political organization around him and putting them into a spiritual order. Clearly the disciples are, well, disciplined. Were they from a paramilitary political order? I am not thinking of the Essenes here; I am willing to assume perhaps that Jesus' influences arose from the Essene tradition, but one must also concede that the disciples did not arise out of nothing. They didn't pop into existence as a miracle. Jesus recruited them from some prior organization, probably political in nature.

I resist attempts to politicize Jesus' message, personally. I think he arose from a political context into the universal ethical and spiritual contexts of his teaching and healing ministry. But the incredible fortitude of the disciples revealed in chapter ten indicates they likely had a military origin of some kind.

Chapter 11 shows Matthew's poor logical organization. It consists of Jesus giving a kind stream of consciousness impression of how things are all going. It's sort of like Jesus as us are watching the disciples go out doing their think and ruminating about how things are progressing. But it's loose and baggy and mercifully a short chapter. It has various legendary sayings in it, of course, that any civilized person would commit to memory and use in their right place.

Then suddenly in chapter 12 the disciples are back, or these are different disciples maybe. And Jesus is bickering about the Law with some conservatives. The conservatives, no doubt somewhat arch about faith healing and the taint of revolutionary politics inevitably attached to some of Jesus' more vociferous disciples, beat up the issue of the Sabbath. But this is the old left and right, conservative and liberal opposition all over again - this is not about Jesus but about the culture of the time.

Chapter 13 begins the parables. 14 is miracles with food. 15 and 16 are Jesus bickering with the conservatives again, ending with a foreshadowing of his death at their hands.

Chapter 17 is an exact match for chapter 3, which describes in concrete images some advanced spiritual work done with James, John and Peter. The interesting thing here is how the four men 'see' Moses and Elijah. I take this to mean the statement that at the highest levels of consciousness one experiences what the sages who passed through that condition also experienced, experiencing it as oneself at the same time as the individual. So I think Peter, James and John experience what Moses experienced, and become that which Moses had become also. Which would be a condition on the map of consciousness in the mid 700s. I think chapter 17 describes the enlightenment experience of James, John and Peter.

Chapter 18 addresses spiritual egotism and the problem of specialness - both common issues for spiritual students. How does one deal with ego and pride at spiritual attainment? And, how does one deal with the glamour of being special?

Chapter 19 would be more kvetching with the conservatives only, were it now for the final lines of this chapter making some remarkable statements. Jesus says, in Matthew 19:26-30, that man needs a savior to be saved, and cannot be saved on his own efforts, but he adds a statement which seems to imply in a veiled way that the conservative factions addicted to legalism will be judged by the spiritually advanced disciples. This is very interesting indeed. It is as if Jesus' twelve disciplines are set up as an alternative for the hopelessly-mired-in-negativity twelve tribes of Israel. Individuals replace tribes, Jesus seems to be suggesting here. All very interesting ideas, and very relevant for the Roman world and for our world today.

20, 21, 22, 23 represent a melange of 3 elements: parables, miracles, and Jesus putting up patiently with the conservatives' bitching. But in 23 Jesus really loses his cool and starts cussing up a storm against his enemies. They have finally and officially pissed off the son of God, and it's not pretty.

24 and 25 are fascinating chapters for us precisely because they describe the modern world. We live in a world where integrity matters. We live, then, in a world where the kingdom of heaven, integrity, is here and now; a world where one is taken up into integrity while another remains, unable to see or even know the different dimension the integrous occupy.

The traditional interpolation of doomsday occult visions from the book of Relevations is unfortunate. According to consciousness research, the end of the world scenario in that book is simply flat out false. So what Jesus must be talking about in Matthew 24 and 25 is not some imaginary apocalypse, but rather a real world emergence of integrity as a practical way of being in the world for most people. In other words, Jesus is talking about ordinary life in the West every day. Another day in paradise.

26 to 28 tell the tale, in choice few words, of Jesus' arrest and death at the hands of the conservatives. We all know the ending; what is remarkable for me is how brief the story is in Matthew.

Why did Matthew write this way? We have perhaps a quarter of a book of Jesus speaking, as it were, straight into Matthew's microphone. We get the raw feed on Jesus' instructions to his disciplines, Jesus' rant against the conservatives, and even a little chapter where Jesus is sort of rambling to himself somewhat loosely while his disciples are off discipling. The rest of the book, shorn of its mythic opening and tragic ending, is endless bickering and miracles of healing and feeding. Jesus mostly seems to have brought health and food and moral guidance in this book.

The most remarkable part of the book of Matthew is the sermon on the mount. Once it is put into the context of the listeners to whom Jesus is addressing his comments, it brilliantly illuminates Jesus' model for teaching and inspiring others. Jesus makes himself accessible as a savior through this sermon.

I suppose the other value in the book of Matthew is for convincing the credulous to follow Jesus. There are no appeals to reason to be found here, and many appeals indeed for the sheep to follow the Shepherd.

So, that's my clear-eyed take on the book of Matthew. It has taken me two hours to re-read it and keep running notes on it as I go, and I am glad I did. It is a wonderful book. I recommend it to everyone. Get a copy and underline all the cool statements in it and commit them to memory. Try out Jesus' views on prayer. Read the sermon and pursuade yourself that only integrity is worth living for, even if you already 'know' the sermon' and its purport. It's a fine piece of work, worth many readings. I certainly enjoyed the chance to share it with you.

I love the Gateway to the Great Books of the Western World

Imagine having the perfect uncle.

Not only does he introduce you to the world at large, but he is a relentless adventurer. He travels far and wide in search of brilliant trophies.

Your perfect uncle (or aunt) knows all the best stories. He knows all the best places to go.

