A Certain Justice

I have let myself go completely and have read another mystery. I stopped at the neighborhood Half Price Books on Sunday and of course ended up with several books. I was delighted to find that Patrick McManus, whose North Idahoan outdoorsy humor cheered me up throughout my teens, has started writing mysteries. I got thirty or so pages into Avalanche while waiting for a prescription to be filled tonight; so far it is pleasant but a little uncertain.

I have, I think, all of P.D. James's books now, and have not been disappointed yet. Well, except that A Certain Justice, which I finished earlier tonight, proved to be one I had already read. I did not own it yet and know no one to borrow it from or lend it to, but in the first few chapters I realized I had read it somewhere. Probably it was at someone's house while I was bored. It was good enough to keep going anyway, especially since I had no other book with me yesterday.

It comes close to breaking the one absolute rule separating a proper mystery from a procedural, a thriller, or most ghastly, a true-crime work. The rule is, the suspects (or the murderer, if he is known from the start) must be sane. The murderer will likely prove unbalanced in his emotions--after all, he killed someone--but insanity is a mystery's deus ex machina. Of course a madman is even less free than we are, but the limits of madness in its many forms are so unknown to us that we have only the author's assurance that he is playing fair. Yet the greater unfairness is not, I think, in that it prevents the reader from guessing the murderer; in that sense, Doyle cheats shamelessly, Knox is far too obscure, Christie too obvious, and Sayers is sometimes hardly interested in the criminal. I rarely guess, though I watch for the hints and misdirections so that when the answer is given, I can try to see the path the author intended.

The unfairness of madness goes much deeper, for a mystery is a sort of comedy, like the classical "New Comedy," in which social disruption, mistaken identity, and cross-purposes among more or less ordinary people follow a chain of causation (even if flimsy) from chaos to greater chaos until the plot begins to resolve towards social harmony. It is characteristic of New Comedy to end with multiple weddings and a feast, and in that light it is not all that surprising that Christie, at the more obvious end, also wrote romance novels and that Sayers bent the course of several books towards that one great engagement. Even less romantic mysteries, though, follow that path of initial disruption (the body in the library) through the cross-purposes and misdirections that multiply as more disruptions, often more murders, increase the chaos, until the detective's integrating intelligence pulls society back towards wholeness and comity. Insanity breaks all that. The initial harmony is shown to be a falsehood over the bottomless chaos of madness, the plot cannot progress by a normal sense of causation, and the detective cannot by his powers of explanation formulate events into a meaningful whole. Nor can society be repaired, when the story turns on the excruciating isolation of every mind from every other.

Bacon stall

Bacon is proving hard going. I could make excuses about work stepping up and the evanescing summer, but really it just has not been very interesting. I was excited about The New Atlantis before reading it, but found I had nothing to say about it afterward. The Oxford selection starts off as slowly as possible, with advice to the queen about the Church of England and those tributes and other minor works. To keep any interest at all, I had to skip to the end for The New Atlantis before coming back to the set order. The editor would have done better to lead off with a short, complete work that showed Bacon's thought in its fullest form, so that the reader, now encouraged with the knowledge of a destination well-chosen, might speed his way through the intelligent but rather tedious early works. The editor, as he reveals himself in the lengthy, sawdust-packed endnotes, is also intelligent but tedious, which probably explains his choice. Skipping to Atlantis was a good idea, and I will have to start skipping at will. Still, it grates on my autodidactic soul to ignore an editor's ideas.

Bacon on the Beach

I went up to Deception Pass yesterday. For efficiency in reading, it rates poorly, since I read about one hour out of seven. On the other hand, it is a beautiful place for being inefficient in. I nearly turned the day-trip into a camping trip, but found myself too poltroonish to stay overnight with nothing but a blanket, a car, and two books.

The picture above is just some minor trail in the park, which at more than 4,000 acres has quite a few long trails. I love green tunnels and bowers and for once had remembered my camera. Just a few feet farther down this trail I startled a small snake, who made the strangest noise at me, like a loud, yawning hiss. Like Professor Savant, I walk around looking up, so the snake got back into his hole while I saw only a blur. I stopped to look in his hole, hoping to find him glaring at me, but all I got to see was a blackish-blue tail with a yellow stripe.

I was delighted to find thistles in bloom, of course. Die Disteln uber alles in der Welt (thanks, babelfish). This area of the park has a lot of barbecues and picnic tables and is next to a parking lot, so it had the most people, but still not more than twenty. For the most part everyone was quietly busy with his own entertainment, but for one older man holding court straddle-legged on a picnic table, a strained bathing suit barely a fig-leaf, his great rolls piebald in red and white. A smaller, younger couple sat opposite on a bench, looking stunned as he shouted some long story about the opposition he faced at work, with frequent recourse, despite the grizzled stubble on his balding head, to fucking this and fucking that. It was only about three years ago that I first understood that the loud and obnoxious would never grow out of it. Had I met this man earlier, I might have learned faster.

