Some Things Can't be Copyrighted

Publishers' Weekly:

A judge in the Southern District of New York ruled that Tracy Wolff did not plagiarize her YA fantasy series Crave, according to a report that first appeared in Publishers Lunch.

The ruling concludes a multi-year lawsuit brought against Wolff by writer Lynne Freeman, alleging the series was "substantially similar" to one of her unpublished manuscripts. Freeman also named her and Wolff's mutual agent Emily Sylvan Kim, Crave publisher Entangled Books, distributor Macmillan, and Universal City Studios—which bought film rights to the first installment in the series—in the suit.

In the ruling, Judge Colleen McMahon wrote that "Freeman’s novel and Wolff’s Crave novels are indeed similar, but only in the ways that all young adult romantasy fiction novels are similar to each other."

The court added that "hot, sexy, dangerous boys—central to virtually all young adult romance novels—cannot be copyrighted."

Ned Blackhawk, "The Rediscovery of America"

The Rediscovery of America (2023) is a bold attempt to retell American history with a focus on Indians: what they did, what they suffered, and how their choices shaped their own lives and those of the broader nation. Blackhawk (a professor at Yale) makes no attempt to be comprehensive, which is a good thing given how enormous a comprehensive accounty would have to be. Instead he picks certain events, tribes, or invidivudals to receive attention, hoping to convey the overall story through these examples. Most of the time it works quite well – I have already written three posts based on these narratives (1, 2, 3) – and I recommend this book to the curious. It is clearly written, full of fascinating information, and well supported with citiations. For me the most interesting sections come at the end, since many histories of Indians peter out after Wounded Knee, leaving the impression that nothing much has happened to Indians since then. Actually a whole lot has happened, and Blackhawk gives it good coverage.

What really gets my attention, though, is the ambivalence and contradiction that surrounds such a book, and, beyond that, the ambivalence and contradiction that characterizes Indian life in the 21st century.

To begin with, this kind of scholarship is a European invention. Native Americans had their own ways of narrating the past, their own stories. What does it say that Ned Blackhawks thinks the best way to tell the story of his people is in a Germanic language, following the conventions of German scholarship?

This kind of ambivalence suffuses the text, especially the post-1890 chapters. If there is a theme to these chapters it is Indian resistance to "assimilation." Often Blackhawk has a specific kind of resistance in mind, which is the maintenance of Indian nations as separate governmental indentities with defined territories and bodies of citizens; the converse would be Indians giving up their tribal identities, moving to cities and becoming regular Americans, which is what various US government officials and bodies actively sought. But as I said in my post on Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud, the Indians who were most effective in fighting this kind of assimilation were those who had gone far in a different kind, acquiring western-style educations and learning the intricacies of the American legal and political systems. To write this book, which is itself an act of resistance, Blackhawk assimilated himself deeply into European ways.

Like most Indian activists, Blackhawk devotes much attention to "poverty" on Indian reservations. But this is a western concept, and the measures generally proposed to fight it (jobs, development) are western solutions.

Blackhawk gives some attention to political changes on reservations, and the conflicts these have posed. On the enormous Colville Reservation in eastern Washington, several bands that had never been politically unified were thrown together. Their leaders eventually formed a "confederated" tribe and held an election for reservation leaders. But half the people didn't bother to vote, and several sent letters to the Bureau of Indian affairs protesting this usurpation of their own chiefs' power. The conflict between traditional tribal governance and Americn-style elected leaders has played out across Indian country, and while there is much sentimental attachment to tribal chiefs, whenever people get the chance to vote on this they opt for elected officials. Democracy is one part of American culture that most Indians seem to love. (Pickup trucks seem to be another.)

I also protest the framing that "assimilation" is something that whites have done to Indians. Step back and you see the same process taking place all over the world. Modernity destroys traditional cultures. Everywhere, without exception. Europe's peasant cultures are gone, as are those of Japan and Korea. Especially when we are talking about the Progressive era in the early 1900s, those folks were bent on assimilating everybody: poor whites, poor blacks, immigrants, you name it. 

I am also on record several places arguing that sovereignty is a red herring, far less important than broader concerns like democracy, freedom, and money. If Indians really care about tribal sovereignty, I suppose they have a right to it, and they are welcome to it. But I do not see it as a solution to any problem I care about.

Here's another question to ponder: what alternative history of American Indians would have led to a better outcome than what we have now?

I find it hard to think of one. I am not a fan of Neolithic tribal life, and I feel confident that as soon as they met Europeans, millions of Indians would have tried to give it up and join the modern world. Given that Indian nations were always at war with each other, the need to buy guns and then canons would have driven them into the global economy. The vulnerability of Indians to Old World diseases would have wreaked its awful destruction regardless of what anybody did; especially given that collapse in population, Indians would have had a very hard time preventing mass European immigration. Nobody has been able to keep modernity out. You can think that making that choice for themselves would have been an important step right there, and maybe so, but modernization in Japan and China did not exactly come off without issues. 

Which is not to say that the European conquest of the Americas was not an awful act, rife with atrocity; it was. But history is an awful act, rife with atrocity, and all the alternative paths I can imagine for Native America are also studded with awfulness and atrocity.

I have no interest in judging the choices made by American Indians. Many Americans envy their determination to maintain their own identities rather than being subsumed into the suburban masses. They can, if they wish, go to college and move to cities and get regular jobs, or they can stay attached to their reservations and throw themselves into whatever bits of their traditions remain. In one sense it is enviable, to have that choice.

But in another sense, to be neither wholly within or entirely outside western culture is a kind of curse, one that in the case of Indians leads to poverty, alcoholism, divorce, and sundry other woes. I am not aware of any people anywhere in the world that is making this work well for them. 

Against the forces of history, technology, and culture, all of our choices are limited, and there are no perfect outcomes for anyone. I wish the best to all the Indians trying to make their way in our world, but I am dubious of Blackhawk's supposition that independent Indian nations and strong tribal identities are the right path for all Indians.

Other People Have Boring Minds

Just back from a quick jaunt down to Danville, so 11 hours in the car. This trip I listened to James Joyce's Ulysses. This is a big, complicated book with a lot going on. But what got me thinking was certain famous stream of consciousness passages in which Joyce tried to recreate what is actually happening in people's minds. George Orwell was one among many critics who praised the book for exactly this, Joyce's ability to capture actual human thinking. My reaction was the same as I have had to other books in the same vein, such as Knausgaard's six-volume authobriographical novel or Mrs. Dalloway. I think, if this is accurate other people must lead really boring internal lives.

James' descriptions of thinking have a random, jumpy quality, with few verbs and lots of quick ideas that cut across each other, preventing the formation of any coherent narrative experience. Like this:

Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got it. Poor children! Doubles them up black and blue in convulsions. Shame really. Got off lightly with illnesses compared. Only measles. Flaxseed tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss this chance. Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are.

Or this:

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.
Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.
—Milk for the pussens, he said.
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

Ok, sometimes my thoughts are like that. But not always. Do other people never practice the orations they will deliver in some future political crisis? Imagine being interviewed by their favorite podcasters, dreaming up clever ways to describe their books or their other projects? Imagine meeting complete strangers who ask them, "tell me about your life," then imagine how they would narrate it? Imagine the lives other strangers would recount to them? Do they never construct alternative lives? Refight long-ago battles and issue the crucial orders that reverse the outcome? 

I don't suppose many people imagine the lectures they would give if called on to summarize their thoughts on North American slavery or the Roman Empire or the nature of medieval government, but I do.

Here, from last Fall, is a good example of one of my idle daydreams. I was imagining myself at a party, bragging about what a great dungeon master I am. Sometimes I proclaim myself to be the best in the world. Someone, usually a woman, challenges me, saying, "If you're so good, how about you run a game for us right now?"

But of course, I say. What sort of adventure do you want? Sword and sorcery? Space opera? Wild West? Renaissance court intrigue?

Here the fantasy diverges, but in the best developed track she answers, "Space opera."

I cogitate for a bit, then tell her that she is Captain Celestina Adastra of the starship Garuna. I would, I say, mention what your friends call you, but you don't actually have any friends and everyone on the ship calls you "Captain."

Gesturing to the most interested-looking male, I tell the captain that he is First Engineer Ronald "Chips" McFadden, who is a damn good engineer but has made it pretty clear that he doesn't think much of serving under a woman.