But more than that, imagine he is of the highest discretion and so only speaks to lead you out into further adventures of your own. Imagine his tact and forebearance allow you to explore exactly what you need to at your own pace and depth.

This is what the Gateway to the Great Books are.

"The works in that set [the Great Books] have a certain magnitude, but they also occupy a unique place in the formation and development of Western Culture. Each of them represents a primary, original, and fundamental contribution to man's understanding of the universe and of himself. It has been said of them that they are books which never have to be written again, that they are inexhaustibly rereadable, that they are always contemporary, and that they are at once the most intelligible books (because so lucidly written) and the most rewarding to understand (because they deal with the most profound and important subjects). It has also been said of them that they are the repository and reservoir of the relatively small number of great ideas which man has forged in his efforts to understand the world and his place in it; and that they are over everyone's head all of the time, which gives them the inexhaustible power to elevate all of us who will make the effort to lift our minds by reaching up to the ideas they contain."

The above sustained and sublime piece of prose is from the Introduction to the Gateway to the Great Books. From the prose style I believe it may be written by Hutchins, but it doesn't say.

I read and reread this paragraph with wonder. The Great Books are larger than my comprehension. And it is the Gateway to the Great Books that have enlarged my sensibility bit by bit so that I can appreciate the truth of these words.

For the last 18 months I have been taking a liberal arts degree through the Gateway to the Great Books. I am just over half way and feel my sense of myself, the world, other humans, nature, and God has been profoundly deepened by this study. It has been liberating. Becoming an autodidact has been empowering. And sharing what I have learnt has been enriching.

What Prose Style Can Teach Us About Moral Character: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Macaulay.

I do not like F. Scott Fitzgerald. I find him an irritating sot, a malignerer, and a kind of prose poet whose sentimentality repulses me. But I get that Fitzgerald has made virtues out of his necessities, and even though his vices may repel they nevertheless glitter with the sprayed-on gloss of honest and vital emotion.

So I sat down to read 'The Diamond As Big As the Ritz' with little expectations of more than a pretty read a la the Great Gatsby. And so it was!

Macaulay's prose reminds me of Gibbon's, but Gibbon's is the purer style. They are very similar, so contiguous that the distinct quality of Macaulay's is obscure. Gibbon's style is nobler, less opinionated, and more just; Gibbon's fine way of applying multiple verbs to a single actor is so stylish and unique that it has no compare anywhere; I am so impressed by Gibbon's style that I can only find him a better writer - I was about to say a better man - than Macaulay.

I do not dislike Macaulay. I don't know him well enough from the one essay. But I receive an overall impression of journalistic quality in his work which leaves me cold.

Please let me clarify that view.

Macaulay's essay on Machiavelli goes to pains to contextualise Machiavelli in the social context of his times. When he compares the social context of his (Macaulay's) own time with Machiavelli's time, I became skeptical. Macaulay is trying to be an apologist for Machiavelli by shifting the blame for Machiavelli's 'evil' onto the entire Italian people in Machiavelli's time and place; and instead of making sense of Machiavelli's morality, by asserting that every age has its own morals he relativises moral considerations into nonexistence. Macaulay implies that every age has its own morals, which are incommensurate to another age's morality; if this is the case, why do we even bother to judge the morality of people and nations outside our own time and place? How can we learn moral lessons from history if morality is incommensurate from age to age? It is a nonsense argument.

And the review of Machiavelli's works, while interesting, seems a little irrelevant; we are only really interested in the political thought, and the moral questions around that. Macaulay rambles here.

So too the comparison of Machiavelli with Montesqieu. Macaulay reckons Montesqieu is popular because of the sentimental fads of his day, not because of the excellence of his book, the Spirit of Laws. But if this were true, then why is Montesqieu in the Great Books and Macaulay is introducing them? Macaulay accuses Montesqieu of matching a far-flung example to a principle, instead of finding principles to fit the proximate political circumstances. This is just to say that Montesqieu argues his case as best he can, and Machiavelli does too; to question the evidence is not to invalidate the theory's weight, and Macaulay does not broach the theory behind the Spirit of Laws.

So as you have read so far my impression of Macaulay is that he writes like a journalist. No doubt more will be revealed.

I don't mean to be censorious of these guys. I believe the character of a writer matters, and vices and errors in superb writers are even more obvious because of the overall excellence of their prose. Both Fitzgerald and Macaulay are urbane and erudite sophists, and fine stylists. If either man were a poor writer then their defects would not be so clear.

Reading Dostoyevsky For Kicks and Giggles

Every few days I read a bit of Augustine; he is magnificent reading, but difficult, irregular, and strange.

I read Augustine in the middle of the day, in snatches.

Even in his word choice I can feel the chaos and confusion of his age. In the irregularity of subject and the novelty of the autobiographical voice, we see for the first time what I call the Christian difference. Before Augustine the chief figure of the age were nobles. Augustine was a common school teacher, and a bishop. After Christ, it is the common folk who make history.

But the palpable darkness of Augustine frightens to me. His profound seriousness is the only relief from human nature. His century is a frightening place.

In comparison to Augustine, Dostoyevsky is a blaze of light.

Before I sleep I read as much Dostoyevsky as I can. Before sleep is best - his work is liminal - that is, on the edge of unconsciousness. Reading him when you first wake up or after meditating seems altogether too cheerful to me, but in the dark hours Dostoyevsky shines.

I'm reading Demons; the new Penguin translation is flat out fine work. Translator was Robert A Maguire. I love how well Penguin has translated his work. Maybe the choppy rough Russian just moves better into modern English than the French? I don't know.

