Most Memorable War

The History of Rome: 

The War with Hannibal 

by Livy

“Indeed, that is the nature of crowds: the mob is either a humble slave or a cruel master. As for the middle way of liberty, the mob can neither take it nor keep it with any respect for moderation or law.”   ― Livy, The History of Rome: The War with Hannibal

Livy begins his history of the Roman War with Carthage with the following passage: "I am now about to tell the story of the most memorable war in history: that, namely, which was fought by Carthage under the leadership of Hannibal against Rome." Thus asserts Livy at the start of the decade beginning in 222bc, books 21–30. He was certainly correct regarding ancient history. The Indo-Germanic and Semitic races were at war with one another over world dominance. The historian notes that the two had a hatred for one another that was as great as their armies, and that they were not only evenly matched but also knowledgeable of the enemy's battle strategies and potential might.

Livy never downplays the exploits of Hannibal, a 26-year-old who emerged as the protagonist of his tale. Ninety thousand soldiers, twelve thousand cavalry, and thirty-seven elephants crossed the Alps, and he made up any facts he could not find in existing records. After failing to stop the Carthaginians in Gaul, Scipio the father attempted again in the Italian plains, but each setback terrorized the imperial city. After Trebia and Lake Trasimene, Fabius Maximus's delay strategies were successful in keeping the invaders at bay for a while, but another consul, Varro, was impatient, which led to the ultimate Roman loss at Cannae (216 b.c.e.). Hannibal could have easily reached Rome if he had capitalized on his victory.

Book 25 covers a different stage of the conflict. A seventy-four-year-old mathematician named Archimedes' inventions of the catapult and grappling hooks, which lifted the prows of Roman ships attempting to attack the breakwater and sank them, kept Marcellus, who was besieging Syracuse, at bay for three years. Ultimately, though, the Romans discovered the gap in the defenses and took control of the island. This war is not over, but will continue until Scipio pursues Hannibal all the way to Zamma outside of Carthage where he will lead Rome to their ultimate victory.

I was impressed that Livy opened his narrative mentioning Hannibal by name. That is undoubtedly because he is the most engaging character in the story and likely the best General in spite of ultimately being defeated by Scipio Africanus. It is a narrative is full of great commanders, brutal and bloody warfare, shifting loyalties, superstitions and omens, and enough thrills to keep the reader both informed and entertained.

Hilarity from Page One

The Crying of Lot 49 

by Thomas Pynchon

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”   ― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49


This is one of the funniest books I have ever read. From the opening page the names, the events, the plot, all serve to provide humor in many ways. The story is disjointed by an abundance of ideas that only loosely hang together. 

What impressed me the most, the moments that had me laughing out loud instead of just smiling (which I did on almost every page), were some of the most outrageous names like that of the protagonist Oedipa Maas and her husband Mucho Mass (!); but also Dr. Hilarious, Mike Fallopian, Arnold Snarb, Genghis Cohen, and many others on almost every page - there were no John Smiths in this book.

There were also the connections, at least those that I noted, that seemed to occur without warning. One connection that I found most exciting was when I remembered a passing reference to Cornell University on the opening page of the novel when I noted, on the first page of the final chapter, a song written by one of the characters Oedipa had only recently met which included the name "Humbert Humbert" in the lyrics. (I hope the connection requires no explanation.)

But that leads to the best aspect of the narrative, for it is surreal, having an absurd quality like it was a perpetual dream sequence. The events do not seem to follow any pattern, although there is the arc of the story based on Oedipa's nomination to be executor of the will of one Pierce Inverarity, which event did not seem to be explained by anything she could think of -- a letter from his law firm "said Pierce had died back in the spring, and they'd only just now found the will. . . She tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then" (when she had been designated in a codicil the previous year). That is the event that sets her on her wild journey. It's one that involves unexpected events that tumble after each other culminating in a denouement that connects with the opening in an unexpected, perhaps bizarre, way. I will not attempt to explain the plot which involves bone charcoal, an Elizabethan drama, named "The Courier's Tragedy" which at least seems appropriate given other aspects of the plot, a modern megacorporation (wonderfully named Yoyodyne), and a mystery about an ancient symbol that is somehow connected to a valuable postage stamp. That list should be enough to whet any reader's appetite while suggesting how outrageously surreal the narrative becomes.

Needless to say I could not put the book down, for it was an exciting read in addition to being hilarious on almost every page. I would highly recommend this to readers who enjoy the works of authors like Sterne, Joyce or, in a more contemporary vein, Haruki Murikami.

Socratic Wisdom

Philosophy and the Return to 

Self-Knowledge 

by Donald Phillip Verene

"Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens."

--- Cicero

This is a book dedicated to the importance of and need to return philosophy to an approach found in the origins of philosophy found in Socratic humanism. This means reviving the ideal espoused in the slogan "know thyself". The examined life and the wisdom derived from the search and process of achieving such a life is one that the author believes is necessary to reform philosophy. He is careful to comment on process and in the concluding sections of the book provide a discussion of virtues. As a student of the classics and someone who admires the Socratic process of seeking knowledge through dialogic means I found this book encouraging and thought-provoking.

