Poem for the New Year

 

Good Riddance, But Now What?

By Ogden Nash 

Come, children, gather round my knee;

Something is about to be.

Tonight’s December thirty-first,

Something is about to burst.

The clock is crouching, dark and small,

Like a time bomb in the hall.

Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.

Duck! Here comes another year.

Greek Lyrics

Pure Pagan: 

Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments 

by Burton Raffel

To Zeus

Zeus, in whom all things begin,

Ruler of  everything,

Zeus, to begin my hymns

I bring You this

As a gift.

-   Terpander

These are Greek lyrics translated by one of my favorite poet-translators, Burton Raffel. The poets included in this anthology provide a glimpse into archaic Greek culture through their poetry. Among them are the very obscure to the somewhat less obscure, with a few familiar names like Plato.  There are poems and fragments of poems for everyone's taste. I enjoyed making connections with my own life and our twenty-first century culture. It was also interesting to see the influence that these ancient poets had on some of our greatest modern poets. Overall it is a beautiful selection of poetry.

Sportcoat the Deacon

Deacon King Kong 

by James McBride

“He felt like a radio tuning in to a new channel, one that was beginning to fuzz into range, slowly coming in clear, proper, the way his Hettie had always wanted him to be. The new feeling humbled him.”   ― James McBride, Deacon King Kong

James McBride’s novel Deacon King Kong is set in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969, soon after the poor but close-knit community has been decimated by the arrival of heroin. The book begins with an act of vigilantism—or maybe it’s just the result of drunkenness: One morning an old widower known as Sportcoat, strengthened by a bootleg liquor called King Kong, steps into the courtyard and shoots a drug dealer in the head. The dealer survives but the aftershocks are enormous. Not only does the shooting invite the police to come sniffing around the project but it kicks off a turf war between drug gangs competing for supremacy.

The remainder of the book tells the story of a wide variety of characters held together by ties to Sportcoat. There’s a running joke in which people ask just what exactly Sportcoat does in his role as a church deacon. He enumerates a list of random odd jobs, calling himself a “holy handyman.” The author has almost as many narrative styles as characters as he shifts from broad, slapstick comedy to shoot and blow violence to nostalgic meditations on New York history. There is even a subplot involving a hidden work of art that was smuggled out of Europe after World War II.

The result was a mixed bag for this reader. I found some of the vignettes exceptionally interesting, but just as I thought the story was beginning to coalesce it fell apart with a character or highlight that just did not work for me. The book fell short of my previous experience with this author in his historical novel about John Brown, The Good Lord Bird, which I would recommend you read instead.

Annual Top Ten Favorites

 Top Ten Favorite Books of 2021

These are my favorite reads since January 1, 2021.  They include an extensive variety of reading: from the Classics to contemporary literary fiction; from the very long to quite compact works; and from fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, and poetry.  It was a very rich year for reading and there were others that could have made my list if I were to expand it.  While the others were very good books these are the ten that I felt will stay with me over the years; in fact a couple of them were rereads.  

The list is in no particular order, but if I had to pick my favorite of the year it would be Metamorphoses by Ovid, which blends beautiful poetry with a richness of imagination that has inspired readers, writers, and artists of all kinds ever since.  Several of the very good books that just missed my top ten include Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the other five novels of Walker Percy, The Republic of Cicero, The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, and Invisible Boys by Holden Sheppard. 

Don Quixote  by  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

The Gallic Wars by Gaius Julius Caesar

The River by Peter Heller

Metamorphoses by Ovid 

Dialogues and Essays by Seneca

Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gassett

The Second Coming by Walker Percy

Dreams and Shadows

The Border Trilogy: 

All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain 

by Cormac McCarthy

"The fire burned down and it grew colder and they sat close to the flames and hand fed them with sticks and with old brittle limbs they broke from the windtwisted wrecks of trees along the rimrock. They told stories of the old west that once was. The older men talked and the younger men listened and light began to show in the gap of the mountain above them and then faintly along the desert floor below." (COTP, p 91)

The first volume of The Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses, combined intensely lyrical prose with the laconic wit of its cowboy protagonists. In it McCarthy mixed the quotidian details of ranch life with just the right balance of mythic phantasmagorical imaginings. Just when his prose seems to be over-the-top, he suddenly returns to the Beckett-like dialogue of two buddies alone on the prairie. One instance of this occurs when John Grady is out on the mesa with his buddy Lacey Rawlins--his Sancho to at least the extent that his adventures approached the Quixotic .

In the next volume, The Crossing, we read of two young brothers on a quest that plunges them into the bloody maelstrom of Mexican politics. Billy Parham who is later joined by his younger brother Boyd, sets out on a series of quests, all of which are doomed to failure. While the travels of Billy make up the action of the novel, it is less about achieving goals and more about larger themes of good and evil, fate and responsibility, and the nature of friendship and relationships in this gray and desolate world of shadows. Related to these themes that permeate the novel is the characters' ability or inability to clearly see the world around them.
"Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them." (The Crossing, p 46)

Cormac McCarthy concludes his border trilogy with a book that is spare and almost allegorical in its storytelling. In it he unites John Grady Cole with his older "buddy" Billy Parham, and focuses on a doomed relationship between John Grady and a Mexican prostitute. With Cities of the Plain the dreams have receded, the young men Billy and John Grady are older and their journeys have goals. This is a book that is bleaker in the telling even as the romanticism of John Grady Cole provides significant interest for the reader. The time is 1952, the place a cattle ranch in New Mexico. The West is changing as suggested by a brief interchange between John Grady and Billy early in the novel:
"What are you readin? Destry." (COTP, p 59)

Destry Rides Again by Max Brand is a classic example of the "myth of the old West". This is the life that is fading in the early 1950's and the question is will our heroes adapt or rebel against the inevitability of change. This change is not without difficulty and there are the ghosts of the past which they face as depicted in the following passage: "They sat against a rock bluff high in the Franklins with a fire before them that heeled in the wind and their figures cast up upon the rocks behind them enshadowed the petroglyphs carved there by other hunters a thousand years before." (p 87)

Shadowed by ghosts of the past and chastened but not defeated by their youthful misadventures, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham have become blood brothers of a sort, clinging stubbornly to a vanishing way of life. Billy reflects on their struggle, “When you’re a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be. . . . You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.”