Demons is confusing and superb. First I had trouble with the names, and had to bookmark the cast of characters list at the end of the text and refer to it constantly (I still do a bit). Second I had to deal with the allusive and hysterical way characters have of delivering major plot points. My thinking goes something like this:

"So... Stephan Verkovensky is maybe betrothed to some nobody called Sonya or Dunya who is the protege of his patron Vavarya Stravogina, for manifold deeply suspicous and impure reasons other. But Vavarya's maybe looney son, is returning home soon, bringing along with him Stephan's son who is an unknown and sundry complications. And Kirilov thinks everyone should commit suicide to prove there is no God. And Liputin is a vile gossip who seems to know everything and say nothing. And there is a new governor in town whose wife doesn't like Vavarya Starvogina. And everyone speaks French when they're excited, which is all the time, which is tiresome to deciper into English but simpler than having to stop to look it up in the stupid notes at the end of the Penguin Book because you know what it means anyhow if you stop reading for a minute and dig out the French vocab but that means you have to stop reading to translate French."

Jeebus himself couldn't sort out this kind of absurd mess, but it sort of makes sense, if you ignore the many maybes in the plot. Reading a summary online would take away the surprise and leave the hysterics.

At 17 years of age, when I last read Demons, I doubt I understood it anyhow.

Do you know why I find him funny? Because I really enjoy Dostoyevsky's company. I really like Fyodor Mikhaylovich the man. I empathize with him. I feel his wild humor. I see how he sees the Russian people. Dostoyevsky cannot see the future, the Bolsheviks and the present Russian Mafia kleptocracy. Instead he sees the foolishness genius and passionately misplaced devotion of the Russian intelligentsia to French frivolity and sentimental vacuity a la Russe. He sees it clearly, and sees it fully, accepts it all in himself, and he laughs.

Do I love Dostoyevsky most of all because he laughs at himself? I don't mean him to reduce him to a character out of Gogol. He is much more than anything Gogol could invent.

Hm. Please allow me to help non-Dostoyevsky readers understand what kind of experience they are missing out on:

Reading Dostoyevsky is like being trapped in a big hessian sack with twenty-seven affectionate lapdogs: it's unpleasant at the time but when its over you secretly enjoyed it so much. All those flickering pink tongues. Mmm.

Reading the Aeneid of Virgil, Blow by Blow

I read books 3, 4, 5 and half of book 6 of the Aeneid tonight (so far). Publius Virgilius packs a lot of story in his text. I can best appreciate this work in the light of Homer, the tragedians and Plato; the summation of all story up til his time is simply remarkable. It is is as if Virgil in his epic has set out not simply to tell a story, but to give all Story, the archetype of story-ness, the All-Story. But he is not summing up like Homer; characteristically Roman, Virgil seeks to engulf the memories of stories past. Virgil's Aeneid is a colony poem in more ways than one.

And what about the person, the consciousness of Virgil? I must admit I read Virgil through the more accessibly humane Dante. So much of Dante is clearly enriched by Virgil, that if the character Dante had not kept him at his side the strength of Virgil's poem would have overcome Dante the poet. Keep your literary influences close - this seems to be Dante's approach to Virgil.

Virgil sometimes comes across as a bit of a patchwork man. The story leaps from reference to reference of other men's work - and it works, it flows, but we do not clearly get a sense of the cohent consciousness of a work. At least, not yet. Maybe I ought to read on before I judge the man!

The poetry is fine. I have fiddled with many translations, and chanced on the Fagles-like one by Kline, which is superbly lucid compared to the Dryden (best of the olde translations). Tony Kline's Aeneid is free online, and has the benefit of having the books subdivided into the more precise episodic structure. This means the reader gets to rest without losing the thread, and gets reminders of what the thread was, and the sense of the story stands more clearly out than if we just have books one to twelve. It really helps the read. Also, Kline's version renders words that past generations might have called the 'moral sentiments' into plain emotions, which is a bit more real.

Kline's translation of Aeneid is not fancy, but neither is it pedestrian - the poetry reads simply and roughly into Virgil's luminous verse. Compared with ye olde Englishe translations, with which one needs to stop and mentally retranslate into modern English every dozen lines, Tony Kline's translation is a pleasure to read.

Update: I'm now at book 8, and the patchwork is becoming clearer. It makes better sense how Virgil's exercise in epic poetry is not an end in itself but a means to justify the Roman empire. But I can also see how, by making the poem a means to a political end, Virgil undercuts his personal source of inspiration. One cannot turn such sophisticated and urbane critical and aesthetic faculties onto the legends of the founding of Rome without also uncovering something of a critique of the beautiful lies of armed force. Virgil's falterings really illuminate why the Romans were relatively scarce in creative genius: it is hard work being a good Roman!

Update: Finished. I can see why Virgil didn't finish the poem. love the first half of Aeneid, but the second is like reading Rupert Brooke's war poems for a few thousand lines. Pathos becomes bathos. Lyrical emotion become prim patriotism. By the time Turnus dies it is just dreary, and the rage of Achilles has become the duty of Aeneas. Meh.

Part two Aeneid sucks more than Scylla's whirlpool. I suggest prospective readers read up until the Trojans land in Italy and stop there. For reading pleasure, the first half is superb. Trust me on this one: the Trojans settled Italy just fine.

On Sainte-Beuve On Montaigne

Sainte-Beuve writes messily, but the fine feelings sweep you along quickly so you don't notice until the second read.

I have forced Sainte-Beuve to speak here of Montaigne in epigram, as I can only imagine he would have wished if he had a modern audience to communicate with.

Much as his work has been demolished for me by Proust's criticism, Sainte-Beuve's wonderful love and enthusiasm remains:

- "It may be said of Montaigne's style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor."

- "Montaigne is a writer naturally fertile in metaphors that are never detached from the thought, but that seize it in its very center."