After a few miles of disoriented hiking, I lucked into this beach, where I read for an hour. I wish I lived near enough beaches to do this more often, but unfortunately the beaches in the lower Sound are not so quiet or even accessible. The slight wind off the sea made the pages stick together; though the air did not feel damp to me, I suppose it must have been. I finally finished the "device," or quasi-dramatic court entertainment, called "Of tribute; or, giving that which is due," which proved much harder to stay with than The New Atlantis. The dozen pages of praise for Elizabeth were exhausting, full of references to recent events that sent me to the endnotes, but the unceasing flattery was even more wearying. It was possibly worth it, though, to find that he praised his Queen's physical attributes in some detail, including her breasts.

Little Murders

I just watched the most peculiar movie, by Jules Pfeiffer, the cartoonist. It is supposedly a black comedy but there is a lot more black than there is comedy. The marriage of a nihilist and a positive-thinker in an existentialist church is funny, as are several of the family conversations where everything said is either banal reminiscence or cliched, except for brief irruptions of dementia that are mostly ignored by the other characters. Still, I feel a little sick. The period is late 1960s New York, and everything is wrong, from the failing power to the 60 unsolved murders per month that appear to have no motive and that the hysterical, conspiracy-theorist police cannot and do not hope to solve. Pfeiffer perpetrates an especially horrifying murder to start in train a demonstration of the murders' motive. It is to him the ape-like love of making someone pay, of fighting back and killing someone when life is brutish and caged. The final scene is in fact of the men in the family truly happy at last in their metal-shuttered cage of an apartment, hooting, climbing on the furniture, slapping their chests, relieved of all torment because they have just murdered several strangers.

"Murderous ape" is certainly a better definition of man than "featherless biped" or even "rational animal," but only someone of Pfeiffer's wit and politics would respond to New York's disaster by going on safari above the human soul's First Cataract, when he needed to travel no farther than into his own memories. That the New York of his youth was markedly more tranquil might have suggested that deep causes were not needed, and a humanity surpassing his wittiness might have suggested turning his satire against the real problems. With elites like him playing games with disaster, it is amazing New York was ever repaired.

The Dark Knight

I just got back from seeing the Dark Knight. It was far better than Hellboy 2, having the breadth, heft, and sense it lacked. A little too mythopoetic, but then that is what Batman is now. Even so, the final scene of voluntary sacrifice is new and powerful. Another remarkable display of dramatic reach in a genre of pure spectacle.

The Joker remains a frustrating embodiment of 20th century contradictions. Though I have not read the early Joker stories, it appears he was a murderer, but that Batman pursued him to the death. Though the Joker proved in later stories to survive each apparent death, Batman had still shown himself willing to fight it out to the only possible end, other than the commercially dull ending of state execution that capture would have meant. Then the comic book code set in and he only pulled capers, which only a highly confident society would consider reasonably repaid with death. After the CCA would have allowed him to be killed, those opinion-makers who are meant when people say "society changed its mind" had rejected the death penalty. From then on, Batman and the Joker have been entoiled in a bad 7th grade ethics question and a perpetual will-he-or-won't-he conflict between Batman's oath to defend the innocent and his inexplicable--except by the zeitgeist--unwillingness to kill off the chief threat to the innocent.

Batman should kill him. For that matter, any one of the policemen in the movie should shoot him on sight. Is it really so hard, so morally fraught, to kill someone who will, with perfect certainty, murder throughout the rest of his life? There is no slippery slope here; would it progress from permitting the killing of those who murder thousands to those who murder mere hundreds, and thence by degree until it was permitted to kill jaywalkers? The putative dilemma is only the boundless self-righteousness of an individual conscience satisfying itself at the expense of thousands. Of course it is just a story, but when it is repeated so many times to such success, it is hard not to think it has laid hold of some favorite delusion of the times. A time, after all, in which "Not in my name" passes for a meaningful, or even relevant, response to a war.

The Amateur Immigrant: Mackay

Stevenson spends several pages on one person, who is a fascinating character. I will try to cut it down to blog-size, but it would be a shame to lose anything of this odd and unsettlingly familiar man.

We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under the name of Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of the intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically he was a small Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already carrying the elements of a corporation... Mentally, he was endowed above the average. There were but few subjects on which he could not converse with understanding and a dash of wit; delivering himself slowly and with gusto, like a man who enjoyed his own sententiousness. He was a dry, quick, pertinent debater... When he began a discussion he could not bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone, without once relinquishing a point. An engineer by trade, Mackay believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the human machine. The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of carrion and perverse gases. He had an appetite for disconnected facts which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads... With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer young, on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money, and but little hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair. "The ship may go down for me," he would say, "now or tomorrow. I have nothing to lose and nothing to hope."