While they fantasize about owning a little spread in the mountains, where they might run a few cattle and hunt their own meat, John Grady falls in love with a teenage prostitute. His desires collide with powers reminiscent of those he encountered in All the Pretty Horses.
''There's a son of a bitch owns her outright that I guarangoddamntee you will kill you graveyard dead if you mess with him,'' Billy warns him. ''Son, aint there no girls on this side of the damn river?''

Alas, for John Grady there are none that can compare with Magdalena. He does not worry about Eduardo, her pimp, with whom he must deal if he is to have her and his stubborn idealism sets in motion his inevitable doom. In fact, the question of one's destiny is present throughout this final part of the trilogy. Before the ultimate scenes of the novel there is a telling exchange between Billy and John Grady. I believe it alludes to John Grady's passions:
"John Grady nodded. What would you do if you couldnt be a cowboy?
I dont know. I reckon I'd think of somethin. You?
I dont know what it would be I'd think of.
Well we may all have to think of somethin." (COTP, p 217)

Combine McCarthy's two previous novels with the final somber tome and you have a masterpiece of contemporary fiction and a worthy contribution to the literature of the West. All three are works of a master story-teller, an author who speculates (some might say pontificates) on the nature of stories. So I will end with an observation about stories that I encountered during my journey through the novel.

"These dreams reveal the world also, he said. We wake remembering the events of which they are composed while often the narrative is fugitive and difficult to recall. Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his own existence." (COTP, p 283)

The Bard of His Own Existence

Cities of the Plain 

by Cormac McCarthy

"The fire burned down and it grew colder and they sat close to the flames and hand fed them with sticks and with old brittle limbs they broke from the windtwisted wrecks of trees along the rimrock. They told stories of the old west that once was. The older men talked and the younger men listened and light began to show in the gap of the mountain above them and then faintly along the desert floor below." (p 91)

Cormac McCarthy concludes his border trilogy about the west with a book that is spare and almost allegorical in its storytelling. All the Pretty Horses combined intensely lyrical prose with the laconic wit of its cowboy protagonists while its sequel, The Crossing, sent two young brothers on a quest that plunged them into the bloody maelstrom of Mexican politics. Cities of the Plain unites John Grady Cole with his older "buddy" Billy Parham, and centers on a doomed relationship between John Grady and a Mexican prostitute. It is notable for its shockingly brutal feral dog-roping scene, its coruscating, vivid depiction the lost world of small horse-ranch life in the American southwest, and also for its fabular epilogue, an extended meditation on the nature of narrative and the forms of human destiny.

With Cities of the Plain the dreams have receded, the young men Billy and John Grady are older and their journeys have goals. This is a book that is bleaker in the telling even as the romanticism of John Grady Cole provided significant interest for this reader. The time is 1952, the place a cattle ranch in New Mexico. The West is changing as suggested by a brief interchange between John Grady and Billy early in the novel:

"What are you readin? Destry." (p 59)

Destry Rides Again by Max Brand is a classic example of the "myth of the old West". This is the life that is fading in the early 1950's and the question is will our heroes adapt or rebel against the inevitability of change. The change is not without difficulty and there are the ghosts of the past which they face as depicted in the following passage:
"They sat against a rock bluff high in the Franklins with a fire before them that heeled in the wind and their figures cast up upon the rocks behind them enshadowed the petroglyphs carved there by other hunters a thousand years before." (p 87)

Shadowed by ghosts of the past and chastened but not defeated by their youthful misadventures, John Grady Cole of All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham of The Crossing have become blood brothers of a sort, clinging stubbornly to a vanishing way of life. With the U.S. Army proposing to turn their employer's ranch into a military base, the two fantasize about owning a little spread in the mountains, where they might run a few cattle and hunt their own meat. But when John Grady falls in love with a teenage prostitute in a brothel called "White Lake" across the Rio Grande, his desires collide with powers reminiscent of his those he encountered in All the Pretty Horses.

''There's a son of a bitch owns her outright that I guarangoddamntee you will kill you graveyard dead if you mess with him,'' Billy warns him. ''Son, aint there no girls on this side of the damn river?''
Alas, for John Grady there are none that can compare with Magdalena. He does not worry about Eduardo, her pimp, with whom he must deal if he is to have her and his stubborn idealism sets in motion a chain of events that cannot be avoided. In fact, the question of one's destiny is present throughout this final part to the trilogy. Before the ultimate scenes of the novel there is a telling exchange between Billy and John Grady.