- "If we desired to write with his severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and turns - it is absolutely necessary to enlarge and extend the French language."

- "In imagining the expression and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally finished, inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated, by the pure and direct spirit of ancient sources."

Some stray birds:

Can even a Frenchman still speak about enlarging the language? And now that English cannot be engrossed by any one human mind, can it even be called a single language, or is it rather a super-language or complex of languages?

I find in Montaigne's classicism the best possible kind: to treat the Roman and Greek authors as a matter for pleasure and wisdom alone, and to avoid all pretense of learning and unnatural composure.

The very same things said of Montaigne are also said of Dante by the critics. Can it be the sweet new style is anything other than a sweet fresh mind made intimate with the minds of the ancients?

Finally, how can we account for Dante in Italian, Montaigne in French, and Shakespeare in English? The mystery at least can be traced to the Roman writers. But that does not explain the light that entered the world through their work.

Crikey - It's Proust!

Reading Montaigne on the train today I came upon this:

"The men whose society and intimacy I seek are those who are called well-bred and talented men; and the thought of these gives me a distaste for others. Their kind is, rightly considered, the rarest that we have, a kind that owes almost everything to nature. The purpose of our intercourse is simply intimacy, familiarity, and talk; the exercise of the mind is our sole gain. In our conversations all subjects are alike to me. I do not care if there is no depth or weight in them; they always possess charm, and they always keep to the point. All is colored by a ripe and steady judgment, blended with kindness, candor, gaiety, and friendship... I know my kind even by their silences and their smiles... Hippomachus said truly he that he knew a good wrestler simply by seeing him walk in the street."

I read this with a shock of recognition. Crikey, I said to myself, he's talking about Proust!

It is no good telling me that Proust and Montaigne live three centuries apart. Just imagine Montaigne and Proust in conversation! (I consider myself humbly fortunate to have friends who can follow my conversation at all.)

Neither it is any use telling me that Gide or Saint-Beuve could fit the bill. They do not. Saint-Beuve is Montaigne's disciple, not his mate; and Gide - his diminution.

On Two Classic Novels: Moby Dick and Tom Jones

Ah, Tom Jones and Moby Dick. Henry Fielding and Hermann Melville; hm!

Reading Melville I feel like he had written four or so sea tales of the commonest kind, stories strictly for men of the mediocre make, perhaps, and one day woke up and decided that if he didn't quit playing it straight this very instant then he might actually explode from lack of sincerity. So he quit pleasing paltry readers and wrote a sea story that revealed to the whole world his amazingly oddball personality.

Let me be very clear: Hermann Melville is a very strange fish. Just as Flaubert (pronounced 'Phallus-butt' in English, fyi), used to say "Je suis Bovary", so Melville can justly say "Je suis Moby Dick".

And after all, you know, after all, I mean, WTF? What is a reader to make of a book in which the writer's inner self appears to be symbolised by a spermaceti whale, and the reality principle seems to be represented by an insane PTSDed sea captain named Ahab? The really funny thing in this read is to notice how tremendously Melville enjoys himself. Like a carrion wind, Melville's good cheer never ever lets up. Laughter streams through the tone and transforms the horrid plot into a fearful symmetry such as would make Mister Blake quake.

Now to Tom Jones. Don't you think there is something snivelling and shabby about a world where everyone is a hypocrite except the hero and his missus? And when I see how tawdry Tom himself is even in his boldest conceptions of virtue, it quickly goes from discouraging to disgusting.

Yeah, I GET that Fielding wants us to clearly see how variable, moonish and instable a thing is virtue. And it's funny for a few hundred pages; but then it's not.

It doesn't help that Fielding's emotional life doesn't engage me. Here is none of the delightful sinister laughter of Dostoyevsky, and even less of the gallows good cheer of Melville. I like Henry Fielding best in legal and ethical questions, in which the disquisitions of his lawyerly mind find their field of muster.

I dug the allegorette (that's to say, the mini-allegory) of the Christian Thwackum and the platonist Square. It reminds me of William James' pragmatism. But I think the problem here is that I just don't care enough about Fielding, Jones, or their respective girlfriends.

Bottom line: Only the English find hypocrisy funny, but evil amuses forever.

A New Nonlinear Way to Read Dante Alighieri.

You can get at the nonlinear and visual construction of Dante's Commedia can be got at by the mind by just reading from start to finish, if you want, passing through Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso.

But what tends to happen as the reader traverses Inferno is that they stop short somewhere. Perhaps they pause at the gates of Purgatory to watch Venus rise. Or perhaps they stop half way up the mountain at Vergil's second lecture of free will. The mind falls short of the passion of Dante's design. Failing to grasp the beating heart that is the whole piece, intellect grows cold at the foot of the mountain where it ought to fall silent in the transcendent presence of Beatrice at the crown of the summit.

Why?

The answer is the failure to invoke the vegetative soul in the recitation: or, in less Aristotelian terms, the failure to extract the juice and excitement that comes from getting the whole work in a single hit of image, light and song.

Here's the problem: Dante's Commedia is nonlinear. The book unfolds in an acausal structure: Inferno mirrors Purgatorio illuminates Paradiso and back again. And that is on the most gross level of the plot: at the deeper level every image calls to image, like three friends chanting at one another from three mountain peaks in perfect harmony and consonance.

So the Commedia of Dante forms a single field of inspirational power, a matrix of image and idea that must be sensed whole in order to be "read" in any realistic way. In a word, you only begin to read Dante once you have read the whole poem from start to finish and have closed the book and started reflecting.

With that in mind, here's a fresh new nonlinear way to read Dante Alighieri's Commedia:

Start with the three books of the poem in front of you.