He too drank, but did not acknowledge the fact; when he once made a fool of himself getting very drunk, by strength of will he "suppressed all reference to his escapade."

In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness....

He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide. One day he took me to task--a novel cry to me--upon the overpayment of literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing-machines and butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produce a mere fancy article. Mackay's notion of a book was Hoppus's Measurer.

Stevenson tried to argue that material production was to produce leisure to pursue happiness, which literature provides richly, but Mackay denied it: "The thing was different, he declared, and nothing was serviceable but what had to do with food. 'Eat, eat, eat!' he cried; 'that's the bottom and the top.'" He debated through teatime so he had to go hungry, which he had more than enough good humor to find funny himself.

Anything, whatever it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued passionate production of corn and steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against the people. Thus, when I put in the plea for literature, that it was only in good books, or in the society of the good, that a man could get help in his conduct, he declared I was in a different world from him. "Damn my conduct!" said he. I have given it up for a bad job. My question is, 'Can I drive a nail?'" And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and steam-engines.

That degree of hostility towards the humanities can be found in high tech, though it predominates only among system administrators, and "bellyful of corn and steam-engines" would be replaced by "videogames and CPUs." In my experience, most tech workers would agree with Mackay that the humanities belonged to another world, but they would first have to be told that world exists as something other than the soft options and Studies programs they saw at college. Mackay was enough a part of the old culture that he had "most of the elements of a liberal education," but it is different now: as a senior in biology told me at UM, he had not had a paper assigned to him since he was sixteen. With few exceptions, Americans who train in the practical sciences or engineering have no conception of what has been withheld from them. Of course I have met a handful of exceptions, though either their liberal education has come by birth, because one or both parents are professors in the humanities, or, as in my case, their tech career was a change in direction after a liberal arts education. What is saddest, many are Mackays by training, not nature, being quick to appreciate the true humanities when introduced to them. I have not found tech workers to be as grim as Mackay, except some system administrators, who anyway have the most noxious tech workers in their number (cf. Slashdot). Mackay in rejecting letters seems to have done more harm to himself than befalls those who merely grow up without them:

...[He] was adrift like a dead thing among external circumstances, without hope or lively preference or shaping aim. And further, there seemed a tendency among many of his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality.

One other thing joins Mackay to the tech worker:

Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sort of poor human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had had the boyishness to dissect and criticize even so small a matter as the riddler's definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle.

Thieves

Of the worst variety. Batch-snatching makes the international news occasionally, but I had no idea it was so common. It is so sad, all those wretched people killed by mobs of lunatics.

The Amateur Immigrant

In 1879, Stevenson took an immigrant-class berth in a steamship to America, one of only a few out of the several hundred below-deck passengers not intending to immigrate to America permanently. The title is partly a joke on that, and partly a bitter pun, since he found the experience hateful and not one to be undergone for the mere love of it. The second half recounts his trip on the immigrant train from New York to California, which went no better than the first half, except that it ends with his joy at the sight of California's forests and the Bay.

The foreword to this edition belongs to the very English school of captatio malevolentiae, having been given to someone who appears to loathe the author he has to introduce, on the thin excuse that the foreword-writer has written a book in the same genre. The problem with this line of thinking is that it gives full opportunity to scotch a competitor, which Raban does enthusiastically. Otherwise the foreword only contributes a highly overwrought symbolic reading of the book, featuring the deadly phrase rite de passage and the suggestion that Stevenson was "governed by it [the rite de passage pattern] more by instinct than by any conscious will to shape his writing to its demands." Which is a pretty nice way to stuff your own hokey theory into someone's work while denying him any praise.

In truth, Stevenson deserves a great deal of praise for so minutely recording and affectingly conveying the sensations of an immigrant, both material and social. The physical conditions are an education in themselves; I never would have guessed that below-decks passengers would be fed on the scrapings of the cabin passengers' plates, nor that even this sort of food was a privilege only of the better of the two below-decks classes, and a treat to relieve the grim (though first-run) food they got for other meals. His phrase for twice-run food is "broken meat," which was new to me and has been frustrating me with lack of opportunity to use it. It would be better to read this short book than to read my account of the physical details, but I have to quote this description of the nighttime air in steerage: "The stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese."