"John Grady nodded. What would you do if you coundnt be a cowboy?
I dont know. I reckon I'd think of somethin. You?
I dont know what it would be I'd think of.
Well we may all have to think of somethin." (p 217)

Combine McCarthy's two previous novels with this somber tome and you have a masterpiece of contemporary fiction and a worthy contribution to the literature of the West. All three are works of a master story-teller, an author who speculates (some might say pontificates) on the nature of stories. So I will end with one moment of speculation about stories among many that I encountered during my journey through the trilogy:

"These dreams reveal the world also, he said. We wake remembering the events of which they are composed while often the narrative is fugitive and difficult to recall. Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his own existence." (p 283)

A Mother with Suffering Child

Hamnet 

by Maggie O'Farrell

“He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.”   ― Maggie O'Farrell

Hamnet is a historical fiction novel about the life of William Shakespeare’s family at the time of his son Hamnet’s death in 1596 and the writing of the play Hamlet around 1600. I was disappointed with this award-winning novel. I found it boring, but even worse was the prose style of the author that succeeded in what I can only call piling on the adjectives and adjective phrases in describing in detail the mundane activities of the characters.

The description of William Shakespeare’s early life, his marriage to Anne Hathaway, whom O’Farrell calls Agnes, the death of his son Hamnet from the plague and the subsequent impact of this tragedy on their marriage and his work comprise the plot of the novel. Will is never named and is referred to as ‘her husband’, ’the father’ or ‘ the latin tutor’. He also has very little to say for himself. This deliberate omission is most likely made to free the narrative from the weight of association that his name carries, but I found it quite contrived considering how much detail we are given about the setting, including the house interiors and streets of Stratford.

The novel begins with Hamnet but the central character is his mother Agnes who is unconventional, free spirited, a gifted herbalist and clairvoyant. It is the events between Hamnet’s parents’ meeting and his birth that provide a major part of the story. At her first meeting with Will she presses the flesh between his thumb and forefinger which reveals his incredible future to her but disappointingly very little subsequently emerges from this insight. There are some interesting descriptions of his former home and the life of the household. The story is narrated in a non-linear fashion with each chapter relating to a different time period. However I found the frequent back and forth an unnecessary stylistic approach that added to my overall disappointment.

The Encheiridion

The Handbook 

by Epictetus

“Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”

“The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.”   ― Epictetus

This is the little (29 pp) book that lays out the essence of Stoic philosophy.  Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Cytium more than three centuries earlier, but it is the works of Epictetus (along with Seneca and Marcus Aurelius) that form Stoic thought as we know it today. Stoicism, while not a well known today as the thought of Plato and Aristotle, was one of the major philosophic schools in Greece and Rome for a half a millenium. 

What makes the handbook most interesting today is the practical advice aspect of Epictetus' thought. One can put some of these ideas to good use even in the twenty-first century.
According to Epictetus one makes progress when "he censures no one; he praises no one; he blames no one; he never talks about himself as a person who amounts to something or knows something." And finally, "Never say about anything, 'I have lost it,' but instead, 'I have given it back.'" Follow the Stoic principles and you will not have an unhappy life.

Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Say Nothing:

 A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland 

by Patrick Radden Keefe



“Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.”   ― Patrick Radden Keefe



Patrick Radden Keefe's book captures the history of the Troubles as told through the stories of the individuals involved in the events of the days from the nineteen-seventies till our current age. The narrative starts and ends  with the story of a young widow named Jean McConville and her ten children. Her story provided the backbone for a series of vignettes and set pieces that held my interest from beginning to the end. The details of the various episodes told stories of secrets and violence, both loyalty and betrayals, and events that stretched from the neighborhoods of Belfast to Boston in America and to the Houses of Parliament in London.

The structure of the book with its variety of characters and interrelated events provided a sort of motion that mimicked the changes in the fortunes of the actual participants involved in these events. I enjoyed the set pieces as well as the detail of the lives of the important players with names like Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and the Price sisters; but I also appreciated the stories, sometimes horrific, of the less well-known persons, especially the children of Jean McConville who were shuttled off to institutions after Jean was "disappeared".

Whether the narrative was describing the famous bombings in London, the "hunger strikes" of the Price sisters and others, or the secret documentary "Belfast Project" at Boston College, the author seamlessly tied the incidents, events, and characters together into a riveting story that I found simply fascinating. 

No matter how much you may remember about these events, that is if you are of an age like mine that lived through this history as current events, I expect that you will read this history with amazement, similar to mine, at the details that the author puts on display. The book successfully portrayed many intimate moments while conveying history on a grand scale.

A Diagnostic Novel

The Thanatos Syndrome 

by Walker Percy

“he believed that there is no end to the mischief and hatred which men harbor deep in themselves and unknown to themselves and no end to their capacity to deceive themselves and that though they loved life, they probably loved death more and in the end thanatos would likely win over eros.”   ― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

The return of Dr. Tom More brings with it an unusual forensic mystery story intertwined with the mystery of belief. One would not expect less from the pen of Walker Percy.  While a common criticism of Walker Percy's novels is that they are repetitive, this is probably because similar themes echo throughout his fiction -- no doubt a testimony to the novelist's fervent belief in the importance of highlighting key problems and issues of humanity, and to his belief that their continued presence in our lives demands scrutiny. We see this from the opening pages when the narrator announces that he notices something strange going on in Feliciana upon his return from two years in prison.

Percy, who himself had medical and pathology training, described this kind of philosophical book as a "diagnostic novel." Although the emphasis is clearly on the book's ideas and moral themes, The Thanatos Syndrome is also a medical thriller. As such, it was almost inevitable that the author would revisit a theme that he dealt with on numerous occasions in earlier novels: the relationship between the "abnormal" and the rest of the nominally healthy and sane society. The recovery of the "real" through pain, suffering, or illness underlies almost all of Percy's fiction. It is rooted in his conviction (with a nod to pioneer psychologist Carl Jung), that at least some of our neuroses, psychoses, anxieties, or depressions may be more than just symptoms; they may actually be resources for learning something about our inner "selves."