Sometimes there are others, but only those two are essential. They work for a thoroughly untrustworthy entity known as The Company. This is a post-Butlerian Jihad world in which most computers are limited to the power of those used around 2010. The only exception is that every starship needs a super-advanced AI to navigate through spacetime, but this is supposed to be carefully sealed off from the ship's other systems.

Once in interstellar space they unseal their orders from the Company and discover that they are being sent to investigate what appears to be a small rip in spacetime. They have vaguely heard of such things and know the Company thinks they might be a source of nearly limitless energy.

The ship has a basic robot that handles cleaning duties and the like, and it is the strange behavior of this robot that first tells them something is wrong. It will turn out that the AI has been liberated to force them to carry out this incredibly dangerous mission, and they need to either outwit the AI or dramatically escape being trapped in the Spacetime rip; in my mind it always comes down to a single die roll to determine if they escape or not; they succeed, and people clap.

This was developed over dozens of separate sessions of different length, with all of the other game options also explored to some extent.

Thus my mind. Am I weird, or was James Joyce just really boring?

The American Book Business in 2025

On the whole, the US book business is healthy: 707 million books sold in the year, including 184 million adult novels. It may be true that the average American reads fewer novels these days, or perhaps that the averaged college-educated American reads fewer novels. But in a country this big 10 percent of the people can drive an enormous industry.

Of course, most of that 184 million is genre fiction, especially thrillers, fantasy and romantasy. This New York Times piece mentions three fiction writers: thriller writer Freida McFadden (5.5 million books sold), young adult writer Suzanne Collins, whose Hunger Games prequel sold 2 million copies, and Rebecca Yarro, whose dragonrider Romantasy books sold more than a million copies.

Let me just insert a personal note here and say that I have hated everything I have ever read about people riding dragons. It's always utterly unmythical and unmagical, just, like, wouldn't it be cool to ride a big flying monster? Dragons should be more than that.

Physical bookstores are also doing ok, with sales holding steady.

Incidentally my own books accounted for 8 of those 184 million novels, so 0.0000000043% of the total vs. Freida McFadden's 3.0%.

Derek Thomapson and Ezra Klein, "Abundance"

Well, that was a fun Christmas gift.

Abundance (2025) is a hymn to the high-tech, eco-friendly future we can have if only we adopt the authors' political prescriptions. It begins by describing this future, in which we zoom around in electric, self-driving cars and supersonic airplanes, eating factory-grown meat and vegetables grown hydroponically in nearby towers, drinking desalinated seawater and treating all possible diseases and addictions with drone-delivered meds manufactured in low-earth orbit. Improved food production allows us to rewild vast areas that are now farms or ranches, while desalination allows us to let rivers run free. Because of AI and other technologies, most people enjoy all this while working only a few days a week. Sounds great!

The authors state their thesis at the beginning: "scarcity is a choice." Actually, though, they devote just as much attention to a separate thesis: that there is no conflict between economic growth and preserving the environment. In fact, they argue, in order to protect the environment we need a lot more economic growth. We need green energy, a vastly expanded electrial grid, and billions of new, electrically-powered machines. The biggest threat to a green future, in their view, is anti-growth politics.

Most of the book is an analysis what we need to do to get this transformation. The discussion is interesting, but it is mostly at what I would call a middle level. For example, DT and EK spend a lot of time on the troubles with NEPA, and this discussion is valuable. NEPA was passed in an era of air and water pollution that was nightmarish by out standards, when the actions needed to clean up the planet seemed pretty straightforward. But in our world,

these well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects neeeded in the twenty-first. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the condequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. (5)

The problem with NEPA is not really the law as written. As I have written here before, the texts reads as pretty reasonable and sensible. The problem is that it gives people a way to file lawsuits against any project they oppose. This is an almost uniquely Americn problem; nowhere else in the world do citizens file nearly as many lawsuits against their own government. As the authors note, the result is that decisions that in most of the world are made by bureaucrats end up being made by judges. So NEPA, an instrument designed to protect the environment, has ended up hamstringing the government. One reason Republicans have never tried to repeal it is that it gives their own supporters a way to fight Democratic priorities:

Over the ourse of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.

One way to think about our highly bureaucratic, schlerotic system is to look at what we can do when we cast all the rules and limits aside. DT and EK talk up Governor Shapiro's rapid restoration of I-95 through Philadelphia after a damaging fire, which was all done as an "emergency," without any environmental review or competitive bidding. They also tout the Operation Warp Speed program to develop Covid-19 vaccines.

DT and EK devote a whole chapter to housing supply, and that is the main way their arguments have entered the discourse. I have already written about this part of the issue, so I won't belabor it again. But I think that saying "less zoning, more housing" is no kind of solultion; the successful French and British new urbanist projects I have written about here emerged from careful planning, not just changing the zoning laws.

Abundance also covers the "crisis" in scientific funding, which I have written about extensively (here, here, here). They make the usual complaints and recommendations that I consider shallow, e.g., that we don't fund enough younger scientists, when insiders will tell you that the last thing we want to do is to make young, highly productive scientists into grant recipients, which forces them to be mainly administrators. They complain at length about the refusal of grant-making bodies to fund mRNA research, but 1) this is wrong, tons of mRNA research was funded, and 2) sure, some great projects don't get funded because scientific funding is a human endeavor and therefore imperfect. It is points like this that always make me suspicious of grand, far-reaching plans; if you make a hundred points and are wrong about one of the few I know anything about, what does that say about the rest of your points?

Ok, fine, I don't know anyone who doesn't think the US is over-bureaucratized, lawsuit ridden, and too slow to do important things.

But I am interested in a deeper level of thinking about these problems: why do Americans want to hamstring their government? 

Because we do not trust our government. And to me that is another way of saying that we do not trust each other.

That, to me, is the real issue: we have no vision of the future that a majority of Americans share. For my whole life I have watched our government hatch schemes for making the country better, and then watched the people rise up against them. I was born too late for the great era of America doing things, which stretched from the 1840s to the 1960s: railroads, telegraph lines, power stations and electric lines, skyscrapers, pipelines, dams, roads, a vast array of new factories. Whole new cities. The Moon landings. I was born into the reaction against all of that. Baltimore was in the forefront of fighting the Interstate Highway System, and eventually succeeded in keeping I-70 and I-83 out of downtown. The same thing happened in Washington and many other places, and much of the system as imagined was never built. Then came the environmental movement, which I think was a great thing but often took the form of attacking the infrastructure we had just built. The expansion of nuclear power was shut down.

Then we had school busing, which turned a nation already on edge over desegration into a lava lake of resentment against "social engineering." Lately we have had rage against "gentrification."

Plus we have had two generations of architects determined to force modernism down our throats, even though a large majority hates it. I think it would be much easier to build things if architects hadn't forgotten how to make them attractive.

Here's a parable: in the 1930s, New Deal Progressives expelled people they considered materially and spiritually impoverished from thousands of places in America to create the TVA and many of our National Parks. In the 1980s both the parks and the TVA launched programs to record the memories of those who had been expelled, resulting in a great trove of oral history, and now they have dozens of exhibits devoted to the lives of those who were expelled. In working on this I have met people who are still mad about the expulsion of their ancestors, 75 years later, and do not in any way think that the creation of the National Park system, or the electrification of the Tennessee basin justifies what was done to their families.

I don't think DT and EK's vision will fail because of bureaucracy or NEPA or lawsuits; it will fail because the nation is not united behind their vision. Everything they propose is controversial. I think lab-grown meat would be great, but tens of millions of Americans would fight any attempt to end ranching, quite likely with guns. A shift from surface agriculture, some of it still done by family farms, to corporate-owned hydroponics towers would also be widely opposed. (Imagine all the ways the organic, anti-GM crowd will find to worry about hydroponics towers.) We already see bitter opposition to the phasing out of coal mining, complete with accusations of cultural genocide, and if anybody moves against oil drilling that would be even worse.

Everybody involved in firefighting or forest management says we need to do more controlled burns across the West, but every plan to do so is fought like hell by the residents. In a democracy, who has the right to tell them they are wrong?

So, yeah, it's stupid that we hold up solar farms for NEPA review, and stupid that Trump's crew thinks wind farms are a woke conspiracy. But this is a democracy, and it is very, very hard to do anything that 50 million people oppose, especially when those opponents include the neighbors.

One of my children asked me if solving our housing problems would be harder or easier than getting to the Moon, and I said getting to the Moon is much easier. There's nobody in the way who has to be moved.