I do want to write about his observations of the other immigrants, though. He found them not at all what he had imagined, both better and worse. The men play gambling games incessantly, but bet no money, an astounding instance of virtuous and beneficial self-control; the mothers affectionately watch their children swing around on the outer railing, apparently callous to the risk; the working class immigrants prove to have far pickier taste in food than Stevenson; there is frequent singing and dancing, especially when a fiddler shakes off his sea-sickness, but the men prove unable to shed their dignity for an eight-man quadrille; above all, the immigrants have a remarkable mildness, where he had expected adventurers:

Comparatively few of the men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition. Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance.

Considering the immigrants in light of England's faltering economy, he finds that the economic battle was harder than he knew:

Thus it was only now, when I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a ship full of failures, the broken men of England.

Though in fact many of the immigrants were from mainland Europe. And again:

As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three great causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first and foremost, this trick of getting transported overseas appears to me the silliest means of a cure... Change Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good.

Yet that their mildness was not mere broken spirits is shown by their cheerfulness: "Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety."

He describes, on arrival in New York, the great crush of immigrants from the many steamships that had landed over just the last three days. If his steamship was representative, what change was worked on America by the introduction of so many cheerful, dim, orderly, drunken, silly, gentle refugees from sense? Contrary to general prejudice in America, foreigners often remark that kindness, mildness, and orderliness are the most striking characteristics of Americans, followed by ignorance, unrealistic thinking, and luxurious over-indulgence. Perhaps the immigrants passed on exactly what they brought, but somehow the country only became greater. There could hardly be greater praise for the power of freedom.

Irony

So instead of writing about culture I went to see an instance of the trash culture Kael regretted, a sequel even. Hellboy 2 turns out to be pretty good as comic book movies go: better than the wretched Spiderman movies, not nearly as good as Batman Begins or Ironman. The plotting is better than in the first one, where the story wanders at random before unexpectedly producing a boss battle that demonstrates just how much is gained when the plot progresses in suspense and intensity towards the climax, and lost when a scene simply shows up holding a sign saying, "I am the climax;" also, a good climax would not be correctly described as a boss battle. The new story still makes no sense at all, which is a pity because Mignola's stories are excellent, his best talent.

The characters are feeble and flat, and that would be incredibly pretentious to observe about a comic book movie, except that Batman Begins and Ironman have just recently shown how greatly good characterization helps and how naturally it can fit into a comic book plot. At least the characters are not stupid, annoying, and vile, like in Spiderman. Mignola writes more believable characters in the comic book and even in the animated Hellboy movies, so it is probably the fault of Del Toro, who gets co-writer credit. After all, he made the villain of Pan's Labyrinth, the colonel, a ludicrous combination as cruel as the Marquis de Sade and as effective as Snidely Whiplash. (I realize that the true villain is his dead father's military honor, man; but that is such a stupid idea, I will not mention it, out of charity.)

The spectacle is remarkable even for a special effects laden genre, though in the usual way the plot had to be dragged from one special effects encounter to another. Now we go into a trolls' market full of marvelous creatures doing... well, whatever it is, they are not doing market business. No problem, they are meant for sixty seconds of gaping, which they are well worth, and then it is time for a fight. With that over, now we go back to a low effects environment, but the bad guy has a little present for the good guys. He could just kill them, but he would rather throw the last remaining forest god at them, inconveniently stored in dehydrated form. He also neglects to bring water, but that lets the Mexican jumping bean of a god bounce into the sewer so it can rise up hugely out of the broken pavement. Of course in its exuberance it throws cars; you would think that audiences either hate cars and want to see them suffer, or love them so much that it is an easy way to grip their emotions, like putting a baby in danger. Possibly inspired by a similar train of thought, Del Toro then adds a baby in danger.

The worst of it, though, is that the fight is so confined and predictable. Once the god is wheeled onto, or blasted up through, the stage, it mostly stands in place, flails a bit, and promptly loses. The god is huge, but the scene is small and cramped. Will Smith's high-speed drive through desolate New York has such effect because driving is a trivial, mundane thing, but it is set on a huge stage, so large it loses any sense of staginess, evoking the wide-open feel that all the audience know from their own driving. Through that common sensation you enter into the movie's world and the desolation becomes eerie and powerful, rather than mere showy scenery. Del Toro is having none of that, and all the carefully arranged big scenes and the final battle are just as much pointless show, Hollywood-epic except when bathos interrupts. Ironman, otherwise well-constructed, succumbs to that cramped staginess in its final scene, letting down the rest of the movie. Ironman's villain is at least subtle and believable until that scene, but the Lucasly-named Prince Nuada apparently practiced sword-spear fighting for millenia only to stand around uselessly while his plans are thwarted.

I do like comic book movies, and this one was pretty good as they go, but it is frustrating to see a studio spend $85 million on a movie only to save $100-$200,000 on a cheap script or, as seems to have happened here, to hire a well-known but foolish director to cripple a good writer. Three last points: the opening puppet-battle is wonderfully and perfectly done; enough Danny Elfman, seriously; and Selma Blair is very pretty. Maybe very, very pretty.