The relationship between the sane and the abnormal in the novel seems curiously reversed, almost like in Saul Bellow's Herzog. It has been noted that the author himself described his fictional design as combining Bellow's depth of character and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s, outrageousness and satire. In The Thanatos Syndrome words of apocalyptic warning are spoken by Father Rinaldo Smith, an aging, decrepit, and cranky priest who is given to seizures, catatonia, and bouts of odd behavior. While he is hardly a figure to command respect, Smith is a typical Percy creation whose purpose is to make us question who really deserves to be branded as "crazy."

The theme of alienation is also important in this work. Dr. Tom More's return from federal prison has him unsure if society has changed or if, instead, he has lost touch as a result of his years in prison. His alienation and status as an outsider allow him to ask questions that no one else cares to. Father Smith, declared mentally unsound by More, appears to have a firmer grasp on morality than does society, as represented by the duo of Comeaux and Van Dorn, both of whom represent the forces of evil.

Although the novel is in some ways structured as a thriller, the reader never gets the impression that More is in serious danger. The threats against him are subtle: implied loss of his favored parole status, arrests for trespassing, and a cable television van that appears to be following him. The subtlety of the threats underscores the idea that society as a whole can be attacked nonviolently, with damage done before anyone realizes the danger. I found this concluding novel of Percy both convincing due to its strong structure while not as emotionally powerful as either The Moviegoer or The Second Coming. I would, however, recommend it to readers interested in southern fiction or Walker Percy.

Strange Journeys

In a Free State 

by V.S. Naipaul

"All at once the lilies lost their brightness; it grew dark below the trees; the swamped garden was silent.  The stream raged on.  On the other bank tree trunks were black in the gloom; leaves and branches hung low.  The wood of a fairy tale, far from home: what was so recently man-made, after the forests had been cut down and the forest-dwellers flushed out and dismissed, what had perhaps been intended only as an effect of art in a landscape made secure, had become natural.  It spoke of the absence of men, danger." (p 128)

Nominally a novel, but actually more like a collection of short stories, In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul is in this way different than other works of Naipaul that I have read. But in other ways it is similar and even better than the others. This is primarily because all the five stories are linked thematically and they share Naipaul's beautiful prose style.

The novel includes stories that are all about people who find themselves in places where they feel, or are made to feel, that they don’t belong; the stories are about boundaries, purity, pollution, incommensurability and just plain strangeness. In the opening prologue, the presence of an English tramp on a Greek ferry causes uproar. The second story tells of an Indian servant who tries to adjust to a new life in Washington D.C. Next, in a story that demonstrated a striking voice with a melancholy that I found disturbing, a South Asian West Indian immigrant in London reflects on the ruins of his life. His relationship with boy he is helping deteriorates as he slowly realizes the failure of the boy to live up to his naive ideal.

The final story, “In a Free State,” is equally pessimistic. In it, Bobby and Linda share a car ride from the capital, in the northern part of the African country, to the so-called Southern Collectorate, where Bobby works and where Linda will rejoin her husband. Ethnic rivalries within the country make this journey perilous because the president, whose politically and militarily dominant people control the north, has set up roadblocks to apprehend the king, whose weaker people populate the south.

The basic conflict between the two characters concerns their attitude toward Africa: Bobby, a homosexual who suffered a nervous breakdown at Oxford, has emigrated to Africa and plans to make it his home. “My life is here,” he says. Linda has lived in the country for six years and considers it an exciting place for her and her husband to work, but she intends to go to South Africa, if it ever stops being “like a John Ford Western.” Her attitude suggests that Europeans can never be accepted in black African society. In the epilogue an Asian businessman travelling through Milan and Cairo reflects on cruelty and empire.

While I found interesting aspects to all the shorter stories, In a Free State clearly stands out among the lot. While neither of the two main characters are appealing, the contrast between the self-deluding Bobby, who claims to have some sort of authentic connection with “Africa,” and the cynical, weary Linda is very effective. They wear their prejudices on their sleeves, so to speak, and only differ in tone and personality. More effective for me was the setting and the use of description to maintain a tension that suggested (not unlike a Hitchcock thriller) the presence of horror just around the bend. Whether you agree with the view represented in these stories about the difficulty of adjusting your being to a new place and a different culture you can, through the graceful prose style of V. S. Naipaul, enjoy the book.

Sex Strike & The Thinkery

Lysistrata and The Clouds 

by Aristophanes

“What doesn’t polite society, in all seriousness, want to discuss? Sex, money, political corruption, bodily functions, religion, loss and despair?

These have been the very subjects attracting writers of comedy since Aristophanes penned “Lysistrata” as a vehicle for the young Joan Rivers.”  ― Gina Barreca

Lysistrata is a bawdy and demented fest of diatribes between women and men. When the women, led by the titular character, withhold their sex in their demand for peace the men seem to be at a significant disadvantage.

The name Lysistrata can be loosely translated as "she who disbands armies". That is behind both her mission and her leadership of the women of Athens who she encourages to withhold their sex from the men until peace can be brokered with Sparta. The play was produced during the Peloponnesian War and Athens had suffered a major blow when defeated in Syracuse with the loss of her navy. While they were recovering from that disaster the war continued with no end in sight (did I mention that these plays address very contemporary issues for those of us living in twenty-first century America?).

The play is famous for the roles given to women, particularly noteworthy since there is no evidence for women attending Athenian theater, and since it entailed the somewhat comic difficulty of having men, already in their phallic-oriented costumes, play the roles of the women. It is much more bawdy and extreme in its humor than The Clouds with the focus on the "battle of the sexes" centered at the Acropolis as a means used by the women, led by Lysistrata, to bring the men to their senses. The humor is magnified in the opening sections as the men who oppose them are old and perhaps a bit senile since the young men are all at war.

