In my ongoing endeavor to have a more and more rewarding conversation with myself, I have begun a Twitter feed. You can see the icon on the column to the right. So far I am Tweeting memorable passages (not to exceed 280 characters) from the wonderful books that I have read.
Luke
I read Natalie Angier’s The Canon because I wanted to bone up on areas of science where my knowledge and understanding lag behind. I’m a motivated layman when it comes to astronomy, but the other chapters here: 1. Thinking Scientifically; 2. Probabilities; 3. Calibration; 4. Physics; 5. Chemistry; 6. Evolutionary Biology; 7. Molecular Biology; and 8. Geology (Astronomy is the 9th and last chapter) promised a wealth of material to fulfill my desire. They held a lot more than that.
Angier is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist covering science. She’s also quite a card. She presents her material not only with a strict, sensible logic, but she leavens it throughout with breezy throw-away lines, like: “power lines … fastened onto high-tension towers that loom phantasmically over the highway, like a procession of giant Michelin Men with arms of aluminum lace,” or in reference to the snout of the star-nosed mole: “Ringing its snout are twenty-two fleshy, pinkish-red, highly sensitive tentacles that … look like a pinwheel of earthworms, or children’s fingers poking up from below in a cheap but surprisingly effective horror movie.”
It’s easy to see why - and highly appreciated - that Angier included multiple throw-away phrases on nearly every page: she set herself a gigantic task, which would feature untold facts and theories, and she needed a way to engage general readers. As often as she quips throughout her book, it never descends into anything seriously jokey, or ironic. Her science, as you would expect, is quite up to snuff, her passion is real, and her hope for scientific literacy is fervent. These attributes add up to a very worthwhile book. If your interest extends to modern science, here is an excellent way to fill in any sketchy areas you feel you have. Take it up!
Please look to the Pages sidebar to the right for a link to the new in-depth piece on three novels, by John Burnside, Anne Enright, and Lydia Millet - Thanks!!
Travel to the not-too-distant future and witness the calamities befall a group of families in Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible. The families - parents and children - have assembled at a rented coastal mansion for Millet’s frightening parable in which children are forced to supplant their parents in an apparent dress rehearsal for the End Times. She includes natural disasters which make modern-day services impossible; lawless behavior by gangs of armed men; the righteous natural world pushing back against the ruination of the planet in seeming outrage.
Millet includes a touch of the supernatural when the owner of the farm to which the children eventually escape and are holed up: a young boy has fallen into a pit and suffered what might be a compound fracture. The farm’s owner, a no-nonsense woman accompanied in her helicopter by a SWAT team, apparently cures the boy and he’s no worse for the wear. This perhaps lays the groundwork for the episode a little later in the narrative where all the parents simply disappear, apparently having lost their will to live because the children are so self-sufficient.
This book takes up serious issues: the exhausted planet, the broken culture, the teetering infrastructure. Whether it does these issues justice, and whether it’s possible to do all these issues justice in so short a work, is fully open to question. The hurricane sequence is the best in the book. The noise, the dark, the violence of nature, the fragility of man-made structures - all these are so vivid and immediate that I cringed for everyone’s safety. The children have surprising moments of worldly wisdom among all the complaining and desultory disrespect.
And here is the center of the narrative. The younger generation, teens mostly, going into junior and senior year of high school (plus a few younger siblings), energetically revile the assembled parents. It’s clear from the start that the teens are and will be on their own, and to their credit this holds true, and they do a creditable job … except for the key event of their rescue at the farm. The parents play a central role in that, and it’s very difficult for me to accept the way they simply wander off forever.
Readers interested in Millet, and you very well should be, please take up Millet’s 2016 novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven.
Dear Jesus, what was he doing? This was not what he promised himself. This was not harmlessness. He was sure he had no right to involve her in so much potential misery. How often had he thought this? But she had the right to involve herself, or had claimed the right, holding his hand the way she had. She was young, the daughter of a protective family. She might have no idea yet that embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness. Maybe apophatic loneliness. God in the silence. In the deep darkness. The highest privilege, his father said. He was usually speaking of death, or course. The congregant’s soul had entered the Holy of Holies. Jack sometimes called this life he had lived prevenient death. He had learned that for all its comforts and discomforts, its stark silence first of all, there was clearly no reprieve from doing harm.
… it had seemed to Jack that his father proposed a sort of Promised Land where troublesome categories did not apply. ‘Night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light.’ Those words nullified a very primary distinction. ‘God separated the light from the darkness,’ in the very first moments of creation. Verse 4. Then how was anyone to believe that any distinction was absolute, not secondary to a more absolute intention, the luminous reality concealed behind the veil of experience? He thought he should write this down, to show it to Della, maybe to her father. He and Della had been there, in that luminous absence of distinctions, in that radiant light.
Page citations from
Jack: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson (Author) Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2020), 320 pages
This novel traces the posthumous influence of an 11 year-old boy on a sympathetic set of adults, and traces the effects of his life and death to self-discovery, love, responsibility, and record-setting longevity. It’s a unique, gratifying read, written with intelligence, wisdom, and most of all, charity. The author’s kindness extends to her characters as well as her readers: the love the characters feel for each other reaches the surface in unusual ways. And Monica Wood’s readers feel her kindness through the realistic strivings and the partial and sometimes surprising success they meet with. This is superb.
A shy, unaccomplished 11 year-old Boy Scout visits 104 year-old Ona to assist with chores and record her history, as part of an exercise to earn a merit badge. Ona is Lithuanian and sharp as a tack. She’s lived in the U.S. since 1913, was married to a dull, unloving man for nearly three decades, but has nevertheless lived an interesting life. After the boy’s passing, his father Quinn takes over. First he takes on the chores, and eventually he fills a void which the youngster’s passing has created.