The Zeitgeist is a most dismal animal

A sudden outburst has rained stories about loss of culture all over the place, with the National Post getting in a fine article today. I think tonight I will try a little of the old ultra-violence analysis and synthesis on some of the more interesting ones. In the meantime, two good quotations found by the writer:

Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture."

Rather than rub in her honest admission, here is my own: mid-century American high culture gives me the sense of suffocating in a heavy comforter, so that the low culture of the time still feels like fresh air in comparison. Only Thurber redeems the mid-century literary culture, though Bunny Wilson does his best to entertain onomastically.

In 1933, Aldous Huxley wrote, "The Zeitgeist is a most dismal animal, and I wish to heaven one could escape from its clutches."

Of course it is possible to escape its clutches--it does not even require a shack in Montana--but escaping will deny you a trendy drugged-up life in Hollywood.

Life of Johnson: Dec. 13, 1784

It is strange, to feel so sad for the death of a man who lived into old age and died in bed 223 years ago. But it is sad; the book so resounds with Boswell's honest love that you cannot help but hear the echo of Johnson's voice, see him in his strange mannerisms, and feel a share of that love yourself. How terrible it is that men die can hardly be imagined, but page by page Boswell manages to put into words the impossible truth that even 1,400 pages seem too few to hold. I almost wish I had not read the book, so painful is it to feel the reality of death.

The last year of his life was marked by great pain, especially from dropsy, a hideous disease, which all but crippled his legs even when it was in remission. He seems to have been treated with the right sort of medicine for one kind of dropsy, since he was given powder of squills, a diuretic herb. He also had opiates to ease the pain, so for the time he was fairly well provided for, but I had a brief physical urge to get him an oxygen tank when he so often could hardly breathe. Even in such pain, "during his sleepless nights he amused himself by translating Latin verse, from the Greek, many of the epigrams in the Anthologia," but as his last year wore on, he regretted that he could no longer even read away his insomnia, saying that on sleepless nights he used to be able to "read like a Turk," which I suppose means lying on his side on cushions.

His last year was spent trying to convalesce in the countryside; he went to his hometown, but found all his remaining friends had died. He then had a wretched year of isolation, seeing no one close to him, and often no one at all. Boswell includes a long series of his letters, which were his sole contact with his former life, and that are highly affecting as the uncomplaining but honestly despairing notes pile up. May it be, that however I die, my last year should not be so utterly alone. And may I also be spared the fate of Boswell, who prostrate with melancholy, failed to write for most of the year, so that after this letter he was only able to get one reply to Johnson before his death:

To James Boswell, Esq
Dear sir, I have this summer sometimes amended, and sometimes relapsed, but, upon the whole, have lost ground, very much. My legs are extremely weak, and my breath very short, and the water [dropsy] is now encreasing upon me. In this uncomfortable state your letters used to relieve; what is the reason that I have them no longer? Are you sick, or are you sullen? Whatever be the reason, if it be less than necessity, drive it away; and of the short life that we have, make the best use for yourself and for your friends....[ellipsis original] I am sometimes afraid that your omission to write has some real cause, and shall be glad to know that you are not sick, and that nothing ill has befallen dear Mrs. Boswell, or any of your family. I am, Sir, your, etc,
Sam. Johnson

How endlessly Boswell must have reproached himself.

As his life dwindled to weeks, he came back to London to die. When a doctor hoped he was feeling better, Johnson said, "No, Sir; you cannot conceive with what acceleration I advance towards death." His friends then were often with him, though his death has a horrifying solitude about it anyway. I suppose death must always be a terrible solitude; even though I picture those who die in bed meeting their end supported by companions, it must be solitary when there is one second that for everyone is followed by another, except for him.

A young woman, the daughter of a close friend, came to ask Johnson's blessing, which proved his last action:

The Doctor turned himself in the bed, and said, "God bless you, my dear!" These were the last words he spoke. His difficulty of breathing increased till about seven o'clock in the evening, when Mr. Barber and Mrs. Desmoulins, who were sitting in the room, observing that the noise he made in breathing had ceased, went to the bed, and found he was dead."

Life of Johnson: Miscellaneous

A few disconnected bits before the last post:

Speaking of Lord Lyttelton's supposed vision of his own death and its occurrence as envisioned, which Johnson had heard from Lyttleton's uncle, he said "It is the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day... I am so glad to have every evidence of the spiritual world, that I am willing to believe it," and when someone said he should already have enough evidence, he replied, "I like to have more." Several times, Johnson's eagerness for proof of spirits gives Boswell pains to clear him of the charge of superstition. Except when pressed, Johnson often described his fear of death as though it were a fear of damnation, but more proof of a spiritual world could not reassure someone fearing the worst from the spirit world. I take this to be further proof that his true fear was of annihilation.