Read through Canto One of Paradise, then Canto One of Purgatory, then pass through Canto One of Inferno.

Stop, reflect; then repeat.

Continue moving DOWN from Paradise to Purgatory to Inferno, canto by canto, until you get to Canto 15 of Inferno.

This is the pivotal point in each of the three books. In Canto 15 Inferno Dante is about to ride Geryon into the Abyss to meet those who are actively vicious and aggressive against God. In each book at this point we move into the zone of heightened aliveness after this point.

Now there's a small hitch: the same pivotal point I point to in Inferno 15 occurs in Purgatory in Canto Sixteen and in Paradise in Canto Seventeen. In Purgatory Sixteen Dante ascents on an Eagle's back to the midway gate of the actively virtuous and pure. In Paradise Seventeen Dante attains the vision of the Heaven of Mars, of the warriors for God.

So the suggested nonlinear path is as follows:

Read up to Paradise 15, Purgatory 15, Hell 15.

THEN, reverse the order of readings to put Paradise last instead of first, thusly:

Read Purgatory 16, Paradise 16, Paradise 17.
Read Hell 16, Purgatory 17, Paradise 18.

At this point you will be able to compare the three pivotal points (Hell 15-16, Purgatory 16-17, Paradise 17-18) in the plot. All the threads will come together in the martial action of the midpoint of all three books.

Reflecting on the midpoints, note that Dante deals respectively with vengeance, anger, and courage - the vices and virtues of Mars, and the uses and misuse of the vital energy of the vegetative soul. Notice your gut level reaction to the images and feelings. And notice especially how much Dante has grown as a person from the start of the book to the midpoint.

These are also the points in the poem where the personal psyche ends and the transpersonal realm of begins. From these three midpoints in the poem, Dante the man becomes less important than Dante the Everyman. The universal Dante shines forth.

These pivotal points are a great place to pause and check in, get an overview of the poem, and really stir up a bit of passionate motivation to finish the adventure by taking it all the way to the finish. The Mars archetype acts as a spur to motivation to complete the recitation of the poem.

So, to summarize: we read from Paradise DOWN to Hell through the personal realm, correlating all the expressions together of Dante's individual psyche as it expresses in all three realms, then at the midpoint of each realm we reverse the order of the books and begin the ascent into the transpersonal:

Read Hell 17, Purgatory 18, Paradise 19.

Continue until the end:

Read Hell 34, Purgatory 33, Paradise 33.

The latter half of the three books gives a sort of transcendent play of image and idea that, to my mind, best resembles the leisure of the Olympian gods.

I firmly assert that only readers who have first grasped Dante the man are equipped to make sense of Dante the visionary poet-prophet. In my opinion, we meet Dante the man himself in the first half of each of the three books and Dante the poet in the last halves of the poem.

By reading the first half of each poem to become acquainted with Dante, we motivate ourselves to read the entire poem and discover the entire "good of the human", as Dante puts it.

On Othello 5: the Character and Death of Othello.

Othello clearly has issues.

It's not just critical thinking skills Othello lacks; some sausages are missing from Othello's barbeque. And he dies strangely content with the memory of a cruel act of justice he once dealt to a Turk, a non-Christian like he once was. Does Othello recognize his karma coming back as a tragedy from that act of rough "justice"? I think so.

Where Desdemona's death is the shock of the play, Othello's is a relief. I burst into tears reading Desdemona's last lines; how could I have read this play four or five times as a teenager and NOT wept, I wonder? Nothing could underline the difference in kind and degree between the teenager and the adult than the fact that only the adult who is experienced in the extremities of suffering can be adequate to comprehend the astonishing moral victory of Desdemona's last words. Desdemona reveals herself a warrior; by forgiving, she defeats Othello.

Coming back to Othello: Othello seems to recognise that his brutal nature is the true man at the end, but does that mean that the noble and sophisticated Othello of act 1 to 3 is fake? This is clearly false, but not an easy charge to avoid.

Othello of act 1 to 3 IS the real deal, but so is the completely different Othello of act 5. The intervening tormented Othello (act 4) is merely the alembic of Iago's alchemical psychiatry, not a man but a patient, a case study. What are we to make of these two different Othello's? And what are we to make of the transformations of youth and adulthood, whereby the same individual can become as different in himself as night from day?

The key lies in Iago's silence.

Is Iago the first psychiatrist? Undoubtedly.

I can't feel anything other than genuine satisfaction in Iago's total silence. Iago is complete, having returned to that avenging Element from which he arose; we feel the human aspect of the man was merely for show, and that in his silence the real man at last is revealed. We feel relieved, not of his speech, but to know him as he really is; Iago is not a human agent, and by his silence shows this is so.

Iago's silence illuminates the character of Othello as a product of primordial darkness and ignorance. Recognising the aboriginal depth of Othello in ourselves, we are humbled. How can we be sure we are just and wise? We can't, unless we become intimate with that darkness which we foolishly disown as evil in ourselves. Othello signifies that intimacy with our blackness, and the terrible cost of becoming estranged from our soul.

How Reflection Creates the Past: On Reading Conrad's 'Youth'.

Joseph Conrad writes with great style and heart!

I just read aloud 'Youth'. Into this little book which Conrad wrote as a youth of 24 years he poured all the experience of aliveness and joy from his formative years.

Reciting 'Youth' disclosed the breath and the silence and the difficult play of words in the author's throat. So when the narrator, old Marlow, asks his listeners to pass the bottle of claret, I reached over and sipped my cup of peppermint tea, and mindfully breathed a moment. Conrad means you to rest when Marlow rests, because he requires you to work when Marlow remembers. If you do not rest when Conrad/Marlow rest, you will probably miss much of the meaning of the story, which is encoded in the emotion and style. This kind of reading is great fun, too!