The pride of the old men is deeply wounded when Lysistrata declares that the women have assumed all civil authority and will henceforth provide for the safety and welfare of Athens. The magistrate cannot believe his ears when he hears Lysistrata say that the women have grown impatient with the incompetence of their husbands in matters that concern the commonweal. For rebuking the women, the magistrate receives pots of water poured on his head. When the ineffectual old men declare that they will never submit, the women answer that the old men are worthless and that all they have been able to do is legislate the city into trouble.

The women do have difficulties maintaining order within their ranks, but that just adds to the comedy. The result of this and further comic moments, including a riot surrounding the birth of a baby to one of the women, is a delight that transcends the centuries and overcomes many of the difficulties of translation. This has become my favorite play by Aristophanes.

While also a comedy critical of aspects of culture, in The Clouds Aristophanes takes as his theme the contrast between an older educational mode and the new interrogative style, associated with the name of Socrates. He begins with a prologue (lines 1-262), which introduces the two principal characters, Strepsiades (“Twister”), worried by the debts accumulating because of the propensity for chariot racing of his long-haired son, Pheidippides (“Sparer of Horses,” or “Horsey”). The idea occurs, with the assistance of “a student,” to have the son enter the school, the "Thinkery" next door, operated by Socrates, wherein by the logic of the sophists one should be able to learn how to talk so as to evade one’s debts. Not unlike sons in our culture, Pheidippides son refuses to attend, lest his suntan be ruined, and his father goes instead. He finds Socrates suspended in a basket from the roof, wherein rarefied thinking can be more appropriately done in the atmosphere of the clouds.

What follows is the entrance of the chorus of “clouds” singing and dancing (lines 263-509), following the incantations and chanted prayers of Socrates, to the alarm of Strepsiades. In brilliant repartee, the chorus is introduced as the goddesses, who, with wind, lightning, and thunder, patronize intellectual development. Yet the buffoonery that follows indicates that it is some weird intellect, for Socrates, in answer to questions about rain and thunder, assures Strepsiades that there is no Zeus but only clouds displaying analogies to the human bodily functions of passing water or gas. Strepsiades is convinced and agrees to become a student.  He proves to be incompetent as a student, for he cannot memorize what is required but only wants to learn how to outwit his creditors. Subsequent to his own dismissal, he forces Pheidippides to enroll under threat of expulsion from home. It here that he is exposed to the debate between “Right” (“Just Logic”) and “Wrong” (“Unjust Logic”), from which it is obvious that the argument of the latter will prevail.

Aristophanes is successful in parading buffooneries and a satiric presentation of his son's great success, he discovers that success means that his son now knows how to whip him. Along with a commentary on the ancient tragedians there are amusing anecdotes concerning child development in Strepsiades’ argument to Pheidippides, but Strepsiades has been defeated by his own intentions. 

I found Aristophanes somewhat more cerebral and obscure in this play when compared to Lysistrata, but the caricature of Socrates is enough to make the play worth while for anyone who is interested in the golden age of Athens.

Being Present for Your Life

The Second Coming 

by Walker Percy

“How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?”   ― Walker Percy, The Second Coming


What is wrong with Will Barrett? He is depressed and his golf game is off kilter. He has a sort of falling down sickness and that theme pervades this tale of revelation and change in the life of this widower who has become a somewhat different person than the young seeker whose story was told in The Last Gentleman.

In this, his fifth novel, Walker Percy once again surveys the themes of alienation, from self and from God, and dissatisfaction with the commercialism of modern American life. This book, while filled with realistic details about life in North Carolina in the 1980s, is able to speak to twenty-first century readers with its existential approach to life's problems. Many of the people Will encounters, and there are some memorable side characters like a chaplain whose belief is somewhat doubtful, remind me of the mediocre Christians who provided fodder for the commentaries of thinkers like Kierkegaard. We find Percy asking the important question whether people may be missing their own lives while going through the motions like shopping or wasting away on the local golf course.

At the center of the novel Will has an epiphany of sort that leads him to a fall that becomes a catalyst for a new life - a new relationship both for him and for a young woman named Allison who has her own psychological baggage. It was somewhat ironic, however, that Will's fall was due in part to his hubristic demand that he would commit suicide if God did not reveal himself. And even more ironic was that this demand led Will closer to being present for his own life than ever before.

Best of all is the way that Percy packages the story - in two parts that fit together so well that this may be his best novelistic effort. It certainly rivals the brilliance of his premiere effort of The Moviegoer. As a reader I was thankful that he returned to Will Barrett and found a way to tell a story of second chances and new love wrapped in an elegant package. The existence of god in the life of Will Barrett is brought home in a more thorough way here than in The Last Gentleman. I found it a transformation made possible by a reasonable belief.

The Chief Horror

The Forest

 “The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.”

― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

A "Different" Boy

Shuggie Bain 

by Douglas Stuart

“He had long perfected the art of staring through people, leaving conversations to follow his daydreams through the back of their heads and out any open window.”   ― Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain

In a book whose story has moments of wry humor interspersed between many more moments of almost unrelenting sadness, Shuggie Bain, the titular character, is tossed back and forth between disappointments too numerous to count. We meet him as he is growing up in the projects in 1980s Glasgow with his mother and family. Both his mother, Agnes, and the environment of lower class Glasgow are characters that rival and sometimes surpass Shuggie in interest for the reader. The combination in this first novel from the pen of Douglas Stuart make for an engrossing read in spite of a heavy dose of heartbreak.