Johnson told a funny story of human perversity:

You put me in mind of Dr. Barrowby, the physician, who was very fond of swine's flesh. One day, when he was eating it, he said, "I wish I was a Jew." "Why so? (said somebody;) the Jews are not allowed to eat your favorite meat." "Because, (said he, ) I should then have the gust of eating it, with the pleasure of sinning."

While discussing whether life was "upon the whole more happy or miserable," Johnson argued for misery and Boswell added the argument, "that no man would choose to lead over again the life which he had experienced." Boswell says, "Johnson acceded to that opinion in the strongest terms." I agree too, except that if I could go back with the knowledge I now have, I would risk it, though with not a lot of optimism. However, Burke argued for happiness:

Every man would lead his life over again; for every man is willing to go on and take an addition to his life, which, as he grows older, he has no reason to think will be better, or even so good as what has preceded.

Boswell blames false hope, and quotes the first line from the elegy Johnson wrote for the strange lower-class doctor who lived with him for decades. Here is the whole first stanza:

Condemn'd to Hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts or slow decline
Our social comforts drop away.

He also quotes Dryden, who is much more on point:

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat,
Yet fool'd with hope, men favor the deceit:
Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay;
Tomorrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse; and while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again;
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And from the dregs of life think to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give

The unexamined life

Unlike Socrates, I think the unexamined or unexamining life can be worth living, but only by those who can live it. Whether some daimon or some demon compels it, others must examine, and if that examining is uninstructed and unaccompanied, it is a torment that twists and cripples thought. I have often thought that many of the strangest elaborations of religion must have their origin in the undirected examinations of compelled minds. Even a land-bound peasant or a stone age tribesman may be born with such a mind, and lacking any lightning-rod to direct his inspirations harmlessly, his mind must instead blaze up and burn without relief. The intricacies of pre-modern magic, medicine, and mythology testify to the perverse ingenuity devoted to them. As there are fewer and fewer living men with whom life may be examined, those who must examine their lives draw ever closer to the savage's desperate isolation of mind. The great rise in conspiracy theories may in part come from that loss of all prior thought.

In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates describes just the union of society and learning that is the rightly directed use and the satisfaction of a compelled mind:

The treasures of the wise of old, written and bequeathed in their books, I unfold and peruse in common with my friends. If our eye light upon any good thing we cull it eagerly, and regard it as great gain if we may but grow in friendship with one another.

Life of Johnson: Reading

Boswell says Johnson was not a croaker, one who complains about his age in all ways. Johnson found his age very pleasing, except that "subordination is sadly broken down in this age." The Tory Telegraph still makes the same complaint, but calls it "lack of deference." Johnson does twice say that reading had declined, once in reference to lawyers' preparation and I think to doctors the other time, but it seems he only thought more training was now acquired in conversation than formerly.

In keeping with the Johnsonian spirit, I should make it clear that I would not choose any other age, all the others being poor in knowledge and menaced by torturers going by the name of physicians. Scientific advances have been an increasing proportion of each century's glories from the 16th, but this age has seen science become unearthly in its glory and beauty. Medicine has become powerful too, and it is an everyday thing for a sick man to be told, "Take up your bed and walk." My grandmother just had a knee entirely replaced, and the other will be done in a few months; she will travel to Italy this year. Johnson tried hard to get to Italy in his final year, hoping the better climate would help, but his too-helpful band of doctors could not make him well enough.

There are many other wonderful things about this age, among them that basic literacy and some degree of knowledge belong to more people than ever before. My earlier complaint is more specific: that group, never large, of people who can attain to significant knowledge and true literacy is now afflicted with the delusion that those attainments are at best private games and at worst sabotage of the efficient machines that will create heaven on Earth. Since Dewey's fools have come to the worst conclusion, the result has been that every year's births provide the raw materials for an educational system more perfectly stripped of knowledge than the year before. If you happen to be one of those industrial inputs, but are somehow so badly machined that you end up with some part of a humane education, you will find that the other inputs, having stayed on the assembly line, can no more understand your peculiarity than a BMW could see the point of a horse. People are not more stupid now than before--they may even be smarter, and many become powerful engines of science--but even with smart listeners, the whole of life cannot be conversations in the form of lectures starting at first principles.