"...the whole terrestrial globe had been one jewel, one colassal sapphire, a single gem fashioned into a planet."

See how Marlow piles up the three clauses on one another? He uses this technique for three quarters of the text. It happens whenever young Marlow, the hero of the story, is powerfully moved. The effect when recited is rhapsodic - it builds complex waves of feeling and image - it crests and foams into the last quarter of the story, which is written very simply. If you do not follow the waves, you probably will not feel the impact of the simply written last scenes. That is why recital is best for this story. But it also expresses the emotional rollercoaster of being young so very well!

If being young is like being asleep, or like being in a dream, then becoming an adult is like waking up and remembering the dream even as it fades from memory's lips and leaves a faint bitterness. Likewise, I didn't understand 'Youth' until I had slept on it. When I woke up all of a sudden the mind cleanly took hold of the whole story as a single object, and I understood what Conrad is up to.

This is not a coming of age story at all. This is a dream of youth and age, as mythical as the sport of the gods, and as golden. The sweetness of immortality and the bitterness of age come together and heighten one another. The authentic taste of the passing of time is here in these pages, intangible and subtle.

"Allegory" is a dead word for a living form. According to wikipedia it comes from αγορευειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public". Wiktionary tells us that allegory is "the representation of abstract principles by characters or figures". I see many problems with the use and meaning of the word (too many to go into here), because it presupposes a break between presentation and representation, between the abstract principle and the concrete image.

In my experience, sometimes the abstraction IS the character - these is no difference between Achilles and vengeful wrath, is there? Likewise, in Conrad's 'Youth', there is gap between abstract and real, presentation and representation. The thing is the idea is the thing.

And in this case the thing is Youth and Age. The story shows the essence of both so well, so powerfully, that is is almost jejune of me to speak of it with ordinary words. It is a very powerful presentation of poetic truth!

The entire story of 'Youth' is an allegory for the nature of youth, complete with invocations to Jove, the god of juveniles. The moments when Marlow uses the triple repetition signal the efforts to hold back the unconscious contents of the actual event - the twining repetitions of threefold horrors are gorgonic snakes of words that ward off the actual experience of youth from Marlow's weather-beaten consciousness.

Marlow's story, with its rhetorical flourishes, is old Marlow's defense against the authentic experience of youthfulness. The story is not just about a sea adventure, but about the life Marlow has lived since then. That is why the first three quarters of the story are charged with such sorrow and sagacity.

And what about the actually young Marlow? We remember pumping water til the cook goes mad, waiting in dry dock til the rats abandon ship, and sailing til the ship burns and sinks. But what do we feel about all this stuff we see of the young Marlow?

We feel the moody turbulence of adolescence in the constant rain and water pumping. We feel the sense of waiting to become an adult in the social embarrassment of dry dock. We feel the fiery concupisnce of puberty in the smouldering invisible fire beneath the vessel which bears a freight of fragile human lives to a new unknown world in the East.

Conrad's 'Youth' is a precise allegory for adolescence! Every detail provides an exact imagining-forth of the essence of being juvenile. So 'Youth' is immortal. And so what? Every adult of character has been through the same transformation in her or his own way.

Old Marlow's perspicacious warding-off of genuine feeling breaks down at the end of 'Youth'. This is signalled by the loss of complex language when young Marlow wakes to see the faces of the East, loses the repetitions altogether. It is simply written. The faces of the East are an image out of dreamtime; consciousness has been broken down by the storms of adolescence, but in being broken, has become adult.

And so what? We wouldn't want to repeat the ordeal of losing these sweet illusions so bitterly, nor would we want to forget the pleasure that the delusions of youth brought us.

For old Marlow in his drink youth is a bitter illusion, until the moment when he breaks through to the direct experience of young Marlow once again, and for a moment the old man is soft and vulnerable once again.

But Conrad seems to be saying also that as adolescence dreams of the man he is to become, so the adult who reflects on her adolescent dreams can always take the opportunity to make them real... reflection is the work of a well lived life.

This is the greater attainment of 'Youth': Conrad through the voice of Marlow realizes his own adult self through reflexively investigating, probing, testing and deepening his perceptions of his own youth.

Augustine's Four Rules of Reading A Book

Today I learnt how Augustine read.

His style of reading reminds me of Dante's letter to his patron Can Grande - no doubt Dante learnt to read through Augustine. But what I was unprepared for was how very wide the gap between Augustine's view of reading and the modern view.

Augustine's rules for reading are (to me at least) still relevant. They are four, and I state them as principles rather than practices because of their general usefulness:

1. PURITY - reading that subserves cravings and appetites distorts the mind's ability to read the text. Maybe a text serves the lower appetites; nevertheless, the meaning of it can only be got at with a mind free of bias and a pure appetite to understand.

2. FAITH - You must suspend disbelief, but you must not suspend belief, in reading. That is to say, faith must be present in reading, and cynicism must be suspending in reading, for comprehension to occur.

I would add that faith can be conditional on historical context or limited to the space of the reading of the text, but it must be present according to Augustine in order to read well.

Faith in the text is primary in making sense of it. Why? Because reading is an inclination of the will and appetite towards clarity and freedom, therefore right from the start the will must be freed from doubt, the enemy of good faith.

These two rules for reading, purity and faith, pertain to the appetites and the will. Purity of appetites and a faithful will are the ends of their application.

3. LOVE - I read Harold Bloom's criticism from love of his mind. Why do I love Bloom's work? Because he has taught me that only by love can I win access through the text to another person's consciousness. For me, as for Bloom, Augustine and Dante, love is the only entree into the mind of greatness. A strong love will take you to the heart of any text.

