The Smell of Burning Books

 

An Insubstantial Pageant

The smell of burning books permeates the air.

It hovers about those engaged in daily activity,

Yielding a strange sense of bittersweet victory.

Forcing our selves, attempting to escape the smoke

We feel the result of harnessing nature -

The written word is our yoke to the world.

The word belongs in heaven with the angels.

What beauty lies below, corroded by our touch?

Yes, there are tarnished tomes that remain.

Just as we turn to the spiritual for relief

We plead for support from the muses -

In vain, we seek what has been lost.

Simple supplication summons our spirits

Forth to the battle. Will there be future moments -

Recording our efforts to mold minds?

Seeing the possibility of pyrrhic victories

As the vapors overwhelm our souls,

We struggle within on this earth -

Players in the insubstantial pageant.

From Preludes of the Mind, 1996 (rev), James Henderson

A Pious Man

Job

by Joseph Roth

"One must write, even when one realises that the printed word can no longer improve anything. To the optimists, it might seem an easy thing to write. To the sceptics - not to say: the hopeless - it’s more difficult, and this is why their word weighs so much heavier. These are, so to speak, voices coming from the beyond, haloed by the radiance of futility." - Joseph Roth

Rereading the novel Job has led me to find it even more relevant as a retelling of the Job story from the perspective of the Jews from the netherland border between Poland and Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. It was published in 1930 and marks a turning point in Roth's career. With this novel, Roth takes a transformation of socio-politically motivated journalism to author as a poet of conservative myths. Roth takes for his presentation of Jewish existence within the elements of traditional storytelling. "Job" for Roth meant his breakthrough as a novelist.

Mendel Singer is a pious, God-fearing and ordinary Jew who lives in the idyllic Schtetl Zuchnow and performs there with his family a modest life as a village teacher. But the rest of his life will not be long because it through a chain of hard blows from the meaninglessness of his existence is torn by fate. Still he believed humbly that misfortune was just a test from God. The first blow hit him when his youngest son Menuchim is born with epilepsy. This was followed by the drafting of his oldest son Jonas into the military, with which his traditional Jewish faith did not agree. His second son Schemariah flees to America. Ultimately, Mendel Singer must discover that his daughter Miriam is with Cossacks, French, and what the strictly devout Jews considered the epitome of depravity. The Singers decide to emigrate to America. This trip can only be bought while leaving his youngest son Menuchim behind. In New York Mendel meets a new fate: He loses both sons in World War I, and his wife dies from grief over it. When his daughter becomes insane, he loses his strength, to tolerate and to believe, leading from humility and piety to rebellion and spite; Mendel loses his faith in God. From now on he no longer prays and lives quietly and inward. But now he learns the grace of the Lord; and the prophesy of a rabbi's wonder that his sick son Menuchim would become healthy is fulfilled. When the gifted composer and conductor Alexei Kossak (really Menuchim) comes to America he introduces himself to his father.
Joseph Roth tells the story of Mendel Singer in a language both allegorical and with biblical directness, whose theme is one of divine visitation and the wonder of God's grace. 

Roth's answer to the question of the meaning of suffering in the spirit of the Bible is the answer of a skeptic, whose life was visitation, the redeeming grace one fervently longs for, but does not to believe they could find or receive. The resulting novel stands in good stead beside his magnificent historical novel, The Radetzky March.

Notes on Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina 

by Leo Tolstoy

"She said she was sorry for Pilate. In Christ's expression there should be pity because there was love in it, a peace not of this world, a readiness for death, and a knowledge of the vanity of words." - Anna Karenina, p 558.


As I reread this amazing novel I was reminded of Kant's famous comment, “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”* I found the novel demonstrated this thought in ways that contributed to its meaning and import upon my current reading. 

One important theme was the nature of happiness. In Part 4, chapter 22, Oblonsky visits Karenin to discuss his situation, and he says: "Should you now be convinced that you cannot make each other mutually happy . . ." and Karenin responds: "Happiness can be defined so differently!"(p 508) Each of the major characters had differing views of happiness; for example, when Levin decides that "he would no longer hope for the exceptional happiness which marriage was to have given him," (Part 1, chapter 26, p 109). Is it even the appropriate goal or are there more important moral imperatives? While I'm trying to analyze the novel in a literary way I find philosophical thoughts intruding, thus how does the novel's depiction of happiness relate to that of Aristotle or Plato or Seneca?

Another important theme is the omnipresence of death in the novel which is shown in many scenes although the most moving of those for me were: first, the death of Levin's brother Nicholas: "Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible force . . . a new insoluble problem presented itself ---Death." (Part 3, chapter 31, p 413-14) Nicholas' illness would last a while longer but his death in Part 5 is almost an afterthought, albeit one with power; second, Anna's son, young Serezha's thoughts about death, after a fretful meeting with his Father: "He did not in the least believe in death, which was so often mentioned to hiim. He did not believe that people he loved could die, nor above all that he himself would die." (Part 5, chapter 27, p 620) (Ironically, when he fails his lesson his father's punishment ends up being a fun evening with Vasily Lukich) ; and third, the nearness of death at the beginning of a new life when Kitty experiences childbirth (Part 7, chapter 15). Do these and other moments contribute to the power of the inevitable demise of Anna?

I was also impressed with the epilogue (Part 8) and found that Tolstoy, in his own amazing way, was able to bring Levin's life and spirituality together in a way befitting his character and role in the novel, specifically I was moved by the concluding paragraph of chapter 14 (p 947) that begins "Just as the bees, now circling round him, threatening him and distracting his attention," . . . and concluding "And as, in spite of the bees, his physical powers remained intact, so his newly-realized spiritual powers were intact also." It seems that his realization of his "spiritual powers" relate to his life lived (as noted in the quote from p 930) and his immersion in nature and the countryside (brought to the fore throughout the novel, but particularly, for me at least, in his immersion in the fields with the peasants mowing hay (part 3, chapter 5, pp 297ff). There were other moments in his development worthy of discussion as well.

Tolstoy encompasses the whole world within his novels. This novel exemplifies his approach that at once brings into focus the humanity of his characters, the details of the world in which they live, and the philosophies by which they guide their lives. Spinning his tale of Anna and her passions out from a small moment in the life of one unhappy family Tolstoy shows again and again how our lives are intertwined with each other. His uncanny ability to demonstrate psychological insight into the characters is amazing from the moment they are introduced through the denouement and epilogue of this massive tale.

*Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason