A Better, Shorter Review of "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony"

Europa and the Bull, c. 200 BC

One of the entries in Scott Siskind's book review contest this year was a review of Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a famously strange book about the Greek myths. The review is not bad, but it is 8,600 words long and for all its length fails to grapple at all with the questions that I think are at the heart of Calasso's work: what does it mean to say that the modern world is disenchanted? What is enchantment, anyway? Why do ancient myths still fascinate us? and are we rational moderns too different from ancient peoples to understand what they believed, how they felt when they looked at the night sky and saw dots of light that bore the names of gods?

One thing our for-now anonymous reviewer gets right: this book is a carefully constructed work of literature, not a scholarly tome. In form Calasso's book is a retelling of various myths, often giving us two or three different versions of the same story in sequence, or mingling them together. Some of the stories Calasso tells may be unknown to most readers, even those who know something about Greek myth. That's because Calasso's favorite source is the Dionysiaca by Nonnus, a Christian writer who lived in the 400s AD. Some scholars consider Nonnus too late and otherwise suspect to tell us much about the Greek myths as they were known in the time of Herodotus or Plato, let alone Homer. But Calasso simply ignores that and treats Nonnus as an authentic ancient source.

Why does Calasso do that? Does he not understand that stories, even very traditional ones, can change across a thousand years? He does. He just doesn't care. He does not understand myth as something that undergoes historical change in response to economic or political or whatever other factors. To Calasso myth is something so fundamental to humanity that it might as well be outside of history altogether.

One of the things that fascinates Calasso about the Greek myths is their focus on transformation. In the stories, things are always changing into something else. He is hardly the first intellectual to have noticed this theme; Ovid gave us the Metamorphoses more than 2,000 years ago. Just as things in the myths are always changing, transforming, so the myths themselves are always changing and transforming. To freeze them is to destroy them.

Calasso begins with the famous tale of Europa and the bull, in which a Phoenician girl was carried off by Zeus in the form of beautiful bull, then used and abandoned in the new world of Europe. Is this not a very strange tale? Why would a god spend his time seducing and abandoning girls, and why would he have to transform into a bull to do so? Why do all of the women in these early tales end up as abandoned suicides, hanging themselves in the desolate spaces where god or hero abandoned them? The stories do not tell us, and neither does Calasso. Not directly, anyway.

Instead he takes us on a tour of things he finds fascinating about the Greek myths. For example, what is the salient characteristic of the Greek gods?

If, driven by an old compulsion, we were to define what the gods were to the Greeks, we might say, using the principle of Occam’s razor, everything that takes us away from ordinary sensations of life. “With a god, you are always crying and laughing,” we read in Sophocles’ Ajax. . . . When something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. (243)

The Gods are life at its fullest, life overflowing. (Nietzsche, of course, picked up on this and made it central to his philosophy.)

The Homeric world is not one with much in the way of human agency; instead, it is the operation of the gods that drives the story. And yet the gods were not the ultimate power in the Greek universe. Above and beyond them lay the power that we sometimes call fate:

Whenever the dullness of the profane was left behind, whenever life grew more intense in whatever way, through honor or death, victory or sacrifice, marriage or prayer, initiation or possession, purification or mourning, anything everything that stirred a person and demanded a meaning, the Greeks would celebrate with fluttering strips of wool, white or red for the most part, which they tied around their heads, or arms, or to a branch, the prow of a ship, a statue, an ax, a stone, a cooking pot. The modern eye encounters these woolen strips everywhere in the fragments that have come down to us but doesn’t see them, removes them from the center of attention as mere decorative details, and hence insignificant. To the Greek eye, the opposite was the case; it was those light, fluttering strips of wool that generated meaning, gave it its boundaries, celebrated in. Everything that took place in the soft frame of those woolen strips was different and separate from the rest. What was it those woolen strips, those tassels represented? An excess, a flowing wake that attached itself to a being or thing. And at the same time a tether that bound that being or thing.

Isidore of Seville (c. 600 AD) could still write, “The woolen ties are so called because they bind.” But what was this bond? It was the momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net which enfolds the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze. (283-284)

Here is one of Calasso's great themes, the net of destiny that the Greeks called Ananke. Things sometimes happen because the gods will them, but even the gods are caught in the snares of necessity. What happens is what must happen.

