Monthly Bookpost, December 2016
HAMILTON: THE BOOK! The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton feat. James Madison & John Jay
It has often given me pleasure to observe, that Independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide-spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids, and the mutual transportation and exchange of their various commodities.
With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence.
This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.
Did you think these old 18th Century books I've been reading all year don't have relevance today? Well, cue Lin-Manuel Miranda...
How in tarnation does a nation, stationed in a new
Location, patiently make a new administration
In a new configuration from the Articles of Confederation?
The creation takes some explanation.
The word-whooshing, contribution of elocution
Made the revolution proposing solutions
Proposing resolutions, preventing dissolutions
Three men making the case for the Constitution
And every day, the public was suspicious and dubious
The Confederation, naive, defenseless and n00bious
They looked in the papers for something salubrious
And found 85 articles, all signed "Publius"
Thirteen states strained between Florida and Maine
They saw their independence drip-dripping down to Spain
To the French, to the English and the Germans and the Dutch
If they got us in their clutches, they wouldn't leave very much
With the Constitution up, only four states could blackball it
Told to turn their backs and keep one hand on their wallet
But these essays in collection for all those who would eyeball it
They said, this here whatchamacallit--
What you call it?
The Papers of the Federalist
They wrote the Papers of the Federalist
It was well revered by centralists
And just you read, just you read---
There are checks and balances, they're everywhere, essential
Legislative, the executive, the jurisprudential
Do you think the public would let it beat 'em and cheat 'em
A people that would stand for that would never stand freedom
There is a demonstration of the separation of powers
A warning to let the nation flower before it sours
A voice saying, leaders leave your ivory towers
Give this government document to the people it empowers
There would have been nothing left to do for a system more vanilla
It might have been trapped between Charybdis and the Scylla
Of anarchy or seizure by a latter day Atilla
Divisiveness between the States, if only a scintilla
Cited by John Marshall in McCulloch versus Maryland
Don't leave it to majorities, a mob rule ain't no fairyland
Mightier than swords, their feathered pens make a stand
The New World going to have a new plan
The New World going to have a new plan
(The New World going to have a new plan)
The New World going to have a new plan
(The New World going to have a new plan)
Just you read it
Alexander Hamilton (Alexander Hamilton)
James Madison and John Jay too (John Jay too)
They didn't back down
But they didn't back the Bill of Rights
The Papers of the Federalist (Papers of the Federalist)
With borrowings from Montesquieu
Their writings were mostly wise
But we have to apologize
For that slave state three-fifths compromise
Our nation's threatened once again
With one foot in the grave
Its enemies in charge of the whole Federal enclave
Can the Founding Fathers show us how we can be saved?
JAY--wrote four of it
MADISON--more of it
HAMILTON--the core of it
WE--adore it
And TRUMP--he's the sick fuck who tore it!
They were a statecraft supplement for us
So just you read--
(What they call it?)
The Papers of the Federalist!
Frexit: Rousseau and Revolution, by Will and Ariel Durant
It is hard to define morality, for each age makes its own definition to suit its temper and sins. Frenchmen had through centuries relieved monogamy with adultery, as America relieves it with divorce; and in the Gallic view judicious adultery does less hurt to the family--or at least to the children--than divorce. In any case, adultery flourished in eighteenth century France, and was generally condoned. When Diderot, in his Encyclopedie, wished to distinguish "bind" and "attach", he gave as example, "One is bound to one's wife, attached to one's mistress." To have a mistress was as necessary to status as to have money.
Of the Durants' enormous eleven-volume history of western civilization through Waterloo, Rousseau and Revolution, at 965 pages (not counting notes, bibliography and index in the back), is the second thickest volume in the set. it covers 35 years. The only volume that's thicker, The Age of Faith, covers 1,000 years. As I've learned over the course of six years of historical reading, civilization expands exponentially.
Most of the 18th Century books I read this year will be found here and in the previous volume, as will summaries of the major events of the period. The Durants wrote an eleventh volume, on the Napoleonic era, but at the time, they thought they were finishing up, and marking the fall of the Bastille as a decent milestone to use as a jumping-off spot. And so they do a lot of unnecessary wrapping-up and making notes on people and events, like Goethe, that were still to come.
The series is big on Europe, and its defects become more noticeable when "The West" no longer is confined to Europe. The colonies of North America, and their war for independence, are barely mentioned. Meanwhile, there are so many advances in government, economics, philosophy, science, music, literature and art that, in addition to referencing Diderot and the encyclopediasts of the age, the book becomes something of an encyclopedia itself. Still, it served as a springboard and introduction to many books I might not otherwise have included in this year's reading, and gave an outline of what to expect from them, for which I am grateful.
The 18th Century Murders: Written in My Own heart's Blood, by Diana Gabaldon; The High Constable, by Maan Meyers; The Prince Lost to Time, by Anne Dukthas
"Um...that gentleman is James Fraser, my...er...my--" "First husband wasn't accurate, and neither was "last husband" or even, unfortunately, "most recent husband." I settled for the simplest alternative. "My husband. And, er, William's father."
Mrs. Figg's mouth opened, soundless for an instant. She backed up slowly and sat down on a needlework ottoman with a soft *phumph*. "William know that?", she asked after a moment's contemplation.
"He does now," I said, with a brief gesture toward the devastation in the stairwell, clearly visible through the door of the parlor where we were sitting.
"Merde on--I mean, Holy Lamb of God preserve us." Mrs. Figg's second husband was a Methodist preacher, and she strove to be a credit to him, but her first had been a French gambler.
--from Written in My Own Heart's Blood
Somewhere in the darkness a dog howled. Betrancourt remembered how, years earlier, a soothsayer had told him that would be the last sound he would ever hear on Earth. Why did it happen, he thought. The men who had followed him from the tavern had, before old Betrancourt broke free and fled, mentioned Monsieur de Paris. If Monsieur de Paris wanted him, then sentence of death had already been passed.
--from The Prince Lost to Time
Hays leaned over to get a better look. Adhering to the back of the body, its teeth caught on the dead man's coat, looking for all the world as if it were biting the dead man's arse, was a human skull.
--from The High Constable
Written in My Own Heart's Blood is the last, so far, of the very thick Outlander novels, and one of the best. There's clearly more to come, but the plots have spread out to several times and places, from 1739 to 1980, and from Scotland to Boston to Savannah, with cameos from historical characters like General Washington, Nathan Hale and the Marquis de Lafayette, and a front row seat for the Battle of Monmouth. The viewpoint changes, Game of thrones style, between various characters, and Gabaldon's writing has improved greatly from the first book to the last.
The Prince Lost to Time is the only one of Ann Dukthas's works (in which the ageless detective Segalla investigates actual historical conundrums and comes up with quirky solutions consistent with the actual historical record) set in the 18th Century. The mystery is clunky; the point is to hypothesize a way in which the Dauphin did not die in the tower, that is consistent with the known facts.
Finally, rounding out a century of period mysteries is The High Constable of post-Colonial Manhattan, which is mainly recommended for people who like tales in which the mystery is secondary to personal development of the main characters. The central family has plenty of issues, not the least of which is the alcoholic son who is failing at work and life and accused of theft and murder, and who uses the experience to grow up and find his true calling amid a wealth of information about the family's Dutch/Quaker/Jewish heritage and the customs and newspaper clippings of the time, and not much mystery.
Rantin Rovin Robin: Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
WEE, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t!
Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
I have a surprisingly hard time commenting on poetry, given all the lyrics I write, but I felt obligated to tackle Burns, who is the only poet in the Harvard Classics set besides Milton to have an entire volume given to only his work. The Scots have elevated him to near sainthood, and the celebration of "Burns Day" on his birthday of January 25 is a ritual like America's Thanksgiving dinner...only with haggis. Different salutes for different galoots!
There are hundreds of them, ranging from the satirical to the poignant to stuff that's hard to even understand without trying to sing it out loud, because of the thick Scots-English, as in "Och aye mi bonny laddie y'are a wee dumb shytte". Many are verses written to a particular neighbor or lover, or epigrams and epitaphs originally scrawled casually on napkins, or political screeds in verse that probably had a lot more punch back when everyone was talking about Alderman MacArgus who tuk wynd amang the praesentin o'th' statue or about Graidy Donald wha had a comely doter-o.
And then among those, you'll find the famous ones you've heard, or at least recognize lines from, like Auld Lang Syne, "To a Louse", or "A Man's A Man For a' That". I grew up with more of these than some did, having a da' who was part Scot, and it made for awkward moments at camp where they'd start a round of "Green Grow the Rushes-o" and I would start singing "There's naught but care in every hand" while everyone else went "I'll sing you one-o".