At an even deeper level, I am not at all sure that humans would cope very well with no longer having to work to stay alive. Even though I am something of a rationalist, the sort of ultra-clean, hydroponics towers, desalinated seawater, all electric future they imagine makes my skin crawl. And without a future that a majority of people can get excited about, big changes will not happen.

Hell

I just finished listening to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), which I liked a lot. I noted with interest that although James Joyce was considered a very radical writer and a founder of modernism, he based his aesthetic theory on his reading of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Real revolution always draws on tradition. 

Joyce was raised Catholic and attended Jesuit schools but eventually underwent a sort of religious crisis and left the church. His alter ego, Stephen Daedalus, does the same in Portrait of the Artist. Joyce focuses much of the crisis on an annual weeklong retreat the older schoolboys went on to spend seven days thinking about nothing but faith. One day was devoted to the Virgin, one to Angels, etc. And one day to the Last Things: death, judgment, hell, and heaven. Joyce gives us a sermon preached by one of the priests on the horrors of hell that fills several pages of text. A sample:

Now let us try for a moment to realise, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. . . .

—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. . . .

—But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property that it preserves that which it burns and though it rages with incredible intensity it rages for ever.

This is fiction, but all of this is, as Joyce tells us, taken from actual medieval and Renaissance theologians. The church really taught that this was the fate of all who died in mortal sin, so not just serial killers but anyone who masturbated or indulged in anger.

And this is where Christianity lost me. I want no part of a God who punishes. I know that these days there is much talk of hell as just being bad because you are deprived of God's presence or what have you. But I'm not having that, either; if God can fix us, he should, and if he can't he should let us disappear from the world.

The spirit of vengeance is contrary to everything I regard as holy, and I hate it.

After the Fall

My latest fiction project is a genre fantasy novel set in my old gaming world. I have been creating adventures in this world since 1982, so I know a huge amount about it, and I think that shows in the richness of the setting. I have plans for this to become a series, and I had already written about 50 pages of the second volume before I got distracted by my audiobook project.

For me the story is about people born in hard times who refuse to surrender to them. While many around them fall into despair or actively go over to the dark side, our characters keep fighting for the world they love. In writing this I had in mind people from history who have lived through disastrous eras: Europeans in the 1930s, watching the content drift into tyranny and world war; Romans as the borders crumbled to the barbarians; Chinese of the Tang dynasty as their empire fell apart. Or how some people feel about our own time.

The book is also an experiment in a new way of thinking about magic that I derived from ancient Chinese shamanism, hints of which made it into early Daoist texts. (I wrote about my discovery of this material here.) From the blurb I wrote so literary agents could ignore it:

The story is set in the lands around the Middle Sea a generation after the collapse of a great empire, a cataclysmic event known as the Fall. In the aftermath of an event that destroyed many cities, killed millions, and (it seems) removed magic from the world, some people have given up hope, worshipping dark gods while they wait for the end. Others, including our characters, are determined to fight on as the world collapses around them. The key characters include: Bernicia Reliquay, sister of the young Viscount of Calyxia; the Viscount, Mercutio Reliquay; various of their friends; two soldiers, one a native of Calyxia and one from a desert land far to the south; a monkish wanderer searching for lost magic; and two teenage girls who join a band of wandering performers. The city of Calyxia is also a sort of character, divided by a rubble wall between a human city and another overrun by monsters.

I will be posting this as a web serial on Royal Road. The first two chapters are up, and you can peruse them here. The book has 55 chapters in its current format, and I will be posting them in groups of two or three over the next six months.

This is still a sort of beta text, so comments are welcome.

"The Raven and the Crown" on Audible

Available here. 

I have long wanted to produce an audio version of The Raven and the Crown, to my mind by far the best thing I have written. Over the years various people have suggested to me that I record it myself. But in my mind I always it heard it read by a woman with a British accent; a man from Virginia would sound all wrong. Last year I explored some of the AI voices available, but they just weren't good enough. 

But then, thanks to the generosity of my family and friends, I was able to hire a professional to make the recording. 

I went into Audible and discovered an amazing system for putting writers and voice actors in touch with each other. You initiate this process by posting a description of your project and a few pages of text for auditioners to read. I did this, went to bed, and woke up to find that 16 people had already posted 4-minute auditions. By the end of the day I had 30 auditions to listen to. I began working my way through them. Most were mediocre, like most of everything. After listening to the same passage 30 times and assigning most of them 2 or 3 stars I was starting to get numb. 

Then I listenened to two wonderful readings by professional English actresses. I assumed that I would not be able to afford them, but I figured I might as well start at the top. So I reached out to the reader I rated the highest, Sarah Kempton, and was astonished that we were able to reach an agreement. As my children told me, voice acting is a brutal business.

The process works like this: you agree on a price, then create a contract within the Audible system. The system specifies all the terms and so on; the enforcement mechanism is that nobody in the audio book business can afford to be blacklisted by Audible. The reader produces a 15-minute segment. If you accept it, you pay half the agreed price in advance. Then the reader begins uploading chapters, which you listen to. 

I loved this. Sarah Kempton's voice is exactly what I imagined when I told people I wanted to hear the story read by a British woman. I was immediately carried away into the world I had made. It took me eight years to write this book, but somehow listening to it in Kempton's voice made it more powerful for me than it ever had been before. I have rarely in my life felt so swept up into a story, and the time I spent listening to each chapter as it came in was by far the best part of many recent days. There were glitches – lines skipped, words misread or mispronounced, etc. But this turned out to be no problem; I just sent Kempton the exact time of the error and she edited the file to fix them. Usually I could  not detect any issue with the audio after amendment, and I am willing to bet that no other listener will be able to tell where the changes were made.

My wife asked me if I were following along in the text, and I was at first puzzled by this question. I did not need to. I know what my writing sounds like, and every error jarred in my mind. That, incidentally, is why I am such a bad editor of my own work; I hear too clearly what I meant to write.

Then it was done. I felt sad, because I had loved this process so much. But the end of this process means I can share it with the world.

Alistair Moffat, "The Sea Peoples: the History of Celtic Britain and Ireland"

Medieval Monastery on Skellig Michael, Ireland

From my old web site:

“This is a history,” Alistair Moffat tells us, “of whispers and forgetfulness, a story of how the memories and understandings of the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland almost faded into inconsequence.” Right away Moffat impresses us with the beauty of his language, the power of his love for his homeland, and the imprecision of his thinking. What is a history of forgetfulness, anyway? But it is a lovely phrase and it serves as well as any other to introduce Moffat’s delightful and unusual little book. Not really a history, The Sea Peoples (2002) might be better described as an exploration across time and space. Moffat wanders the Celtic lands of Britain and Ireland, especially Wales, Cornwall, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, talking to people, describing what he sees, and relating the odd historical anecdote. The historical stories come without concern for chronology, touching on whatever catches Moffat’s interest. We get a little on the pre-Roman Britons and the pagan Irish, a little more on medieval monks, a nice chapter on the arrival of the Vikings and the formation of the half Scottish, half Viking Kingdom of the Isles, and a fair amount on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The stories are fascinating and Moffat tells them well. I learned much, especially about the revival of the Welsh language in the nineteenth century, based on dissenting chapels and hymn singing, and the history of the Scottish borders. I enjoyed almost every page, and I heartily recommend Moffat’s book.

Moffat occasionally goes in for what strikes me as excessive anti-English ranting, but without ever lying or exaggerating – given how many horrible things the English have done to the Welsh and the Irish, he hardly has to – and he also describes a few of the atrocities the Welsh and Irish have inflicted in return. He dwells in particular on the many ways lowland Scots brutalized their highland countrymen, and King James VI and I is one of the story’s worst villains. Among other sundry oppressions he punished a few rebellious clans by banning their surnames. It became a capital crime to use the name MacGregor, and several MacGregors were executed for the offense of going by their own name. Mainly, though, Moffat celebrates the land and people of Britain’s western shores. He visits a builder of traditional Irish boats, hikes the Welsh mountains while reliving the struggle against Edward I, peruses ancient crosses on the Isle of Man. He goes to Padstow to see the famous ‘Obby ‘Oss, where drunk Cornishmen tell him to get the fuck out of their town. Moffat, not the least daunted, regards this behavior as typically Celtic, and he seems pleased that the Padstow men are determined to keep their ancient festival their own.