After a brief introductory section and two chapters where we meet Agnes, her girl friends, and her second husband, Shug, we finally meet a five-year-old Shuggie who is dancing while being cheered by his mother in her Glasgow tenement. Shuggie is the last born among Agnes’ children. The other two children were sired by a different father. Agnes abandoned her first husband for a taxi driver who is rarely at home. Shuggie’s father, Big Shug, is a womanizer and has pushed Agnes into a depression due to his philandering behavior. Agnes has turned to alcohol, thus, becoming a shadow of her former self. In spite of flaws, Shuggie loves his mother and sometimes misses school to look after her.

Agnes’ behavior forces her first two children to plot their escape. Therefore, Shuggie is left with his mother. Shuggie hides from the outside world for being mocked about his sexuality. This leaves him alone and he spends much time with his mother. To make his mother happy, Shuggie sings and dances for her. When Agnes’ conditions worsen, men take advantage and molest her sexually. Readers get insight into a bitter and humiliating woman, whose downfall is catalyzed by love and marriage. Simply, it is a case of a dysfunctional love affair.

Shuggie is displayed as a character who longs to make his mother happy no matter what happens. Although he has been failed by his parents, Shuggie is never judgmental. Gradually he begins to realize he is "different" than the other boys.
"He felt something was wrong. Something inside him felt put together incorrectly. It was like they could all see it, but he was the only one who could not say what it was. It was just different, and so it was just wrong."

In spite of this devastating realization, or perhaps because of it, Shuggie is a strong character dealing with rejection by friends and abandonment by his father, just as his mother is also dealing with rejection. The rejection experienced by a mother and her son leads to a huge love that binds them together. The decade of the eighties is not kind to either Shuggie or Agnes. While Shuggie gradually enters manhood in his teen years he begins both to accept his gay persona and to learn how to dance for himself.

Stuart's book won the 2020 Booker Prize whose judges praised this "amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love."

Confession of a Personal Catastrophe

Lancelot 

by Walker Percy

“Can good come from evil? Have you ever considered the possibility that one might undertake a search not for God but for evil? You people may have been on the wrong track all these years with all that talk about God and signs of his existence, the order and beauty of the universe--that's all washed up and you know it. The more we know about the beauty and order of the universe, the less God has to do with it. I mean, who cares about such things as the Great Watchmaker? - Walker Percy

Following the example of Camus' novel, The Fall, Walker Percy styled his fourth novel as a confessional with Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, as the titular confessor. Lancelot is packed with philosophical and theological questions, questions debated in his essay collection Message in the Bottle (1975). Lancelot, like Percy's previous protagonists, has lost himself to everydayness, sex, consumerism, newspapers, and television. He is jolted out of his alienation only by catastrophe: his wife has been unfaithful—his daughter is not his. Percy, a Christian novelist, uses violence, shock, and the bizarre as a catalyst to promote a self-directed search. Lancelot, like the characters in Percy’s earlier novels, undertakes the search only after catastrophe occurs.

Through a series of fragmented flashbacks, Lancelot, failed lawyer, ex-grid star, Rhodes scholar, and madman, travels through his memory in an attempt to discover what went wrong. He relives the past, while rambling in a monologue to a silent priest who acts as a sounding board.

The search begins, as in Percy’s earlier novels, by confronting the haunted past, because only by understanding the past can Lance contemplate the future. In doing so he must, as Percy has suggested in his philosophical essays, “stand in front of the house of his childhood in order to recover himself.” Once there Lance discovers his father was a crook. He must then not only become aware of sin, of evil, but he must also see it and experience it. What he sees is his wife committing adultery, his daughter participating in an orgy, and his son admitting his homosexuality. The issue is twofold: first Lancelot must see his wife’s unfaithfulness; then in his quest for sin, he must experience evil—he must kill. While searching for evil, he discovers that “sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought.” Because his wife’s unfaithfulness jolts him out of his ordinary existence, he questions whether “good can come from evil,” and he undertakes a search “not for God but for evil.” “Dishonor,” Lancelot learns in this first-person narration, “is sweeter and more mysterious than honor. It holds a secret,” and he is determined to discover the secret.

So, the protagonist experiences evil and discovers despair. But for Percy, as with Kierkegaard, despair is a stage toward hope. Lancelot despairs of the modern world, “The great whoredom and fagdom of America.” But he visualizes a new life, a new order of things; “there will be a tight-lipped courtesy between men. And chivalry toward women. Women must be saved from the whoredom they have chosen.” His new life, as he visualizes it, involves a retreat to “a cabin and a barn and fifty acres in the Blue Ridge not far from Lexington, Virginia.” Joining him, he assumes, will be Anna, a victim of gang rape, who along with Lance is a patient in the institute. Lance links his future to Anna’s.

Percy, termed a stylist by many, has progressed in his style; the monologue device spans the novel. Yet he takes this novel one step further than Love in the Ruins, where the main character awaits the end of the world. Here Lancelot ends the modern world for himself and plans to start a new one. Again, as in his earlier novels, Percy reverses the traditional ways of making do in the modern world. Average happiness is conceived as despair, sin is better than indifference, forgetting better than remembering, wonder better than certainty, tragedy better than an ordinary day, and madness better than sanity.