I started the collection on or about January 25, and finished it in December. These need to be read a few at a time.
Pop'nfresh Gender Roles: On the Black Hill, by Bruce Chatwin
But Benjamin did not cry. He simply pursed his mouth and turned his sad grey eyes on his brother. For it was Lewis, not he, who was whimpering with pain, and stroking his own left hand as if it were a wounded bird. He went on snivelling till bedtime. Only when they were locked in each other's arms did the twins doze off--and from then on, they associated eggs with wasps and mistrusted anything yellow. This was the first time Lewis demonstrated his power to draw the pain from his brother, and take it on himself. He was the stronger twin, and the firstborn.
A very strange tale, almost but not quite magic realism, about 80 years in the life of a pair of identical twins born near the Welsh border in 1900.
Things change slowly, but they do change, from a long, rural idyll of a pair of childhoods, through two world wars, a depression, faint stirrings of technology, and ultimately a flood of new things. The boys share a bond so strong that when one of them is drafted and the other stays behind, the one at home feels the pain of the other's boot camp tortures.
And the gender roles are quirky. The farm where the boys live is called "The Vision", and, while being described as intensely masculine, is misty and poetic. Nearby is the feminine "The Rock", where the energy is wild and feral and described as "feminine" (untamed?). This seemed to me distracting from an otherwise touching, Dylan Thomas-esque story where characters are drawn full-fleshed with but a few words. High recommendations.
Dead Poetess Society: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
"This is Stanley Baldwin, who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long," said Miss Brodie. "Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan "Safety First." But safety does not come first. Follow me."
This was the first intimation to the girls of an odds between Miss Brodie and the rest of the teaching staff. Indeed, to some of them, it was the first time they had realized it was possible for people glued together in grown-up authority to differ at all. Taking inward note of this, and with the exhilaration of being in on the faint smell of row, without being endangered by it, they followed dangerous Miss Brodie into the secure shade of the elm.
Seems to me, the Peter Wier movie Dead Poets' Society was an all male reboot of Muriel Spark, who did it better in this novella about a teacher adopting half a dozen students in a strict private school/academy and attempting to awaken their imaginations and souls, thereby making enemies in the authoritarian faculty and ultimately being railroaded into dismissal.
There are differences. No suicide, although a minor character is killed in the Spanish civil war and some of the girls' eventual deaths years later are foreshadowed (the story, centered around the girls' senior year in 1931, flashbacks and flash-forwards extensively, gradually giving meaning to certain details and referencing both World Wars and beyond. The school is in Scotland, not New England, and has heavier Calvinist overtones that even the supposedly free-spirited Miss Jean bows to. And, of course, the "awakenings" of girls in a world where girls more than boys are forever being told to stay obedient and half-asleep and where any expression of passion is presumed to be sexual, has extra significance.
Mostly, the quality is in the language. It is a riveting story, expertly plotted, in which one cares deeply about the characters and dreads the sense of impending doom that looms over them like a gothic cathedral. Highest recommendations.
Point/Counterpoint: Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke; The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine
In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and in the transit from one form of government to another-you cannot see that character of men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country. With us it is militant; with you it is triumphant; and you know how it can act when its power is commensurate to its will. I would not be supposed to confine those observations to any description of men, or to comprehend all men of any description within them-No! far from it. I am as incapable of that injustice, as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremities; and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little, when no political purpose is served by the depravation. This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.
--from Reflections on the Revolution in France
No man is prejudiced in favour of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone. We have but a defective idea of what prejudice is. It might be said, that until men think for themselves the whole is prejudice and not opinion, for that only is opinion which is the result of reason and reflection. I offer this remark, that Mr. Burke may not confide too much in what has been the customary prejudices of the country.
--from The Rights of Man
The more I read about the French Revolution, the more alarmed I become about this day and age. It's as if---and yes, the comparisons will fail unless you squint pretty hard, but work with me here--a President for Life Romney, married to Hillary Clinton, tried to do the right thing by the starving people in hard economic times, but was persuaded by competing factions within the party. First he listened to a Mormon adviser, who urged that food stored be appropriated to feed the hungry, but then another Republican adviser screamed that this was socialism, and had the Mormon replaced with someone who urged laissez-faire market solutions and snatched the food back from the hungry, and eventually a mob of Occupiers and Black Lives Matter activists led by Sanders and Warren rose up and threw Romney out of office, while both they and the Tea Party spewed endless hate about Clinton being a Wall Street tool even as she had been trying to overcome past mistakes and was a liberal at heart. This is the point at which Burke and Paine had their famous exchange of ideas. What they didn't know, and what Burke correctly predicted, was that while the Bernie people were trying to get a wonderful Utopia established in which everyone had both rights and food, the Tea Party would seize on the new anarchy and kill the Bernie people, and everyone else who looked liberal to them, and then the Trump people would kill the Tea Partiers and set up a directorate and then Petraeus or Colin Powell or some other popular general would kill Trump and set up a military empire.