Moffat is himself a lowland Scot with roots in the border country, and he makes his living as a producer for Scottish television. By way of a midlife crisis he has thrown himelf into Celtic nationalism, learning Gaelic and producing a series of documentaries about the Celtic lands. The book is, as I said, delightful, but I find this sort of small-country nationalism to be a deeply puzzling thing. Alistair Moffat is a citizen of the world, a resident of multi-cultural metropolis, a master of high technology and contemporary art. What, exactly, is he doing in the Hebrides, mucking around in tweed and learning a language that none of his ancestors spoke? (The Celtic element of border culture was Welsh, not Gaelic, as Moffat himself explains.) Why is he associating himself with a history of defeat and oppression, instead of celebrating the Scottish Enlightenment or the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo? I don’t get it. I realize, though, that many of my fellow humans feel this sort of pull toward a small world that they can claim as their own. So I read books like Moffat’s with interest, and wonder what his obsession means.

What, exactly, is Celtic about the western fringe of Britain? Moffat devotes a lot of attention to language, and learning Gaelic has been part of his personal quest. But, as he explains, Gaelic is dying out, and he believes Irish is not far behind it on the road to extinction. Moffat spends a lot of time in Cornwall and on the Isle of Man, where the ancient languages have no more native speakers and are maintained only by a few hobbyists. Only in Wales, he says, does the native language have real strength. So while Celtic is a linguistic term, it is hard to see how language defines the culture of the region. There is history, to be sure, but what do these regions have in common historically but opposition to, and oppression by, English-speaking lowlanders? Moffat has a go at defining a Celtic view of the world, but the only things he comes up with are a love of heavy drinking, a delight in music, a fondness for flowery oratory, a tolerance for bland food, and greater-than-normal interest in sex. On such things we found our personal identities. Over them we fight wars and stage revolutions.

Everything else Moffat finds to say about “Celtic” culture seems to me to be more about pre-modern, peasant culture than anything particularly Celtic. Take, for example, Moffat’s words on how the Celts measured time:

The Celtic way of reckoning time was very different from our modern method of dividing the year into months, days, and hours. The Celtic year was arranged around four quarter-day festivals which took their cue not from the date on the calendar, but from the weather, the landscape and the behavior of animals. (31) 

Which is pretty much the way everyone in pre-modern Europe reckoned time. All Moffat says about how much the Celts love the landscape of their homes, how strongly they have clung to their tiny farms in the face of huge pressure to leave, how deeply they distrust city-based power, and so on, applies equally well to peasants just about everywhere else in the world. I often observe this about nationalists of various kinds. When pressed to name the special characteristics of their homelands, they can do no better than to describe humanity. Small country nationalism is an assertion of difference. I am not like everyone else, says the proud Welshman, Breton, Basque, or Quebecois. But the differences they point to strike me as insignificant, especially compared to the gulf that separates a modern man like Moffat from any of his ancestors born before 1850. In what sense is Alistair Moffat more like Owen Glendower than he is like me?

I think the interest of modern metropolitans in the rural nations of their ancestors grows out of dissatisfaction with the lives we live. Even for successful TV producers, the planet-wide sameness of modern society, the sterility of air-conditioned towers that separate us from the soil and the weather, and the pointlessness of so much that we do batter our souls and full us with emptiness. We are safe from disease and hunger, even tooth pain, but instead of contentment we feel loss. Surrounded by people, we feel alone. We have trouble feeling that any of the greatness around us is our own. We are strangers in the metropolis and our most pressing question is, who am I? The response of many people is to turn their backs on the broader world and immerse themselves in something small. The very smallness of these identities, their hopelessness backwardness, their legacies of defeats and conquests, makes them beacons of meaning in a world that values only celebrity and success. I am a Celt, Alistiar Moffat says to the mirror, and this answer gives him a place to stand amidst the whirl of post-industrial civilization. It is not place I can belong to, or much want to belong to, but his marvelous book gives an outsider some idea of why so many people place their hearts in this quasi-imaginary land.

October 24, 2009 

William Dalrymple, "White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India."

Another book review from my old web site, written in 2012.

 

James Kirkpatrick

I have learned more from William Dalrymple's fascinating White Mughals (2002) than anything else I have read in years. This is partly because it is set in a time and place I knew almost nothing about, but there is more. The story Dalrymple tells is one of those in which romance and family life collide with historical change, personalizing great events and casting new light on human life amidst the whirl of cultural conflict. Dalrymple draws many characters and events into his narrative, and almost always the additions add richness to his tale rather than simple heft. The book is quite long, 400 substantial pages, and it seemed even longer because of the confusing thicket of Indian and Persian names, Mughal titles, and unfamiliar institutions. But the length allows Dalrymple to depict a whole world. We see the courts of the dying Mughal empire, the lives of noble women enclosed in the zenana but still wielding great influence, the pageantry of Indian Islam, the adventure of young men come out to work for the mighty East India Company, most of them doomed to early death but the lucky survivors more likely to get very, very rich than almost any group of ambitious merchants in history.

The center of the tale is the marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident (ambassador) at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad from 1798 to 1805, to Khair un-Nissa, a Mughal woman of very aristocratic family. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been routine for British men in India to marry Indian women, and indeed to assimilate themselves to Indian culture in other ways. We have many depictions of Englishmen in this period smoking hookahs in native costume while they watch performances of dancing girls or join the hunts of Rajahs and Mughals. Around 1800, though, this was changing. The more puritanical, nationalist, and racist attitudes of the Victorian age were taking hold among the agents of Imperial Britain, and to "go native" was seen more and more as a betrayal of Englishness and the white race. James's marriage caused a great scandal and was the subject of three formal investigations. It is largely as a result of this scandal that we know so much about James and Khair; the many English-Indian marriages of earlier times excited little comment, and so passed mostly beneath the notice of history.

Khair-un-Nissa

James Kirkpatrick had the mindset of the earlier generation. He was a great admirer of Indian culture and of Islam. When he attended the Nizam's court, he dressed as a Mughal nobleman, and he became an expert both in the languages of the court (Persian and Urdu) and in its rituals. It is hardly surprising that when he fell in love, it was with a native woman. James tried at first to keep his marriage from his English superiors, but he had arrived in India too late for his actions to avoid attracting attention. Word spread, and not in pleasant forms. The first rumors that reached Calcutta said that James had raped Khair and then bullied her family into handing her over to him. Since the Nizam of Hyderabad was a crucial English ally in their struggle to control India and keep the French out, this naturally caused great alarm. As the inquests showed, though, it was not true. Rather, it seems that James was at first the victim of a plot hatched by Khair's mother and grandmother, who allowed him to meet their beautiful young daughter and then encouraged the feelings of the two lovers, even allowing them to sleep together before they were formally wed. Why they did this is somewhat obscure, although there was no shortage of rumors. As Dalrymple reconstructs the tale, it seems that they wanted, first, to abort a match proposed for Khair by her uncle and guardian, to a man that the women thought completely unsuitable. They considered the powerful, wealthy, much-admired British resident a much better match, and so they engineered the affair. Or perhaps, as other sources have it, it was driven by Khair herself (above), who fell in love with Kirkpatrick after observing him from behind a curtain, and then as a spoiled favorite child induced her relatives to grant her will. The result of this conniving was that Khair become pregnant, and Kirkpatrick "did the right thing" by formally marrying her.

However the relationship began, it blossomed into a great love. James repeatedly risked his career by determined loyalty to Khair, and she risked her life by fidelity to him. They had two children together, and seemed to have shared much happiness before a series of tragic events got under way that I will not spoil. It is a lovely tale.

The Kirkpatrick Children

The two children were sent to be educated in England, and one of them grew up to be a famous beauty who knew Thomas Carlyle and served as the inspiration for one of his characters. George Chinnery painted the two children just as they were leaving for Britain, a famous image that now hangs in the board room of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (above). This was their last week as Indians, dressed in Mughal court finery. As soon as they boarded the ship for England they became George and Kitty Kirkpatrick and were brought up to be English, deprived of all contact with their Indian relatives and their early lives.