Simply put, love makes reading and writing worth while. Since reading involves the love of that which reads - in other words, reading is intellectual vanity - the most literate books win the greatest love, since they most intimately put us in contact with that quality of intellectual vanity which does reading. Even more deeply, the love that creates a text and the love that reads the text are the one substance, and the love that carefully appreciates a text arises from the same kind of love as that which created the text. Love is the common human factor in reading and writing.

Criticism without love is worthless. A critic without love, even in the form of courtesy, respect, or polite restraint from abuse, is not worth a hearing. Any misreading (in the sense of Harold Bloom's map of misreadings) that adds love to the text is good or at least harmless.

4. MULTIPLICITY - Simple, clear passages of a text offer a meaning which is unarguably revealed by purity, faith and love. The consensus of informed opinions around a great text is fairly fixed, and there is little freedom in it. But Augustine offers a view of free interpretation of the text in the case of ambiguous passages.

Multiple readings, imagined, invented and supposed, are good and useful when the text is ambiguous and poetic, and when they do not violate the good faith of the text. Obscure passages provide freedom to play and explore the text more fully.

These are Augustine's four rules for reading a book, then. Let's put them in their historical and intellectual context now!

Augustine came to value the pagan tradition negatively, as an example of ignorance and error in human thinking. So much of his rules for reading concern the Christian and Jewish religious writings of his time, many of which came to be our present day bible. Augustine's reading was informed by a deep seriousness or purpose, and a moral and devotional aim.

Perhaps the primary challenge to we moderns is Augustine's stark vision of the human good to be got from reading. But Augustine differs not greatly in this from Samuel Johnson, who read voraciously and judged by very high standards of moral purity.

I suppose the biggest difference from we moderns is the more broad sense of what is proper in books - we are less offended and less corrupted, I suppose, by impure and appetite-stimulating images or words. Perhaps it is because we are so constantly overfull with stimuli, that we end up becoming accustomed or unaffected to the tides of vicious and sex-loaded content or screens and pages wash up. Certainly we seem to inhabit an alien and noisy world compared to the agrarian north African environment of Augustine.

Take these rules, then, as you will... a stimulus to your reading more spiritedly, or a window on a kind of reading past and long gone.

I Visit The Great Books of the Western World in My Local Library

I visited the South Australia State Library on North Terrace, with excitement in my belly. I was off to visit the Great Books of the Western World. To my astonishment, the State Library didn’t have the books. The librarian looked it up for me at Adelaide University Library website, and found them in the marvellous Barr-Smith Library.

I zipped behind the State Library, across the State Gallery grounds, down the physics building carpark and carried the bike down four steps to then cruise along the main side street of Adelaide University on my bike, my long blonde hair flying in the wind, feeling fairly astonishingly great.

I trotted down two flights of stairs and circled around the stacks of books, sneezing a little in the dust, til I found them… the complete collection of the Great Books of the Western World.

I sat cross legged beside them. The Great Books are nestled beside the stairwell window, so as I settled in I glanced up and got nice view of the young people’s legs as they sashayed upstairs and downstairs, adding significantly to the sensual pleasure of the finely printed and bound hardcover classics. I read the reading plan introduction, taking notes, rephrasing key points, and soaking up the glorious insights.

Gradually I entered a heightened state; I sat cross legged there forgetting myself completely until my legs went numb. An hour must have passed.

Then I took the books entitled “The Great Conversation” by Hutchins and “The Syntopicon, Volume One” by Adler, and went and sat down. I kept expecting someone to walk by and see me sitting there glowing and exhilarated almost out of my body and demand I leave shouting “No intellectual joy allowed here, sir!”

I read the entire “Great Conversation” book. It was irresistible; compelling. Among our contemporaries, where else can you find genuinely timeless erudition? It’s almost unknown, a forgotten excellence. And Hutchins made it seem effortless. Most remarkable, perhaps his brilliance really is effortless.

Imagine talking to such a man in person. I counted the great authors and came to 73 men (excluding the trio who wrote the US constitution; Jefferson alone suffices.) I imagined a great shadowy vault of a room where these men sat and conversed together through the ages, and the world outside the portals and the eaves of this quiet room trembled to their words. I imagined this and my body fairly shook with gratitude.

I started on the syntopicon with the essays on "Angel" and "Animal". I almost made myself late for my evening appointment reading - it was a huge rush to get to Glenelg on bike in 35 minutes. And I suspect as soon as my present batch of book reviews is done I will be spending a LOT more time by the window to the stairwell in the State Library.

Two Things

Two things have interrupted my liberal humanist reading.

The first is the choice to take on book reviews for a self-help magazine.

The second is my focus on Doctor David R. Hawkins empirical ‘praxis’, from his book “I: Reality and Subjectivity”, which occupies the time I'd normally read in, with an investigation into subjective awareness.

Much of the focus has been on validating and verifying the basis of his conclusions in my own subjective awareness. My head tries to whine about how hard it all is, but in all honesty this kind of inquiry is a powerful experience of self-intimacy.

Above all I am grateful that through no particular virtue of my own I am able to explore the praxis with enough inner clarity to get some of Hawkins' concepts experientially. I am extremely fortunate.

It is springtime here, and in the green is something so beautiful. I don't know what. But I feel happy knowing it is there.

Satanist alien energy field sacrificial slave-gang scouser mass murderers on the high frontier… indeed!

Reading Peter F. Hamilton’s ‘Reality Dysfunction’. It’s a fine book. It’s strange to see the tropes of triumphalist golden age American SF transposed into the cynical postmodern British context. It’s also got some passages which are not strange so much as outright weird, even oddball.

Satanist alien energy field sacrificial slave-gang scouser mass murderers on the high frontier… indeed!