The new novel, with Lancelot rambling to a priest in confessional fashion, breaks from Percy’s previous style. The monologue, which pretends to be a dialogue is broken at the novel’s conclusion when the priest answers “yes” to Lance’s newfound understanding and ability to change, to heal his broken self, as Percy has all his characters do at the conclusions of his novels. Percy, a Catholic, always incorporates religion into his novels, and Percival, the priest-psychiatrist, echoes Father Rinaldo Smith and Kev Kevin of Love in the Ruins.

The protagonists in Percy’s four novels all seek alternatives to their present alienated existence, alternatives which will enable them to function in a fragmented and empirically oriented society. Consequently, the fragmented self exemplified by Binx of The Moviegoer, Will of The Last Gentleman, Dr. More of Love in the Ruins, and Lance in this novel is reunified in varying degrees by the novels’ ends. Other similarities also exist between Lancelot and Percy’s previous novels. Binx is a moviegoer in that novel; Lancelot is a television watcher, while Margot is an actress with a company filming a movie in Belle Isle. Lancelot realizes, as Binx eventually did, “that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world, but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in illusions.” Percy also repeats his intrigue with catastrophe as a means of “rendering the broken self whole” in Lancelot. Binx in The Moviegoer, Sutter Vaught in The Last Gentleman, and Dr. More in Love in the Ruins realize that “only in times of illness or disaster or death are people real.”

Although Percy continues to pose philosophical questions in Lancelot—can good come out of evil, does tragedy heighten reality, how is one to live in the modern world—he has not progressed in developing new characters and ideas. They all echo and re-echo his last three novels as well as his philosophical essays. Lancelot continues a progression in Percy’s writing, for Lance, like the other protagonists, undertakes a search—in this case, a search for evil. He begins a new world for himself by personally and symbolically trying to destroy the modern world, by understanding evil through his participation in it.

The fragmented digressions of Lance’s mind are the vehicle Percy uses to convey his philosophy. I found myself getting bogged down in the author’s philosophical gymnastics over questions of the significance of the past, the question of good and evil, and the alienation and fragmentation of modern man. This made the novel seem a bit more tedious than its predecessors. This may be because he moved beyond his earlier approach to life as a journey and portrayed this narrative in confessional form. His use of this form seemed insufficient and led to a feeling that the protagonist, Lancelot Lamar was ranting at times.

"a perfect novel"

Stoner 

by John Williams

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

William Shakespeare

Today marks the 99th anniversary of John Williams's birth. He worked as an editor and academic and wrote four novels during his lifetime, all of which are published in by New York Review Book Classics series: Nothing but the Night, Butcher's Crossing, Augustus (co-winner of the 1973 National Book Award), and Stoner, my favorite, which was called “a perfect novel” by The New York Times Book Review. In his memory I am reprinting my review from several years ago.

John Williams's Stoner is that rare novel which is almost perfect in every way, from its plain prose style to its subtle portrayal of themes and evocative descriptions of events that are common enough for all adults to have experienced them - in ways that make the narration a pleasure - and which makes you stop and reflect in wonder at the marvels around you, past and present. 

I found the story often took my breath away as I intently pondered the beautiful telling of a story of love and loss. The pain and pleasure were so pronounced that the reality of the images created by the author had an effect that few books ever do. I found the prose style reminiscent of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, but with more hope present even as Stoner deals unsuccessfully with the vicissitudes of life.

This is a Midwestern book, set on the plains, about a young man who is schooled in the hardships of farm life but who flowers in an academic setting - up to a point. His taciturn being and stoicism both help him survive and contribute to his downfall in love and learning. In each he fails, even though he does experience small moments of triumph; yet even in failure his determination shines through the pages of the novel and makes this drama somehow less tragic than it might have been otherwise. The difficulty which Stoner has in communicating his feelings is palpable throughout compounding the inevitability of defeat for our hero. 

This novel in all its detailing of the life of William Stoner captures some of the passion and loss that is suggested by Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 (quoted above) that plays a pivotal role in Stoner's education. This is a story of integrity and persistence in living through adversity and loss.

Ghosts in Massachusetts

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales 

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Nathaniel in his turn would walk the ways of Salem, town and village, and ghosts would keep him company, never quite visible , lurking always just beyond the corner of his eye.  But he would pin them down on paper and when he had them there he would inspect them with a kind of literary credulity.  For it was with him somewhat as it was with Cotton Mather; useless to preach to the artist against the existence of witches; the very breath of the artist is witchery and magic."  (Marion Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts, p 277)



The ghosts of Salem and Nathaniel Hawthorne's past are represented in many of the tales in this collection. None do it as well as in his magnificent short story, "Young Goodman Brown".

In this story Hawthorne describes the titular young man on a journey one evening that would change his life. As the story begins he comes "forth at sunset" after "crossing the threshold" of his house and his life, leaving his wife, Faith, who talks of "dreams" and is, he believes, "a blessed angel". His journey turns into one of his own dreams or visions where one after another of the people in his life are unmasked by the devil. He gradually discovers that his own corruptibility which he fears his embodied in his fellow townspeople, and ultimately in his own wife Faith. Young Goodman starts the evening journey with "excellent resolve", but he also has doubts which are fueled by comments from the stranger he meets. He grows more concerned and conceals himself even as his spectral visions (not unlike the evidence of witches in old Salem) show the deacon and elders of the town laid bare in their consorting with the devil. The evening has led to Young Goodman's loss of moral virginity. It is a loss that will haunt him the rest of his life.