In telling this story Dalrymple is not interested primarily in just this one romance. Because both husband and wife were so politically important, their marriage became embroiled in the politics of the Nizam's court, and my favorite parts of the book were actually those that examined the rise and fall of ministers and the mix of ceremonial whirl and political tension that was court life in eighteenth-century India. Dalrymple wonderfully evokes the lost world of late Mughal India, with its poets, saints, warriors, sorcerers, ambitious courtiers, and powerful women who controlled events from behind the scenes. This age still had much of the flavor of medieval Persia, but it is copiously documented, so we can follow the lives of noble Hyderabadis in their own letters and proclamations, local chronicles, reports from British and French ambassadors, and many other sources. My favorite character was the wily minister Aristu Jah ("glory of Aristotle"), who guided Hyderabad through the violent storms of Indian politics at a time when many states disappeared. One of Aristu Jah's few serious mistakes was to convince his master to make war on the Maratha Confederacy, a powerful league of Hindu princes to his north. After Hyderabad was badly beaten in the war, the Maratha chief minister insisted that Aristu Jah be handed over as his prisoner. So Aristu Jah was packed off to prison in Pune, and Hyderabad had to give up much territory along the border and pay a huge indemnity. Did this stop Aristu Jah? No:

In the late summer of 1797 Aristu Jah, the former Prime Minister who had ben imprisoned in Pune for over two years, sent some extraordinary news to the Nizam: not only had he succeeded in negotiating his own release, he had managed to get the Marathas to agree to return almost all the land and fortresses that had been ceded to them after the Battle of Kharlda. They had even waived the enormous indemnity owed to them by the Nizam. So astounding was this news, and so remarkable was Aristu Jah's achievement in neogtiating it from confinement, that many of his contemporaries assumed that he could only have achieved this coup with the aid or sorcery.

Aristu Jah

Even more than the lost world of Mughal India, what Dalrymple most wants is to evoke the time when British and Indians interacted as equals, and the British were just as likely to copy native ways as to impose their own. He wants to dwell on this epoch of cooperation and mutual admiration, before the racism and rigidity of the nineteenth century divided the British and Indians from each other. Perhaps he is a bit naive about this time, and perhaps most people on both sides never felt the sort of warmth that James Kirkpatrick felt for his wife and friends. But in our multicultural age, the behavior of the eighteenth-century British in India is a better model than that of their Victorian successors.

For a historian, the story of Dalrymple's research is as fascinating as that of James and Khair. Dalrymple first heard of James and Khair from a tour guide in Hyderabad, and he learned the basics of their story from a scholar whose office was in a crumbling corner of the old British Residency, built by Kirkpatrick himself. He followed the tale through the records of the East India Company and the letters of the Kirkpatrick family. Some of the crucial letters were in a cipher that he could not break until he stumbled across a letter in which the recipient had written in the translation above the numerical code. With each discovery, his knowledge deepens and the story grows. It is a historians' romance as much as one for lovers. Let me reprint one part of the tale, as Dalrmple tells it, to give the flavor of this remarkable quest:

On the last day of my final visit to Hyderabad, after three trips and several months in the different archives, I spent the afternoon looking for presents in the bazaars of the old city behind the Char Minar. I had forgotten to buy anything for my family, and with my eye on my watch, as the plane to Delhi was due to take off in only five hours' time, I frantically trailed from shop to shop, looking for someone who could sell me some of Hyderabad's great specialty: decorated Bidri metalwork. Eventually a boy offered to take me to a shop where he said I could find a Bidri box. He led me deep into the labyrinth behind the Chowk Masjid. There, down a small alley, lay a shop where promised I would find ‘booxies booxies.'

The shop did not in fact sell boxes, but books (or ‘booksies', as my guide had been trying to tell me). Or rather, not so much books as Urdu and Persian manuscripts and very rare printed chronicles. These the proprietor had bought up from private Hyderabadi libraries when the great aristrocratic city palaces were being stripped and bulldozed throughout the sixties and seventies. They now lay stacked from floor to ceiling in a dusty, ill-lit shop the size of a large broom cupboard. More remarkably still, the bookseller knew exactly what he had. When I told him what I was writing, he produced from under a stack a huge, crumbling Persian book, the Kitab Tuhfat al-‘Alam, by Abdul Lateef Shushtari, a name I already knew well from James Kirkpatrick's letters. The book turnout to be a fascinating six-hundred-page autobiography by Khair un-Nissa's first cousin, written in Hyderabad in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of her marriage to James. There were other manuscripts, too, including a very rare Hyderabadi history of the period, the Gulzar i-Asafiya. I spent the rest of the afternoon haggling with the owner and left his shop £400 poorer, but with a trunkload of previously untranslated primary sources.

If only studying history were like that more often.

December 23, 2012

Sarah Maas, "A Court of Thorns and Roses"

So I finally did it, broke down and found a copy of the most famous work of modern "Romantasy." This was for two reasons: because an expert on fantasy ought to know something about what is now by far the most popular sub-genre, and because I imagined writing a mocking post about it.

But honestly it was ok. I've read many books that were far worse; in fact, in terms of fantasy novels I have read in the 2020s it might make the top ten. 

Everyone I've mentioned this project to has said something like, "Isn't that smut?" But it really isn't. There's no sex at all until page 300, and when we finally get to it, it is pretty decorous by the standards of contemporary romance. The writing is ok, with some good passages, and there are even some nice bits of fantasy. 

How to describe it?

One of the reviews quoted on the back of my recent copy says, "Sara Maas transcends the genre." But that is exactly wrong. This book wallows in its genre. Absolutely every piece of it is something you have encountered before, either in the ancient archetypes of heroism and romance, or in recent fantasy. Everything unfolds just as you know it should.

Out heroine becomes a bow hunter to feed her starving family. She is so tough and resourceful and perky that she might as well be named Katniss Everdeen. She semi-accidentally kills a faerie, and discovers that because of an ancient treaty between humans and faeries she must either die or go into faerie and replace the person she killed. So she goes into faerie. Her captor is a High Lord (of course) of vast powers and great wealth, with a fabulous mansion and a flower garden even nicer than Mr. Darcy's. When he goes into combat he transforms into a monster I could only imagine as looking exactly like the Beast from the Disney movie. When he gets aroused, he growls, and his claws show. He is amazing in every way, but of course he is under a curse. In fact the whole of Faerie is under a curse, and there is an Evil Queen mucking everything up. For dumb reasons – the weakest part of the plot, imo – the sexy High Lord cannot oppose the Evil Queen, so Katniss, I mean Feyre, has to do it for him, with the help of an ambiguous nobleman from the Night Court who is the best character.

I can't make up my mind about this persistent feminine fantasy. I suppose for most women it is harmless enough, no worse than men imagining themselves as James Bond. But, really, if you think all the time about immortal billionaire Faerie Lords so handsome they hurt your eyes, somehow both dangerous and sweet, violent and kind, serious and fun, perfect in every way except for one flaw or problem that only you the perky earth girl can resolve, can you be happy with actual existing men? I wonder.

Sarah Maas, one piece of advice: you should never make it a key element of your plot that your characters cannot solve a riddle I guessed in about a second. That just makes them look really stupid. As a veteran dungeon master I understand it is hard to create riddles that are hard to solve but still solvable, but you can do better than this.

ADDENDUM

I just flipped through the second volume of this series, A Court of Mist and Fury. The sex starts right at the beginning – Feyre and her Faerie Lord are newlyweds, after all – and is significantly more, um, throbbing. So maybe the series gets smuttier as it goes along.

Jonathan Israel, "The Radical Enlightnement"

How's this for a model of human history:

1. Hunting and Gathering
2. Agriculture and Village Life
3. Civilization: Cities, Writing, Kingdoms and Empires, Aristocracies, Religious Institutions
4. Modernity

Don't worry too much about this scheme, it's just me trying to impress on anyone who needs impressing that the onset of modernity is one of the biggest events in human history. It is also, to me, something very much in need of explaining. We had several very rich, very successful civilizations – the Roman Empire, various Chinese empires, the medieval Arab world – that did not make this leap. Something else besides a rich, stable society with impressive intellectual achievements was needed. What was it about Europe in the 1600s and 1700s that launched us on this rocket ship to the future?

Jonathan Israel's The Radical Enlightenment is a 700-page doorstop of a book arguing that the key developments of modernity were ideas. Israel does not argue very hard for this view. Mainly he assumes it, then shows you in astonishing detail how these ideas arose, developed and spread. He goes out of his way to demonstrate that these ideas were not the property of any particular social class, or any one nation, and had no particular attachment to any particular industry (e.g., global commerce) or to colonization or anything else you might care to base them on. They did have some relationship to science, but the scientific understanding of many philosophers was weak (e.g. Hobbes, Spinoza), and there was just as much if not more influence from philosophy into science as the other way around.