Quinn is in many ways the focus of the story. He performs chores around the house for Ona scrupulously at first, before their relationship gels into a friendship. Quinn’s marriage has fractured - twice - but Ona observes Quinn’s continuing devotion to his ex-wife Belle. She finds she admires Quinn’s perseverance and kindness, and allows him to help her pursue her plan to re-qualify for her driver’s license. This license is a wonderful trope by Wood, a hard encapsulation of Ona’s determined will to continue to function in the world despite her age.
“The One-in-a-Million Boy” has such a big heart: it has space for everyone’s ambitions, everyone’s failings, everyone’s redemption, everyone’s love. I recommend this book as heartily as I have before for Wood, one of my favorites. “My Only Story” is superb, “Any Bitter Thing” gratifying and balanced, but “The One-in-a-Million Boy” takes the cake. A multiple award winner, and my new favorite among Wood’s oeuvre, be sure to take this one up!
Subtitle: From the Birth of the Sumerian Civilization to the Fall of the Roman Empire - -
Author Norman F. Cantor says at the outset of his useful and outstanding book “Antiquity” that he will avoid a simple recitation of names and dates, and focus instead on the major influential trends that formed the ancient world. He keeps this promise, and the resulting book stands as an exceptional example of writing history for the layman. Any non-academic or non-historian interested in a concise, persuasive, and highly readable history from early Egypt and Iraq to the fall of Rome - this is definitely for you.
Cantor divides his work into two main sections. The first he calls the Basic Narrative, and it contains a straightforward recounting of the known ancient Western civilizations, from the “Hydraulic Despotisms” which grew up along the Nile, and in the fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates. He then takes up Greece and Rome, followed by the role and hegemony of the Christians, and finally the decline of the ancient world. He indicates that a relatively well-rounded person who is the product of a Western education will not find much that is new in this section. His presentation of it, however, gratifies this reader, who has longed for such an economical treatment and found it, blessedly, here.
He calls his second section Societies and Cultures. Here, Cantor assesses and affirms the lasting contribution of the various cultures from Western antiquity. Sections include Egypt, Ancient Judaism, Athens, Rome, Christian Thought, The Civil Law, and Remembering Antiquity. His discussion ranges over a plenitude of well-thought-out observations, deep and various, unblinking and thought-provoking. These insights run to some length and recapping them here any more deeply than the “35,000-foot” level is just beyond my scope. I’m going to highlight the barest minimum here, to give you an idea.
Egyptian genius found practical engineering solutions to very challenging projects, but was not a creative or embellishing energy. The Hebrews alone in the ancient world practiced a religion without resorting to the “magic” of sacramental miracles or the touching of holy talismans, and this led to distrust and ostracization by other religious groups. What we consider the genius of the Greek world was really Athenian; unsurpassed and foundational achievements in drama, philosophy, mathematics, polity, and architecture flourished for a time only to fall to Persian pressures and competition from nearby city-states. The Roman genius for administration, engineering, and warfare extended its power beyond anything that had come before, but suffered from over-extension and exhaustion before establishing the geographic and economic pattern seen throughout medieval Europe.
Cantor also spends ample time and energy on the very pervasive influences of Christianity and legal codes on the ethical and civic structures that rule the world today. These sections are worth the price of admission by themselves.
The author adeptly balances the sweep of roughly fourteen centuries with the effects on Western culture of a handful of specific over-arching influences. I’m not in a position to judge the relative importance of these influences, so I will leave that to others. I want to point out that this is an admirable book, a concise recap for the intelligent lay person of the civilizations, cultures, and intellectual traditions that shape the West to this day. If you’re interested, it’s hard to imagine a better entry.
Indrajit Garai shows the big heart of a therapist in his guide to living, called “The Seeker of Well-Being.” Full of concrete examples of how to help you learn your true self, and to live in accordance with it, “The Seeker of Well-Being,” is not only a concise guide to Ayurvedic medicine (ancient Indian healing) practices, but to achieving true well-being. This has more soul and more insight than any book I have encountered in a long time. It touched my heart.
“Seeker” does not contain any soft, philosophical observations about our lives and how to lead them. It leads the reader through easy, practical exercises to arrive at insights into the self - physical, emotional, spiritual. You are then directed to pathways toward aligning your life with your core beliefs and emotional makeup. The author takes us forward, on a straightforward progression from self-discovery through to concrete steps to help us live in accord to our innermost selves.
Garai also uses a large number of case histories to illustrate his points about well-being. These patients’ stories ring true in our modern way-too-busy world, and we find ourselves reflecting on our own history, our own struggles in a toxic relationship with a job or a partner. He generates good examples in these narratives, of steps forward, and of progress made. Some are touching; all are illuminating.
Some of the deep concepts propounded by the author: our frailties come from the same source as our qualities; solutions based on metrics outside ourselves (like society’s conventional wisdom) will not work for us long term; our lives will lead to conflict and eventually disease or breakdown if we continue to lead them in ways contrary to our fundamental beliefs.
In some of his exercises Garai leads us toward our fundamental beliefs and core values. These are some of the most compelling passages, where readers will find themselves on their own journey to their innermost selves. Learn the principal parts of your own physical and emotional makeup. Take steps toward your own innermost fundamental beliefs, and find what you may have been missing. Indrajit Garai will lead you, gently, supportively toward your true self and happiness.
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