Priam, standing with Helen on the walls of Troy, says to her, "It was not your fault; it was the gods."

No psychology since has ever gone beyond this; all we have done is invent, for those powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names, which are less effective, less closely aligned to the pattern of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror. The moderns are proud above all of their responsibility, but in being so they presume to respond with a voice that they are not even sure is theirs. The Homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them, it was as if every crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant that a god was present and at work. What we consider infirmity they saw as “divine infatuation” – átē. They knew that this invisible incursion often brough ruin: so much so that the word átē would gradually come to mean “ruin.” But they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that “mortal life can never have anything great about it except through átē.” (93-94)

And one more point:

Socrates himself cleared up this point shortly before his death: we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul cast on itself. “This risk is fine indeed, and what we must somehow do with these things is enchant ourselves.” . . . “These things,” as Socrates casually puts it, are the fables, the myths. (278-279)

So what was the enchanted world of the Homeric heroes? It was a world in which humans were weak creatures at the mercy of divine whims, whether than meant Zeus carrying off princesses or heroes forced to battle each other so the gods could be entertained. It was a world governed by destiny's grim dictates, symbolized by the streamers of wool that decorated every significant occasion, and by the long list of abandoned, dying heroines. A world in which humans experienced wonder only in the grip of divine madness that also brought them very near to death.

What happened to that world? In a word, responsibility. When humans decided that we could and should be captains of our own destiny, the world ceased to be the playground of gods and monsters and became the mundane place that we inhabit.

Calasso finds signs of this shift in the classicial world, and sometimes implies that the 5th century Greece was the first place where at least some humans disenchanted themselves in pursuit of rationality, success, and self-control. But with Calasso linear, historical time is never simple or absolute. To him, the shift from a universe ruled by destiny and divine power to one where men believe themselves to be masters of their own fate has happened and has not happened and is happening in every moment, in every person. These are two sides of a golden coin spinning through time.

That is my interpretation of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. But, really, that is not the point of this book. The point is to be led through the Greek myths by a writer who is an expert of the highest order, yet who cares about getting the myths right only as a doorway through which he shows us glimpses of the deepest human things. If you have any interest in myth and what it means, read this book, because it is wonderful.

My review of Calasso's most famous book, The Ruin of Kasch, is here.

Help from Outside Can Damage Local Institutions

From a review of Breakdown in Pakistan by Masooda Bano, part of Scott Siskind's book review contest:

Since Pakistan’s government is of limited use to much of its population, “a vibrant network of [non-state groups] emerged to meet the collective needs of the community and those of the poor.” They weren’t founded in response to availability of external funds, but as a response to disasters or a perceived need among some target population. Bano cites the example of Anjuman-Faizul-Islam, one of Pakistan’s oldest voluntary organizations (VOs), “set up in response to a famine in Bengal that left many children orphaned,” or the All Pakistan Women’s Association, created in 1948 to promote women’s rights, literacy, and economic opportunities.

With the dawn of the NGO era of aid in the 1980s, Western donors and charities began combing Pakistan for local nonprofit partners to implement their projects, and discovered this rich base of small-scale organizations already acting as an informal safety net. The way ahead seemed clear: train Pakistani VOs in grant management and project implementation, so they could tap into larger donor funds and take their good work to scale.

Grants were won; aid projects implemented; success declared. But as Bano relates, Oxfam soon discovered an unexpected dark side to its “capacity-building” work in Sindh province. It had trained six locally prominent welfare organizations in strategic planning and proposal writing, and got them started on implementation by giving them $1000 to work with. The VOs largely met their explicit project targets, and seemed ready to engage with international development funds on a scale much greater than they’d handled before.

Yet all six organisations were visibly more dysfunctional at the end of the project than they had been at the beginning. They were consumed by factionalism, accusations of favoritism, legal battles over control of funds. And they had lost virtually all of their volunteers—notably including the members whose monthly donations and contributions of time had for decades been the backbone of their work. An Oxfam official observed about one group: “From thirty active members, the size of the team shrank to three or four people who had become workshopias,” i.e. those who had gone to every training workshop and built the strongest relationships with the foreign donor. The kind of welfare work the VOs had previously done, based on mobilizing communities for mutual support, was now beyond their capacity.

Western aid to poor countries may have saved many lives, but the unintended costs have been very high. 