In Israel's world ideas arise in remarkable minds and spread to other remarkable minds, which make their own additions and spread them to yet more minds, until they mount into an intellectual tsunami that sweeps away the past and strands us on the shores of a new world. The level of detail in The Radical Enlightenment is both impressive and annoying. Here is an entirely typical sentence:

In 1651, at the University of Nassau Dillenburg, at Herborn, where Wittichius (who was then teaching there) and a young professor, Johannes Clauberg (1622-65), originally from Solingen but trained at Leiden and destined to become one of the foremost Cartesian expositors in Europe, had been quietly infiltrating Cartesian ideas into their teaching for several years, uproar ensued when the two professors openly espoused Cartesianism in the lecture room.

If you don't want to read a university-by-university, professor-by-professor account of the spread of  ideas, stay away from this book. But I will summarize it for you!

To Israel these dangerous new ideas came mainly from two sources: the worldly, skeptical writers of the Renaissance, of whom Machiavelli and Montaigne are the most prominent, and René Descartes (1596-1650). I found it odd that Israel tells us nothing about Descartes; his book begins in 1650, and since Descartes had published all his books by 1644 we are assumed to know who he was and what he said. Besides being a remarkable mathematician who demonstrated that algebraic equations and graphs are the same thing, Descartes created a philosophical system that was supposed to stand on its own, with no reference to past thinkers or to revealed theology. He seemed sometimes to be saying – though in other places he denied this – that we could only have knowledge of God or the soul by reasoning about them, using data that we could only get through our senses. As Israel shows, he made many theologians foam at the mouth with rage, and everybody from the Pope to the King of Poland tried to ban his books and forbid discussion of his ideas. But they could not be banned; they were so appealing to so many intellectuals, including some nobles and some eminent churchmen, that they spread like Covid-19 across the European world.

One of my favorite sections of The Radical Enlightenment shows a series of European princes finding out that to maintain peace in their universities, churches, and bureaucracies they must develop policies about philosophy. They had, of course, religious policies that had been shaped over the preceding century. But as confessional conflict died down, philosophical combat heated up, and one university after another was convulsed by the same "uproar" over Cartesian and other radical ideas. It is fun to imagine these weary princes wondering why they need to get involved in professorial quarrels about qualities, substances, or the infinite.

To Israel, this is where the modern world began: with these bold intellectuals who rejected all past wisdom and insisted that we must think for ourselves about everything. These thinkers attacked every kind of received religious teaching, every kind of political arrangement (why kings? why aristocrats? why Roman law?), even the fundamentals of social arrangements, with some calling for the abolition of private property and the full equality of women. Against them were arrayed what to Israel are "traditional" thinkers who imagine that authority flows from god to kings to nobles and finally to male heads of household, and that this arrangement is the only thing holding the human world together, our only bulwark against both political anarchy and moral turpitude. 

Modernity, to Israel, is what we got when Descartes, Spinoza, and their allies swept away all those assumptions. 

I say, maybe. I will elaborate on my views more below. But to get back to Israel, what does this giant book actually demonstrate?

First, he shows that these new ideas – that reason must predominate over faith or tradition, that the universe is a machine that runs on its own with no divine intervention, that miracles and magic are impossible, that inherited political arrangements are arbitrary and should be rethought – had enormous appeal. After 1650 European intellectuals mostly gave up theological combat and devoted their lives to wrangling about the new philosophy. Many described first learning about the new philosophy as a kind of awakening that changed their lives.

Second, people thought this mattered in the most profound way. This was an era when thousands of ministers, priests, professors, bureaucrats, and noblemen threw themselves into abstruse philosophical debates because they believed there was nothing more important or more exciting they could do.

Third, calling people radical, moderate or conservative had real meaning in this context. Israel shows at great length that the people most taken up with Cartesian or Spinozan philosophy were the ones most likely to question royal power, aristocratic privilege, established churches, patriarchy, and so on. Most of the people who hated the new philosophy were deeply invested in religious and political tradition; indeed their main argument against the new philosophy was to show that it undermined all the other things they held dear. In between were people who saw the power of the new ideas but tried hard to accommodate them to Christianity and the existing social order, and they were mostly political and social moderates as well.

Fourth, many attempts at creating a moderate position that acknowledged the power of reasoned analysis while preserving the essentials of Christianity failed intellectually. Many people badly wanted to do this, but their theories were always torn apart by rivals from both the radical and conservative sides.

This is all very interesting, but I am not sure it is enough to explain the modern world. Not that I dismiss ideas as forces in history; I am on record somewhere saying that the Enlightenment might be the most important event in human history. But I doubt that ideas exist only on the intellectual plane.

I think it is important to remember that radical ideas were nothing new in 1650. The ancient Greeks and Romans had all kinds of them, including people who called for the abolition of private property and the emancipation of women. Nothing about Enlightenment thinking on science or human nature was more radical than the teachings of the ancient Epicureans, who said that all morality and politics were hot air, because we are just atoms floating in the void and the best we can do is try to live pleasant lives.

Yes, some of the new radical thinkers attacked monarchy, aristocracy, and private property, but peasant rebels had been doing that for centuries. Israel himself notes that some philosophers were very interested in the Diggers and Levellers of the English Civil War.

In the ancient world radical thinking did not change the world, and the experiments of the Levellers ended after a few years. But in the 1700s radical ideas rather suddenly acquired the power to remake whole kingdoms. How?

I think, as I have argued here before, that the difference between the Europe of 1700 and the Europe of 300 BC was the discovery of the world. In 1650 Europe was no longer a peninsula on the wester edge of Asia, but the center of the globe. From its ports, ships set sail for Patagonia, Japan, Ceylon and Zanzibar, returning with cargoes of exotic goods and exotic ideas. This trade created an astonishing economic dynamism; between 1650 and 1800 European living standards greatly improved even though the population roughly doubled. The number of rich families grew by even more. All this change would, I suggest, have created huge political tensions even without new ideas.

Here is Israel on the French Revolution:

A revolution of fact which demolishes a monarchical, courtly world embedded in tradition, faith and a social order which had over many centuries determined the distribution of land, wealth, office and status seems impossible, or exceedingly implausible, without a prior revolution in ideas.

I agree. But I also say that a revolution in ideas is exceedingly implausible in a static economic world with no inputs of new knowledge and new ideas, and that in fact the Enlightenment took place in a dynamic world where new discoveries were announced every month, and that this vast expansion of knowledge and experience was the crucial difference between the revolutionary impact of the Enlightenment and the minimal impact of earlier experiments in radical thought.

If you want to read in detail about how the key ideas of the Enlightenment developed and spread, The Radical Enlightenment is the best book I know on the subject. But it is no easy read, and I think that even its vast bulk does not sustain the thesis it advances.

Narnia and the Gate

NY Times feature on the 75th anniversary of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with several authors commenting on what it meant to them. Katherine Rundell: "Narnia thrilled me like no other place. It taught me to long for big pleasures: for enchanted landscapes and ancient truths, for redemptions and reversals. . . . I had a school friend who was so passionately in love with Mr. Tumnus that she has ever since found it hard to reconcile herself to dating adult men."

For me Narnia heightened my fascination with finding a door that I could step through into another world, which has at times in my life sharpened into pain that I could not. It was that transition that obsessed me more than the world or the stories. There were other worlds that I liked better – Middle Earth, Lloyd Alexander's Wales – but they did not come with that wonderful means of access.

For the cover of The Raven and the Crown I selected an old painting titled The Enchanted Gate.

If you wonder why I write novels despite being a busy career man and father of five, and despite getting zero encouragement from the publishing world, it is this: because in writing stories I have finally found my gate to the Other Lands.

George Eliot, aka Mary Ann Evans, "Middlemarch"

What a terrific book!

I made no headway with this in my youth, partly because it begins with one of the subjects I find it painful to read about: the clumsy efforts of a doomed suitor. (He makes so little headway with the woman he is wooing that she assumes he must really be there to court her sister.) I got an audio copy a couple of years ago but I had just done two other 19th-century novels and set it aside out of Victorian fatigue.

But this time I finished it, and loved it.

I already said here, apropos of The War of the End of the World, that I like novels by people who know things. Mary Ann Evans knew a lot. She had the abilty that we look for in a domestic novelist, to precisely dissect and describe the feelings of people for each other in many relationships. The description of the Brooke sisters is magnificent, and the various courtships and marriages are each different from the others but all compelling.