Reading William Faulkner

                        Signposts for Understanding 

                                                 Absalom, Absalom!

                        by Willam Faulkner

“What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your childrens' children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett's charge at Manassas?" 'Gettysburg,' Quentin said. 'You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.”   ― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

How can we understand the message of Absalom, Absalom!, if there is one? I am reminded of Hannah Arendt's dictum that "the process of understanding is clearly, and perhaps primarily, also a process of self-understanding."(Arendt, p 310) Reading this novel requires such a process on the part of the reader that adds to the inward aspect an emphasis on close attention to detail and to the incarnate nature of the prose. I would like to suggest a some signposts that were apparent to me as I read this text; thus follows comments on a few passages and themes that contribute to the meaning and power of Absalom, Absalom!. 

While the narrative seems out of joint from the beginning, one encounters a story revealed through discussions by characters who are, for the most part, looking back through time and memory to events that continue to resonate in their lives. This process is one that provides only partial and prejudiced information. Yet the memories will remain with them till their death or, in the case of Shreve and Quentin, into their being in a cold dark room at Harvard.

The novel begins in the dark on a "hot weary dead September afternoon", with Quentin Compson visiting Miss Rosa Coldfield. The darkness from the opening pages, perhaps suggestive of a lack of clarity or mist that blurs the story, pervades the chapters of the novel; thus we find Miss Rosa, as imagined by Quentin on the opening page of the fourth chapter, "waiting in one of the dark airless rooms in the little grim house's impregnable solitude."(p 70)  Even in the opening of chapter six we find darkness combined with death as Quentin and his roommate Shreve at Harvard receive a letter from Quentin's father that infects the room with "dead summer twilight---the wistaria . . .attenuated up from Mississippi and into this strange room, across this strange iron New England snow."(p 141)

Faulkner crafts the novel with magnificent prose that recalls mythology and history as material for the tales that encompass the modern narrators' lives. One example of  this mythology can be seen in the naming of Thomas Sutpen's daughter, Clytemnestra, followed by this telling passage:  "I have always liked to believe he intended to name her Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster."(p 48)  But Faulkner also bent language lower, toward the soil, until it'd lost any pretense of plot and was on the verge of incoherence. He would twist language until it encompassed the agony and sadness of is―-the unique moment exploding in its defenseless exposure, flashing incandescently before vanishing into the nothingness of was.

The novel's "current time" begins with Quentin's visit to Miss Rosa in September 1909 and concludes with Quentin and Shreve repeating the Sutpen story in their Harvard dorm room (January 1910). The novel's "past time" covers the rise and fall of Sutpen, his family, and his plantation in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi (June, 1833 – February, 1884), as well as key events in Sutpen's upbringing. 

Yet these times are mixed together in the telling, and as seems to be suggested in the actuality of the lives of the participants. The best description of the process of the characters' lives (and perhaps our own) is provided in Chapter Four:  "You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others are all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter . . ." (pp 100-101)

The “loom” can be seen in one of the key relationships in the novel, that of  Quentin Compson and Shrevlin “Shreve” McCannon. We can enter their story, Chapters 6-9, via the connection with the dark to which we are introduced on the first page of the novel. For the opening paragraph of Chapter Six (referred to above) highlights the light as seen in the “snow on Shreve's overcoat” and “his ungloved blond square hand red and raw with cold,”.(p 141)  This light and the contrast with the dark leads us toward the closeness of Shreve and Quentin. This closeness is brought home with references to them as “twins” and “brothers” (pp 236-7) that share a “closeness” (p 288). I suggest that this mirrors the closeness of the other pair of “brothers”, Henry and Bon.(p 237) As with all such aspects of this complex narrative there are references to the relationship of Shreve and Quentin that separate them that are as great as the distance between Alberta and Mississippi.(p 236) It is not surprising, but just as complicated to fathom the meaning of  “love” as they talked - for their twin identities yielded  to their sharing with each other, “since neither of them had been thinking about anything else;”.(p 253) The lives of these two “brothers” are both as close and as far apart as can be imagined, yet it takes their intertwined existences to bring the novel to a climax.

One of the most important realizations I experienced in this reading of the novel was best described by another great American novelist, Wallace Stegner, who wrote:

"This novel . . . is in one respect the most realistic thng Faulkner has done. It  reconstructs historical materials as any individual in reality has to reconstruct them---piece-meal, eked out with surmise and guess, the characters ghostly shades  except in brief isolated passages. As in life, we are confronted by a story whose answers even the narrator does not know, whose characters he (and we with him) guesses at and speculates upon, but does not attempt to explain fully."・(Stegner, 1936)

I think that this approach along with the magnificent if sometimes ornate prose and deep psychological acuity demonstrated by both characters and settings combines to produce a powerful novel that successfully captures a time and culture for its readers. Ultimately, it is up to each individual reader to look for signposts and decide for themself what level of understanding they have attained.

_________________________________________________________

Arendt, Hannah, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)”, in Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954. Schocken Books, New York, 1994.

Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom! Vintage Books, New York, 1990.

Stegner, Wallace E., New Technique in Novel Introduced・ Salt Lake City Tribune, November 29, 1936, p. 13-D