Two Visions of History

A professor muses on the students he is teaching in the late 1960s and their notion that we are entering the Age of Aquarius, and realizes that Virgil had also referenced the procession of the equinoxes in his praise of imperial Rome:

Redeunt Saturnia Regna: the old gold age that once was is come again. Walking home through the illuminated streets, in bed with Julie, at breakfast, standing abstracted before his students, Pierce came to feel often, like a clutch in his throat or a hum in his ears, that sense of collision he had first felt at Earl's; as though he had come upon some kind of crossroads, no, as though he were himself a crossroads, a place where caravans met, freighted with heavy goods, come from far places, colliding there with others come from far places, headed elsewhere: pack-trains, merchants carrying jewels sewn into their clothing, dark nomads from nowhere carrying nothing, imperial couriers, spies, lost children. The history he thought he knew, the path called History that he walked every walking day, that path that led backwards through a maze of battles, migrations, conquests, bankruptcies, revolutions, one damn thing after another, men and women doing and saying, dreaming and playing, till it coiled finally and unknowably upon itself at the side of a cold campfire on some vast and silent veldt —from that path, it seemed, there forked another, just as long and just as mazy, only long since lost; and for some reason now, just now, it had suddenly become visible again, in him as to others, dawn winds rising as night turned pale. 

Down that road, the past did not grow darker with distance, but brighter; that way lay the morning lands, wise forefathers, who knew what we have forgotten, radiant cities built by arts now lost.

Nor did that road go curling off to an ending lost amid the beasts: no, though far shorter than the road Pierce called History, it was infinite, because just as its furthest age rolled back to its first days, the whole road completed a circle; the serpent took in its mouth the fast-dwindling tip of its tail. Nowadays history is made of time; but once it was made of something else.

Now that would be a story to tell his kids, wouldn't it, he thought. The story of that history not made of time; that history which is as different from History yet as symmetrical to it as dream is to waking.

As dream is to waking.

He pulled himself from his new armchair with some difficulty and went to the window; he turned out his lights and stood looking out into the never dark city.

There had been a morning once, when he was a child, when he had awakened from frightening dreams, labyrinthine pursuit and loss, and his mother had tried to explain to him the nature of dreams, and why it is that, though you seem in them to be in mortal danger, you can't be hurt, not really. Dreams, she said, are only stories: except they aren't stories outside, like the ones in books. Dreams are your own stories, inside. 

Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of.

–John Crowley, The Solitudes

Sherman Alexie Against Literary Mobsters

 On his blog:

Dear Members of the Political Left, there are literary mobsters who share our politics. You’ll see them rail against the censorship of their thoughts while organizing to censor other writers because of their politics. They do this underground. They get readings shut down. They get publishers to rescind the publication of books. They serve on award juries where certain books are automatically eliminated for consideration for major awards. It’s easy to spot the mobsters. They’re the ones who only talk about the censorship of their words. You’ll never hear them defend the rights of writers with different politics. Some of your favorite writers are mobsters. A few of you Substackers are running with these mobsters. I’ve read your posts. And here’s a distressing thing: Some of you don’t realize that you have become a mobster.

The Songbook of Zengeren van Male

One of the weirdest manuscripts you will ever see, chock full of bizarre images across hundreds of pages.

Renaissance Illustrations to Marco Polo

Marco Polo sailing from Venice, and detail

People have been arguing over how to view Marco Polo's Book of Marvels of the World since it first appeared in 1300. The skeptics have had their day, but now the general view is that Marco Polo really did travel to China and serve Kublai Khan as an ambassador. There are embellishments in the text, but most of them are called out as things Polo only heard about and did not see himself; and as for the rest, well, the man to whom Polo dictated his tale was a noted author of romances named Rustichello da Pisa. Blame him.

Two versions of the Polo brothers doing homage to Kublai Kahn 

And one that shows the brothers receiving a gold passport.
These were real, one of the many accurate details in the book,

The Great Khan hunting

Harvesting pepper in Indonesia

The Polos served the Khan as ambassadors to South Asia, traveling to Indonesia, Burma, and India.

A battle between the Mongols in the King of Burma

And some of the fabulous details that made it into the manuscript.

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 have now (July 1, 2026) conpleted uploading this book as a web serial on Royal Road. You can read the whole thing here. It has more than 5,000 views, so somebody likes it.

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