Even highly esteemed graduate schools in the humanities have little to work with, though they do their best by drawing from overseas and from private schools. It is painful to listen to professors talk and to realize that you are witnessing the descent of man; in classics, the greatest scholars are all past retirement, and many are over 80. They have been great from their early days, as I found whenever I read their published work, though of course they have grown more learned over time. Professors of 50, unless they were educated entirely overseas, have little of the older generation's penetration, but are serviceable: hammers, not lances. Professors of 40 show astonishing gaps in their knowledge, and professors of 30 sometimes seem never to have opened a book from outside their field or this year's NYT bestsellers list. American graduate students in their mid-20s, though their native talents may be great, would have been rejected by undergraduate admissions fifty years ago for appalling unpreparedness. All of this refers to Americans educated in public schools and most private schools; the rest of the world was not so stupid as to admire Dewey.

So imagine being an American of 30 or 35 but by ill chance possessed of a mind roughly molded in the older style. As you look far ahead to those nearing death, you see scholars who utterly outstrip you; looking ever closer, you find people more and more like you, though more finely modeled; somewhere around 50, they grow more alien; when you look behind at those coming up, you realize that their principles of thought are becoming not only alien but hostile, fused with political ideology. Every year the desolation, like the Sahara, increases its borders a little more, but also adds more savages who only know the wasteland. They love the wasteland; men love the manner of life to which they are born, and resent attempts to unearth and tear up its radical errors. All this is not pleasant now; it will be intolerable in thirty years, when the wasteland covers everything and only scattered anchorites remember what was lost.

Johnson would surely not believe the extent of the collapse, but he would understand how reading might die, once learning was no longer esteemed or profitable, and other entertainment was cheap and ubiquitous:

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them. There must be an external impulse; emulation, or vanity, or avarice. The progress which the understanding makes through a book, has more pain than pleasure in it. Language is scanty, and inadequate to express the nice gradations and mixtures of our feelings. No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.

Life of Johnson: Cats

I used up my writing time with that last post, but how can I not write about Johnson and cats. Boswell writes,

Nor would it be just...to omit the fondness which he shewed for animals which he had taken under his protection. I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.

He also let Hodge climb up on his chest, which upset Boswell the cat-hater. On another occasion, Johnson was talking of a loony young nobleman who was "running about town shooting cats"; falling then into a "sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, 'But Hodge shan't be shot; no, no Hodge shall not be shot.'" What a sweet image that is, and the most tenderness I remember seeing an Englishman express towards an animal before the 20th century.

I also now want to call a cat Hodge, but my Dinah could never learn to ignore a new name so perfectly.

Taking recommendations

Most of the time, if a writer recommends a book it is new and publicized well enough that the recommendation is mostly unneeded. Recommendations for older books have proved worth following up, though. From Theodore Dalrymple I picked up Malice Aforethought, an excellent mystery that would belong with Ronald Knox's and Dorothy Sayers' mysteries, except for its quiet lack of sentimentality. George Will recommended I Hear America Swinging, which was an odd but entertaining experience in itself, and a little unsettling, too, to see how far its satire had become reality in thirty years. I just now finished The Belles Lettres Papers; it is a pity I have already forgotten who recommended it, because it was well worth interrupting the Johnson marathon. Which reminds me, I first read Rasselas because of Dalrymple's recommendation.

So far all the recommendations have given the best kind of delight, unexpected and unobligatory. Belles Lettres is written as though a history of a literary journal, narrated by a smooth, politic young editor. It is a light satire on office and literary politics, which I enjoyed even though I last read the NYT Review of Books, where the author was once an editor, five or six years ago and do not keep up with literary fashion. I also cannot help thinking the author, Charles Simmons, must be the namesake of Charlotte Simmons in Tom Wolfe's novel, but none of the reviews suggest why that might be and I am not very willing to read one of his tomes just to find out. Wolfe, for me, suffers the blight of over-recommendation, which encourages all that is mulish in me; there is enough of that to start with, so I may never get around to him. It may be just as well, since reading lengthy descriptions of college girl sex written by an elderly man has a slightly creepy feel to it.

Life of Johnson: Americans and the end of the war

So my interest in seeing Johnson thwarted by American victory is not to be satisfied. He says almost nothing, only expressing his relief when the administration that lost the war was replaced. It seems it had an effect on him though, for he says twice to Boswell that he no longer enjoys talking about current politics; in 1783 he says, "I'd as soon have a man to break all my bones as talk to me of public affairs, internal or external. I have lived to see all things as bad as they can be." I am a little sorry for him; the American victory began the utter defeat of his kind of Toryism, though after the rapid losses from that day to the mid-19th century it took another century for old Toryism to be extinguished entirely. The fissioning of the Anglican communion, which is happening right now in the split Lambeth and FUCA conferences, shows how far things have changed from the days of loyalty to Church and Crown, but how the forms still linger.

The Anglican problems, which were caused by the theological novelties of the North American Anglicans (Episcopalians) and of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, remind me of what Johnson said about freedom of religion: "Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test." It seems the gay bishop thinks much the same.

I promised to return to Taxation No Tyranny, but there is not a lot there; I think Boswell is right that it is largely bluster and sophistry. But there are two interesting arguments. The first is a familiar one; if the state's power of coercion is an affront to liberty, then there must either be anarchy or tyranny. He does not give theoretical grounds for believing the state will not become tyrannous, even though he values the power of coercion over individual liberty, but then again no one has found a theoretical basis for valuing liberty over government power that does not lead at least some enthusiasts to anarchy. What he ought to give is a discussion of the mechanisms by which the emphasis can shift back and forth between state power and liberty. He could then argue that the American revolts were a disruption of those processes and that giving in to them would make the damage irreparable. His desire to give colonies no quarter and to reserve all powers to the parent state makes that impossible though. His views remind me of Hobbes, though I do not remember a reference to him and the index does not have anything useful.

The other interesting argument still causes trouble today. Johnson spends several paragraphs on a mock Declaration of Independence by Cornwall, which because of their independent linguistic and ethnic background as Celts he considers a stronger case than the Americans make. The underlying argument is the same one used against Woodrow Wilson's puffy idealism: if any people desiring a state must have one, who can be refused a state? Soon enough all states will the size of Lichtenstein, if long tenure imposes no limits on secessions because of historical grievances or ethnic identities. A cruelly oppressed people might safely be granted that right without risking general secession, except that the colonists managed to convince themselves they were cruelly oppressed when they were really governed lightly. It is embarrassing how extravagant the complaints were when the offenses were so much less than everyday federal actions now. What makes more sense is that a people should form a separate state when it has become numerous and prosperous and has shown an effective and beneficial ability to govern itself. That is not as exciting as sic semper tyrannis and other bloody slogans, and of course men of good will and intelligence can agree on a principle like that yet bitterly disagree that it applies to any particular instance. Still, it is no way out, to try to make the whole problem disappear into the primacy of the Crown.

The broken window fallacy

Every now and then, there is a story about how disasters help the economy with all the new jobs in construction and so on. The economic illiteracy required to give that idea even superficial plausibility exceeds the usual reporter's ignorance: not only does the idea fail even thirty seconds' reflection, Bastiat explained the fallacy in detail two centuries ago. Trust the Boston Globe, the worst broadsheet paper in the country, to provide the latest example. The Boston Globe is one of the few sources I ignore completely, though in this case the Arts & Letters Daily link tempted me in to enjoy the Globe's humiliation.

News sources on my ban list:

1. The Globe - try reading it for a week; it will amply prove itself the most stupid paper you have ever read.
   
2. The Daily Mail - a rabid tabloid with the loosest sense of truth, it has somehow become digg fodder and is showing up all over the place as though it employed sane or honest reporters.
3. Newsweek - self-parodying in its earnest furrowed-brow stupidity, it is strictly an opinion follower; if you read any other news already, reading Newsweek is like reading one of those old Reader's Digest compressed classics after reading the original. Newsweek is also distinguished among the three newsweeklies by the least attention to accuracy, in its polls and in its articles.
   

I will read articles anywhere else, even occasionally lunatic blogs, but those three offer nothing but the mental clutter of disinformation. Well, and the occasional funny self-immolation, like today.

Knox discovery

I just found a book for the holiday, an astounding find since four of the six mysteries Knox wrote have been OOPed with prejudice. I have read the two in print, but the other four command ludicrous prices on abebooks.

Of course I will be violating American copyright law when I read that, since it is merely 81 years old. In Johnson's time copyrights lasted less than twenty years, which does seem too short, but the hundred years he proposed, and that thanks to Disney is now the law in the U.S., is surely far too long. Even excellent books fall out of print long before a hundred years elapses.

Johnson: Going for a roll

What with cleaning and yardwork in preparation for the 4th, I have not made much progress, though I am down to the last 200 pages or so. Boswell's depiction is so detailed and affectionate that I actually feel sad as the end approaches. How could anyone read the Life and not come out loving Johnson? Even the way he sometimes makes me think of Ignatius Reilly is in the end charming. Apparently Boswell censored some of Johnson's low humor, which is both a surprise, given what he included, and a shame, since the way Johnson told low jokes would have to show a lot about him. I was just going to say that Johnson was very dignified, but though he often was, he could also be wonderfully goofy. Once, in his 50s or 60s, when he came to a grassy hill, he said something like "I haven't been for a roll in a long time," and rolled down the hill. Another time, in his late 40s or early 50s, he got talked into staying out all night drinking and running around, and when morning came he and a friend went out boating I think, and made fun of Boswell for being too responsible to come. Boswell does not give enough of that sort of thing for me to have a feel for how that playfulness fitted in with the rest of his personality, but at any rate it is very appealing.