War and Peace: Almost Done Edition

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Napoleon is at the gates of Moscow, seems like it'll work out well for him.

Two striking things at this time:

1. War is always in the background of the book, but it spends most of its time as a purely domestic drama with Austerlitz as a kind of setpiece happening far away and of little import to anyone else. And then, gradually, there is nothing but war, even as the characters try to deny it and continue on as normal. 

But of course, war was there throughout the book, impacting people's lives in real ways they just kind of discounted and pretended didn't exist. Napoleon and Alexander don't really change at all. The system of things, as Tolstoy says repeatedly about war, depends on the spur of the moment decisions of regular, ordinary people working in concert (or not). The war machine can't hum without people thinking of military service as noble, the forced raising of troops as a fact of life, and the increased taxation to support those wars as logical. 

And so it seems that if you are ever to find yourself in a world where real life, whatever that is, seems caught up in the machinations of powerful people far away from you, it is almost certainly the case that it has in fact been like that for awhile, and you have chosen not to see it, and by choosing not to see it, brought it on yourself. (A connection, perhaps, with Sartre in Being and Nothingness "if there is a war, it is my war, in my own image, and I am responsible for it")

NB this is not an endorsement of this line of thinking, just a sketch of it. Though I do think people go to great lengths to pretend to not know what they're doing, so they can treat the consequences of their decisions as inevitable.

2. When I read War and Peace in college, I wrote my essay on Pierre, though I now remember nothing at all about it. What strikes me the most about Pierre this time around is not his successive attempts to change, nor the futility of them, but that he remains basically the same person he was at the beginning of the book: a more-or-less good person with some serious flaws but who can rise to the occasion when the occasion presents itself. And as I get older and have observed myself (and other people) for longer, this is pretty much what I see: the external trappings might change, you might graft yourself onto a different plant than the one you started on, but the person doesn't really change that much.

A brief and unfortunate venture back into computer gaming

Via Cookie Clicker. At first it seemed like an ideal type of game: exponential functions, arbitrage, and absolutely no point to any of it. Then I learned there were eventually going to be aliens, gods, monsters, and a revolt by the producers of the cookies. I don't need or want themes, larger points, or involved gameplay.

A reminder, in its way, that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow worked as well as it did because it merely described the games that were being played; the one chapter in which a game was actually played in the text was not very good.

A realization on horror and Weimar

Watching Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler yesterday, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari today, it struck me that a lot of horror's aesthetic is set during the Weimar period because those were, coincidentally, the people making movies that endured on these topics. Mutatis mutandis neo-gothic. But the association is kind of accidental--Weimar didn't strive to make scary things, there was just a lot of stuff that looked like that for entirely separate reasons, and they happened to use stuff that looked like that in the movies because that's the stuff there was. Some of it's stylized, to be sure, but that manner of stylization was also elsewhere.

Toward a general theory on reading poetry

When I was young, I read The Waste Land and knew none of the references, or almost none (the supper at Emmaus only). To understand any of it, I had to go and do research.

Some decades later, I read Ulysses. By then I had read enough English literature to recognize when a parody of style or content was happening, and to know the source being parodied without needing to look it up ("Hey, wait a minute, this sounds just like..."). Being able to do this enhanced my appreciation of the novel, even if I ultimately did not love it.

I find poetry to be a richer field now than I did when I was younger simply because there is more material in my head: formally in the sense that I've read more and can catch more detail I would have missed, informally in the sense that the store of memories and feelings increases and allusions and reminiscences the author could not have intended come more thickly now.

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

 

Untitled Good Samaritan Thought

It's Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship who brings up that to use "and who is my neighbor?" as a dodge requires the following things:

1. Knowing what the answer to this question is supposed to be (i.e., "everyone, and anyone who needs you")
2. Finding this answer unacceptable because of other commitments, either moral ("I would like to not have to love people from group x") or practical ("helping other people when they need it is a lot of work, I'd prefer not to")
3. Trying to obfuscate the question intentionally to produce an incoherence (e.g., "shouldn't I love my family more than strangers I'll never meet?")
4. Not trying to come to an actual answer (ordo amoris still requires you to love the people at the bottom, after all, and can imagine circumstances in which you're obligated to help them) but literally beg the question, by assuming your intuitive moral order is unimpeachable, or at least serviceable.

...and Jesus' response to that question is a story where it is perfectly clear who did the right thing and who did not; the clearness of it is self-evident, requiring no detailed explanation; and it is meant to shame the person for thinking there could be any other answer. But only if that person is capable of shame.

Reading in Progress: I have a lot to say about Uwe Johnson, apparently

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries: Now about 600 pages in. There's been narrative time enough to accept that it's going to end badly for all of the 1930s German characters, regardless of what you're meant to think of them. No one is really spared, in the end: the Nazi true believers, the Jewish people run out of town, the collaborationists who just want to go along to get along, the principled resisters. The best outcome you can hope for is keeping your head down and trying to make it through, and it only costs your soul and ability to think of yourself as a good person, if you care to think of it.

I remember teaching a class of college freshman Viktor Frankl's Memories of a Concentration Camp and pointing out to them that Frankl remarks several times that the best people did not make it because they were too concerned for others, and that this remark implies that Frankl excludes himself from the good people in Auschwitz. How could this wise, avuncular narrative presence, so filled with insight and compassion, have possibly been a bad person? Well, he glosses over his own bad parts in the retelling--that's simple enough to do when you're writing the story.

And so it is in a difficult time. You can always lie about what you did or felt later, should you live that long. I know the compromises I am making; do you know yours?

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace: set myself a pace to finish it in three months and, sure enough, I am well past a third of the way in. And every time a character is on stage perhaps too long for my taste--old Bolkonsky, Pierre (when he gets in one of his moods), the Rostovs and their money troubles--the narrative focus shifts and there's something new and better.

Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems: About to chuck this one out, canonicity notwithstanding. Harmonium reads of a stern, New Englandly paternal authority, with interwar sexism and racism generously sewn in. We'll give the later stuff a try, but move on shortly.

Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems: Now this is more like it, the polyphony of the permanent observer who can recreate a number of different voices because of observation (one assumes). Some midcentury rich lady nonsense, but then here comes "Sunday Evening" and even that redeems itself.