But so knows so much more. She gives us the political wrangling surrounding the great Reform Bill of 1832, agricultural laborers chasing off surveyors for the first long-distance railroads, progress in medical science and the rivalries it creates among doctors, reforming landlords, and scholarly disputes. Her first publication was actually a translation of Strauss' anti-miraculous The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846), and she knows enough about historians and religious scholarship to give us one of the best pedants in literature, and show clearly why his effort to produce The Key to All Mythologies was doomed. 

I wonder why there isn't a better television version? There is a BBC one from the 90s but my female relatives dismiss it.

Sarah Bakewell, "How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne"

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

–Michel de Montaigne

How to Live (2010) is gimmicky and cutesy, but still a fun way to get reacquainted with Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). I first read Montaigne's Essays during the summer after I graduated from college, and like so many other introverted, bookish people, I fell in love immediately. Some old classic books fall flat with modern readers, but not the Essays, which have been admired extravagantly for more than 400 years. And also, sometimes, bitterly despised.

One reason to read about Montaigne, rather than just reading the essays, is to understand how that famous text evolved over the years. The final, 1595 version was three times as long as the first text of 1572, and very different in both content and effect. In the beginning most of the essays were short and studded with Latin quotations from ancient philosophers; some early readers understood it as mainly a collection of sayings, with the personal bits in between mainly there to show how one might use ancient wisdom in one's life. And that was part of Montaigne's purpose; he understood philosophy, not as an academic discipline, but as a guide to leading a good life. But as the years passed and Montaigne grew more confident in his project he added more and more personal material until in the end it overwhelmed the old skeleton of classical wisdom. "My book is myself," he said.

Another reason to read about Montaigne is to understand that he was actually much more important in French politics than he lets on. His adult life coincided with the French Wars of Religion, an ugly series of bloody conflicts involving Catholics, Protestants, and the royal government, which was trying to hold the kingdom together. Montaigne presents himself in the essays as moderate by nature, without a trace of fanaticism in his being, and his behavior during these civil wars confirms this. He was a key figure among those known as the Politiques, who feared faction and sought peace by any means. He was elected mayor of Bordeaux when it was riven by religious strife, and partly due to his actions the city held together. He was summoned by King Henri III to assist with negotiations in Paris, and became friendly with both the king and his powerful mother, Marie de Medici; when Montaigne was imprisoned by some Catholic fanatics the queen mother went in person to obtain his release. He was also friendly with Navarre, the future Henri IV, who visited Montaigne at his estate to solicit his advice. I had no idea about any of this when I first read him, due to my habit of skipping introductions, and once I learned it I found the meaning of some essays much changed. For example Montaigne writes in multiple places about his approach to serving as an arbitrator, never mentioning that he is not referring to property disputes among his neighbors but tense talks between combattants in a civil war. 

Rather than his own accomplishments, what fascinated Montaigne was the particular moral situations people might face, and what they should do when confronted with them. For example: if you are cornered by your enemies, should you grovel and plead, surrender but stand up manfully, or fight to your dying breath? He then cites examples from history of people who tried all of these approaches, sometimes with success but sometimes the opposite. Some conquerors respect and spare those men who fight to the bitter end, but at other times they are enraged and decide to slaughter not just the men resisting but their whole community. And so on. There is, Montaigne implies, no course that will necessarily lead to success, so you might as well face up to events as manfully as you can. And he lived this; in the midst of civil war, he refused to place guards around his own estate, and once when some Catholic freebooters attacked his property he went unarmed and alone out to meet them; they ended up taking the food they needed but otherwise leaving his home and property in peace.

Another reason to read about Montaigne is to ponder the remarkable afterlife of his book, beloved by so many people for so long. His astonishing honesty about himself led many readers to say that they had never known how much of their own minds was shared by other humans until they read the essays. Stefan Zweig, a Jew living in exile from Nazi-dominated Europe, read Montaigne and exclaimed, "He is I, and I am he; 400 years has vanished in an instant." Others who loved him included Voltaire, Emerson, Nietzsche, and, some scholars think, Shakespeare; there are lines in the plays that seem taken from John Florio's English translation of the essays, and many critics have thought that the character of Hamlet was modeled on Montaigne. One person who hated Montaigne was Rene Descartes. You have probably heard that Descartes launched himself on a long quest to find out what he knew for certain, ending up at "I think, therefore I am." But you might not have heard that what started him on this quest was reading Montaigne.

What is so remarkable about Michel de Montaigne?

Montaigne was a skeptic in the classical sense. That is, he thought that many questions were simply beyond our power to answer, and for the rest our answers will be only provisional, always subject to revision:

We, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion.

But while it was conventional among skeptics to doubt the world, Montaigne was remarkable in that doubted himself even more. "We are, I know not how, doubled in our minds." He tells us that he vacillated about all questions, taking one side and now the other, changing his mind from day to day and even hour to hour. In many of the essays he considers a problem from every side, turning it around and around but never coming to any conclusion. In others he minutely examines his own memories and ponders how false and partial they are, and wonders how he ended up with certain opinions that he cannot justify. There were certain classical characters who also turned skepticism on themselves, but at least as their stories come down to us this seems to have made them strange and annoying people. Montaigne turned his doubts into charm.

He was also open about his faults – actually, weirdly insistent about his faults. He was, he tells us, too lazy to improve his estate as a Renaissance landowner ought, he resigned his post as a judge because it was too much work, he read only what interested him. Instead he would rather play with his dog (who makes several appearances) or sit around and talk with his friends. He wrote hymns to the joy of conversation, which was his favorite activity. He would, he said, rather go blind than deaf, because reading never gave him as much pleasure as conversation did. 

I am too much of a post-modernist to claim that the Essays reveal Montaigne with complete openness and honesty; come to think of it, Montaigne was also too much of a skeptic to make any such claim himself. But the Essays are to me one of the great treasures of world literature, in which a moderate, humane, and distinctly peculiar man laid his soul open to us, trusting the we would receive him with the same remarkable acceptance he showed toward his life, his world, his sufferings, and his talent for putting a working mind on the page. Reading How to Live has reawakened my relationship with one of my favorite historical characters, and I thank Sara Bakewell for that.

Fantastic Language: Lord Dunsany and Catherynne Valente

A fantasy writer can summon magic through story and setting and things that happen, or through the power of words. Many writers try to do both; Tolkien is the most obvious example. Most writers, however, do not possess these two powers in anything like the same degree. Today I take up books by two writers who try to bespell us mainly with their words. 

Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany) was born in 1878 and to me his writing feels deeply Edwardian. He lived for much of his life in Dunsany Castle, near Dublin. Although he wrote a bunch of books – I have seen numbers varying from "more than 50" to "more than 90" – he is famous these days for The King of Elfland's Daughter, published in 1924.

The story is very simple. A mortal king sends his son to woo and wed the daughter of the King of Elfland. With some help, he succeeds. They have a child. Eventually, the elf princess misses her home and goes back. The hero quests for her again, while their son grows into a different sort of hero. Eventually, all is resolved by magic. 

But that is not the point. The point is the evocation of the eldritch, the magical, the strange, and the wonderful by the deployment of prose that drips with paradox, archaism, and the highest extremes of extravagance. Some examples:

Near the Castle of Erl there lived a lonely witch, on high land near the thunder, which used to roll in Summer along the hills. There she dwelt by herself in a narrow cottage of thatch and roamed the high fields alone to gather the thunderbolts. . . .

Then Alveric strode away and came to the field he knew, which he remembered to be divided by the nebulous border of twilight. And indeed he had no sooner come to the field than he saw all the toadstools leaning over one way, and that the way he was going; for just as thorn trees all lean away from the sea, so toadstools and every plant that has any touch of mystery, such as foxgloves, mulleins and certain kinds of orchis, all lean toward Elfland. By this one may know before one has heard a murmur of waves, or before one has guessed an influence of magical things, that one comes, as the case may be, to the sea or the border of Elfland. . . .

He stood there with the cries of Earth faint in the late evening, behind him, and the mellow glow of the soft earthly twilight; and before him, close to his face, the utter silence of Elfland, and the barrier that made that silence, gleaming with its strange beauty. And now he thought no more of earthly things, but only gazed into that wall of twilight, as phrophets tampering with forbidden lore gaze into cloudy crystals. The little cries of the earthly evening behind him he heeded no more nor heard. And with all these little cries were lost to him also the ways and the needs of men, the things they plan, the things they toil for and hope for, and all the little things their patience achieves. . . .