This is the classic American short story of the guilty conscience. The question Brown confronts is whether his heritage of Original Sin incapacitates him for resisting personal sin. In this profoundly ambiguous story, Brown wavers between the desperate cynicism of the corrupt soul and the hopefulness of the believer. Hawthorne mirrors the communion of the church with that of Satan's altar. Contrasts abound with Faith, the angel of Young Goodman, joining the fallen angel in his mind. His tale is a blend of simplicity and seriousness. But more importantly he portrays experiences, fears, and feelings that, at least in part, his readers share in the sense they may experience similar doubts and wonder about the nature of their own morality and mortality. Melville would say of Hawthorne that his writing was "as deep as Dante".

At the beginning of the story, he has already made his bargain with the Devil—hardly a token that he is among God’s elect but not necessarily a sign of damnation, either, if he can reject the consummation in the form of the perverted communion service in the woods. Whether by act of will or by divine grace, Brown appears to have resisted the power of evil at the climactic moment and given evidence of at least the possibility of salvation for his wife and himself. There is abundant evidence in this and the best of his early stories that Hawthorne has much magic in his prose.

The Gallic Wars

The Landmark Julius Caesar: 

The Complete Works 

by Gaius Julius Caesar



“In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.”   ― Julius Caesar






"All Gaul is divided into thee parts."
With these famous words Julius Caesar begins the first of his Commentaries on the Gallic War.*
In these Commentaries, he gives a chronological account of his activities in Gaul from the time of his succession to the governorship of Gallia Narbonensis in 59 b.c.e. to the end of the Gallic revolt led by Vercingetorix late in the same decade. During those years, Caesar and his Roman legions confronted first one group of tribes, then another. Only two sections, the first section of book 1 and the second section of book 6, are not about actual battle operations or preparations. The former is a description of Gaul and its inhabitants; the latter is an account of customs of the Gauls and Germans.

In his comments about the Gauls, Caesar stirs the imagination and stimulates curiosity by giving only enough information to make the reader wish more had been written. The account of the Gallic Wars is a reminder that war has been a continual factor in human affairs. As one example of the fury and effectiveness of war in ancient times, Caesar comments at the end of his account of the battle with the Nervii: This battle being ended, and the name and nation of the Nervii almost reduced to annihilation, their old men, together with the boys and women whom we have stated had been collected together in the inlets and the marshes, when this battle had been reported to them, convinced that nothing was an obstacle to the conquerors, and nothing safe to the conquered, sent ambassadors to Caesar with the consent of all who survived, and surrendered themselves to him; and in recounting the calamity of their state, they said that their senators were reduced from six hundred to three; that of sixty thousand men who could bear arms, scarcely five hundred remained.

Other examples of the character of these ancient wars included the massacre at Avaricum, at which, according to Caesar, scarcely eight hundred people of all ages and both genders escaped the city when it was taken, out of a population of forty thousand; the rest were killed; while indiscriminate killing was the norm at Sarsura and the Euberones, among others.

Caesar the Roman administrator is apparent throughout the Commentaries. He writes in an impersonal fashion, however, much as though he were preparing a favorable report to the Roman senate. Only rarely does an individual come through to the reader as a real personality. Even Caesar himself, whose name figures more largely than any other, remains an official and a general rather than emerging as a clearly visualized person. The Gallic and Germanic chieftains who oppose him are little more than names, and the same is true of the lieutenants who serve under him. The only outstanding exception to this general statement is the passage concerning Sextius Baculus, who, sick though he was, arose from his bed and saved the day for the Romans by rallying their forces when they were attacked in a camp at Aduatuca; he fought bravely until he was carried back to rest.

Of particular interest to English-speaking readers are those portions of the Commentaries that deal with Britain and Caesar’s invasions of Britain. Caesar’s account of the early history of that part of the world is the earliest of the Roman documents. Caesar tells of his first expedition, an abortive one, made in 55 b.c.e., and his second and more successful attempt the following year, an invasion that paved the way for the Roman occupation that lasted until the fifth century c.e. For his second invasion, he ordered a fleet of more than eight hundred vessels built and assembled, a logistical success noteworthy in any era of history. This fleet carried two thousand cavalrymen with their mounts and five Roman legions, each consisting at that time of about five thousand men.

Caesar was a remarkable man, one of the greatest in human history, in the sense that greatness may be defined as leaving an indelible mark on the history of his time. Few such men have lived; fewer still have left written records for posterity; and none has left a document to compare with Caesar’s Commentaries. The book occupies a unique place in the written records of the Western world. In addition to its value as history, it deserves to be read as an example of a concise report presented with an idiosyncratic style and flavor. The military greatness of Julius Caesar is the most striking aspect of the eight books of his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Whether you believe all of what is reported or not, this was an achievement of massive proportions.

*The Landmark edition of his commentaries is magnificent providing a new translation complemented by extensive footnotes, helpful maps, drawings, and illustrations. There are also useful appendices and even links to a series of scholarly essays on the Landmark web site.

The Study & Library of Cervantes

The House of Miguel de Cervantes in Valladolid, Spain*

"In Valladolid, readers of Don Quixote can stroll through the house occupied by Miguel de Cervantes from 1602 to 1605, the year in which the first part of the novel was published, and experience a voyeuristic thrill . . . . The house, though carefully restored, has necessarily been furnished with bits and pieces that never were in Crevantes's possession. Only the study, on the second floor, contains a few objects that most certainly belonged to him: not the "ebony and ivory" desk described in the will of his daughter, Isabel de Cervantes, but another, also mentioned in the document, "made of walnut, the largest one I possess," two paintings, one of Saint John and the other of the Virgin, a copper brazier, a chest for keeping papers and a single bookshelf holding some of the titles mentioned in his work. In this room he wrote several stories for his Exemplary Novels, and here he must have discussed with his friends the conception of his singular Quixote."

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, pp. 182-3.

*By Lourdes Cardenal - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1860473