But Peter F. Hamilton really fails at representing religion accurately. His religious characters are weak and often outright culpable. The notion that humanity could split over biotech is fascinating, but not feasible: people are at once more sophisticated and more messy than that.

To his credit his utopian visions have their psychopaths and narcissists. And while he is not casual about evil – indeed he often lingers over the fruits of evil for dramatic effect in a way which is (sorry) just vulgar – he is also not entirely sincere about it, using violence for effect in a way which seem kitschy in the Dickensian sense (the child that sees the dead man’s face with a white worm in its mouth “like a diminutive tongue” is one unforgettably bad turn of phrase), and he relies on liberal dollops of casual sex to convey his characters’ values (ie, good sex to the good characters, nasty painful sex to the bad guys).

Like John Scalzi, Hamilton posits an Earth who is denied advanced technology. But the comparison is revealing: English Peter F. Hamilton sees Earth as denied advanced technology by backwards collectivist belief systems and ecological limitations (people must live in arcologies). American John Scalzi shows Earth wilfully isolated by her colonies to protect her from the social reality of constant interstellar war. Scalzi – and American SF in general one might say – stays close to the competitive and evolutionary reality of US society, and their work benefits. Hamilton shows a regressive and collectivist vision of Earth which is pure Thatcherism.

Hamilton has some moments of the purest Elizabethan Englishness when he takes us to the hedonistic space habitat Tranquillity. High culture, even royal culture, he represents by superb extremes of fatuous wealth, erudition, high art and a wild party scene – Tranquillity is superb. The reason for its founding (a royal’s long term wish to preserve human civil mores) is also revealingly English.

For the Americans, however, every self-reliant man is the center of human society. The notion of a civic center of human civilization is just irrelevant. The US might have a centre of capital (New York), genius (L.A.), or party life (San Francisco), a focus of civic business (Houston) or diversity (Miami) – but culture? “The center cannot hold”, Irish W.B. Yeats wrote, but he did not immigrate to the States to see that fear fully realized.

Anyway, culture aside, it is a fine book.

I remember a fantasy writer asked Sean Williams how long his book should be, and Sean replied “As long as it needs to be to tell the story”. Did Hamilton need so many words to tell his tale? A shorter book might have been more appropriate to the scale of the story itself.

But the condition of entry into Peter F. Hamilton’s imaginative worlds is willingness to take on the long novel. I just can’t believe he wrote three hulking great books in this series, any one of which would have made an ordinary trilogy in size. It must’ve taken years.

Saint Augustine... Sex Addict, Shock Artist, Zen Master

Last night I downloaded Saint Augustine's Enchiridon and Confessions.

As I may have mentioned before, Augustine is far and away history's most famous sex addict, and honored for having recorded his recovery from the illness of sex addiction in the Confessions. His illness and recovery are his defining story. The fact that he is a spiritual and intellectual giant impresses me less than the astonishing personal transformation.

Good translations are important. As you know from reading my blog, it gives me great pleasure to seek and find a vigorous English rendering. Last night I quickly found very fine translations of Confessions and Enchiridon from the superb online library, Ethereal Christian Classics. New, classy font; verrry nice. I compared with the Pusey translation from Project Gutenberg and within two paragraphs preferred the Ethereal Christian Classics version of Confessions.

The opening paragraphs of the Confessions were fascinating - a series of emotionally charged questions that you couldn't have answered - at least I couldn't answer them. Maybe you can.

Confessions is a shock. Confrontational. You sit down to read Saint Augustine, guessing his life story will be a nice little drama for an evening's amusement, little expecting to be body tackled by the saint himself in full moral flight and dragged along the pitch, a human football kicked at the goal of a spiritual awakening. Somehow you don't expect Saint Augustine to be so... unsaintly.

But on starting the Enchiridon I instantly noticed how beautiful the ideas were (beautiful ideas make for beautiful prose), and decided to read the latter work first. The form is smooth but obscure and rich as pure butter - you would be familiar with the kind of writing from modern Zen writing. Augustine is like a Zen master pointing out the utterly simple fact of his experience for you to ponder. Again the saint surprises: Augustine as Zen master. In the darkness of the humbled mind and heart, a Mystery.

From the translator of Confessions I learnt two more fun facts about Augustine:

1, that Saint Augustine (in his magnum opus 'The City of God') invented our idea of a society. I was surprised when I learnt last year that Aristotle invented the notion of energy, so pervasive the concept is, but after a few instances of hearing some basic idea was invented by so-and-so, you get used to the shock of the old.

2, that a confession cuts both ways. First and obviously a confession is a record of false thoughts, feelings, and actions; tossing out stock-in-trade thoughts and feelings which have caused nothing but pain; and noting your responsibility for having created it; thus the sign of a successful confession is a sense of gratitude. Second, and more mysteriously, confession is an act of recognition of a Higher Power. When you or someone you know, then, embarks on a course of deep therapy, a spiritual inventory, a searching memoir, a period of directed journaling or a similar type of inner investigation, it is worth remembering that the ultimate motive of our mucking about in negative and painful memories is a more joyful connection with a Higher Power.

One more thing: Augustine's mature writing in Enchiridon is a striking, basso profundo voice, like Prospero in The Tempest. Augustine's is a listening prose, and the audiobook of Enchiridon must have quite an impress. Augustine's style really reminds me of the late Rvd Billy Graham's - a voice not to be blinked at.

That's my dish on hanging with Augustine last night, August 22. I find him fascinating. I think you might also find him fascinating.

PS - I must add that Augustine also invented the genre of the memoir with his Confessions. Knowing the rash of 'mislit' or misery literature on the shelves of Borders, this is one of the few books that actually scratches the itch.