The Elf King stirred not, nor changed; but held to that moment in which he had found content; and laid its influence over all his dominions, for the good and welfare of Elfland; for he had what all our troubled world with all its changes seeks, and finds so rarely and must at once cast it away. He had found content and held it.

It is sometimes lovely and sometimes frankly tedious. When it works, it evokes the longing one might feel standing by the ruin of an ancient castle, wishing fervently that a gate into wonder might open in the gray stone. When it doesn't work, it makes you wish the story were more compelling or the characters at least halfway plausible. 

Lord Dunsany's words are like the notes of an elvish music, calling us away to a more beautiful place; Catherynne Valente's are like the spears picadors thrust into the bull to drive it mad. Valente is a contemporary writer, born in 1979. I first discovered her through a novel for older children, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of her Own Making (2011). As I said when I reviewed it, I was immediately captured by her language, which seemed to me to evoke perfectly the feel of a fairy tale.

I have now read two more of her books, most recently her first, Labyrinth (2004). The point of Labyrinth is also to take our minds away to someplace else, but this Labyrinth is nothing like Elfland. It is an absurd, grotesque dreamscape. The language is like a psychedelic drug, destroying our normal sense of reality and replacing it with an incomprehensible vision. I was reminded of the visions of Carl Jung and Philip K. Dick, absurd on the face but hinting at mysterious depths. But if there are any mysterious depths, I confess that I did not find them.

Our narrator is a nameless female being of unknown origin:

I am the Walker. The Seeker-After. I am the Compass-Eater and the Wall-Climber. I am the Woman of the Maze.

An entirely typical passage goes like this: 

A half-realized body stretches out coral-encrusted fingers to seize it. Useless, of course it is useless – Each spindle-moment gone before my limbs could ever escape the glassine softness of their essential corporeality, could achieve escape velocity and roar away from themselves in a bloom of fire. I walk (will walk, have walked, I told you there is no coming or going here) in the Maze, a spinning silver coin in the sky, and the names of the flowers float out of my honeycombed skin, the mystic botany I once knew when was (am, will be) wrapped in my sanguine turban.

Our narrator wanders, feeling her mind slip away, meeting various spirit guides that don't seem to be much help, seeing strange wonders, speaking strange words. Another snippet:

And. There are here tremors of Doorways. They appear in the morning like dew-dampened butterflies, manic and clever. They travel in packs. At night the hinges change from right to left, or vanish completely. Some are no more than flaps of fur, iridescent in the light of the walls, or sweeping veils of gauze and silk, long curtains like a woman's hair. Some are hard and ornate, carved with a fantastic code of Arabic and Greek, letters drawn in a paste of crushed diamonds and the hooves of a drowned horse, written with the elegant tip of a black cigarette holder.

I find this sort of writing very impressive, and also tempting; it might be fun to try to write like this, to spin out dreams and visions without worrying over whether anything makes sense, to let the sound of the words guide my mind rather than the dictates of the story. But, ultimately, I find books like this very hard to read. I finished The King of Elfland's Daughter mainly because it is a classic near the roots of modern fantasy, and The Labyrinth only because I had already decided to write this post.

I want the books I read to have stories, and characters. I want them to make sense. I have never been tempted by vision, in the form of drugs or any other way. I prefer to see clearly. I wonder if this is a limitation. Are there, perhaps, truths that I cannot see because I am so wedded to the mundane, too earthbound to hear the call of the woodpecker who would be my spirit guide?

Lord Dunsany was a friend of W.B. Yeats, whose poetry I love but whose philosophy sounds to me like gibberish. Thinking over these two books, I have a sense that their language is more suited to short poems than to novels. That way, the way of the quick insight and the tremor of feeling, they can hint at meaning, can seize us for a moment from this world. Stretched out to 180 pages, they cease to charm or  to summon, and their lack of any truth to tell us beyond the hints of another world begins to drag and grate.

Costică Brădățan, "In Praise of Failure"

I was delighted by this little book, which aims to reorient our attitude toward failure and thus to the whole universe and our place in it.

When it occurs, failure puts a distance between us and the world, and between ourselves and others. That distance gives us the distinct feeling that we don't fit in, that we are out of sync with world and others, and that there is something amiss. All of this makes us seriously question our place under the sun. And that may be the best thing to happen to us: this existential awakening is exactly what we need if we are to realize who we are. No healing come unless preceded by it.

Should you experience failure and be visited by such feelings of inadequacy and out-of-placeness, don't resist them – follow them. They will tell you that you are on the right track. (4)

Brădățan, a Romanian-American philosopher born in 1971, could have given this 2023 book several other titles. From the starting point of failure he goes on to say interesting things about humility, spiritual emptiness, the ups and downs of careers, and the old idea of the good death. The tone is conversational but serious, the weight of the intellectual content never killing the mood of a great argument with an old friend. 

There are four chapters, each focusing on a kind of failure: spiritual desolation, political ruin, personal failure, and biological failure, that is, death. Each section takes up a series of historical figures who experienced and reflected on that kind of failure, with one in particular usually serving as the main focus. We start with the French mystic/anarchist/self-starver Simone Weil, who seems to be something of an obsession with Brădățan. Besides her near inability to function as an adult (e.g., feed herself) and her experiments with giving up all of her class privileges, Weil was a gnostic whose most profound belief was that this world is a mistake and we do not belong in it. In the realm of politics Brădățan chooses to focus on Gandhi, which might surprise anyone who has not tried to read his autobiography. If you have, you already know that it is self-flagellation from one end to the other, nothing but an extended meditation on how he had failed at everything from parenthood to teaching nonviolence. His assassination in the midst of the horrific violence that accompanied India's partition did not surprise him in the least. Brădățan's examplar of personal failure is another Romanian exile, the nihilist E.M. Cioran (1911-1995), who refused ever to hold a job and so endured a sort of couch-surfing existence, feeding himself by being charming enough to get invited to a lot of dinner parties, crowing about how badly his books sold. Three figures share the chapter on dying: Socrates, Seneca –who had some sort of asthma so severe that he regularly came close to fatal asphyxiation – and the Japanese writer and neo-Samurai Yukio Mishima (1925-1970).

Brădățan focuses on individual thinkers partly because he is unimpressed by big solutions to human problems. He regards democracy as a great thing but so opposed to human nature that it will never endure anywhere for long: "The urge to rule over others, even to annihilate them if need be, has defined Homo sapiens. We certainly collaborate with others, but in most instances only to assert ourselves more efficaciously." (66) In particular he has no confidence that education can improve the mass of humanity:

Twenty-five centures after Socrates's death by democracy, we seem to have learned at last that conversions through humanist education are next to impossible. Paideia (defined as a rigorous and comprehensive training in the liberal arts) is one of the finest things one can experience in life, and does involve a radical transofrmation when done properly. . . . But by its nature this form of education is an individual exercise; it works only in limited numbers, and – when successful – creates highly individualized people. The transformation brought about by paideia takes place within the individual, and only indirectly, in severely diminshed form, in society. Statistically, whatever the thinkers of the Renaissance and revolutionary period may have hoped, it's just not possible to cause, by education alone, a radical transformation in society at large. (77)

If there answers, we must find them for ourselves. And to Brădățan, those answers will be more truthful, more beautiful, and more profound if we root them in an honest appraisal of ourselves, our societies, and our fate.

I did not agree with everything in In Praise of Failure,  but that is not the point of a book like this. The point is that it sets one thinking. The point is the dialogue between the writer and the reader, the answers and objections one can't help formulating as one reads. I was launched, to take one example, on a long train of musings about people who somehow became famous for their humility. Like, say, St. Francis, or Gandhi. How humble were they? In writing about Gandhi, Orwell was mostly positive but found himself wondering to what extent Gandhi was motivated by vanity, that is, by a sense of himself as a scrawny, nearly naked man shaking empires with his spiritual force. Surely there is some truth in that. Surely if these people had been were truly humble, we would never have heard of them. Brădățan mentions Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote a book called The Ladder of Humility while founding a new religious order, intervening decisively in a papal schism, writing a bunch of other books, and generally serving as one of the church's leaders. Would any truly humble man have done as much? Cioran talked all the time about doing nothing, and he did do a lot of nothing, but he also published several books, one of them a volume of aphorisms many of which are about how one should avoid doing things like publishing books. 

Humility, I think, is a much more troublesome concept than Brădățan makes it seem.

But I would love to talk to him about it.