Sort of.
As I said last month, Burke was a Bourgeois liberal for most of his life, urging liberal reforms in England to stave off revolution. When revolution happened, he did what I probably would do and foresaw the ruin of the good as well as the bad, and was not happy about it. I expected to agree a lot more with Burke, but he did like Orson Scott Card after 9/11 and went full on flatline. He is not an Obama urging caution and wanting the down and out to be content with modest reforms so as not to risk throwing the bathroom out with the bathwater; he is Giuliani screaming at the ignorant rabble (of color) to shut up, go home, and stop talking uppity to their betters. In today's time, his arguments read like idiotic superstitions and blatant appeals to prejudice. True, we should hesitate before throwing down custom and tradition, and make sure that what we have to replace it is really better, but Burke takes it as a given that the old is better just because it is old. Kings can do no wrong. Churches speak for God above, and the very concept of civil rights for all people--including, you know, those smelly (Millennial) peasants who think the mere capacity to inflate their lungs entitles them to participation trophies--is an abomination against civilization. His prediction of chaos and blood proved right, but for all the wrong reasons.
In response, Thomas Paine comes back with the American ideal of Democracy and praises the Constitution (that revered three-year-old document at the time) as if he lived in 1967 and such ideals were taken for granted. Remember, he was writing during the brief period when the Bernie movement of the day was in charge, there was some semblance of order and at least the attempt to create a good government, before the mob took over and made blood flow through the streets.
Burke is supported by what happened in the short term; he was specific. Paine is supported by the results over centuries; he was talking about ideals. Most of their arguments flew right over each others' heads because they were taking about different things. There is a great deal of food for thought, and a bunch of rhetorical chicanery, in both of them, and both should be read together.
Especially right now, when it seems ready to happen all over again, here.
What am I doing here? The Vocation of Man, by Johann Gottlieb Fichte
I can never become conscious either of the external powers, by which, in the system of universal necessity, I am determined; nor of my own power, by which, on the system of freedom, I determine myself. Thus, whichsoever of the two opinions I may accept, I still accept it, not upon evidence, but merely by arbitrary choice.
Has there yet been a satisfactory reconciliation of determinism versus free will that does not wholly reject determinism? If there is, I'd like to see it, because Fichte's mercifully short attempt is nit it.
Fichte assumes that people have a more insistent need for an orderly universe than people (me, anyhow) really do. He rejects free will mostly on the basis that we are to small to know much on a cosmic scale, that happiness leads inevitably to a desire for the existence of God (so that we can express thanks to it); but also (rightly, it seems to me) rejects determinism on the grounds that it deprives us of worthiness because of our right choices, or makes it unjust to blame us for our wrong ones--though, of course, the argument fails that because something is not fair, that means it cannot be the case.
The reconciliation, that we are free-willed tiny parts within a self-directed much larger whole, like self-aware white blood cells in a human body, is neither convincing nor spiritually/philosophically comforting. If that which really matters is too large to even be meaningfully perceived much less affected by our actions, and if we are guided pretty much by instinct, that does not seem to me to promote my well-being or that of anyone else. Your mileage may vary.
Fichte writes in a weird first/third person narrative as if the first person narrator is you the reader, passing from despair to rejoicing as I/you receive Fichte's wisdom, that the "vocation of man" is obedience to one's conscience as the voice of God. The technique is offensively presumptuous; he literally tells you what you are thinking as you read, and in my case at least, he is laughably wrong.
Also, German philosophers are certainly a stodgy lot.
Curmudgeon's Guide to Europe: A Tramp Abroad, by Mark Twain
There are some unaccountable reputations in the world. Saint Nicholas's is an instance. He has ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children, yet it appears that he was not much of a friend to his own. He had ten of them, and when fifty years old he left them and sought out as dismal a refuge from the world as possible and became a hermit in order that he might reflect upon pious themes without being disturbed by the joyous and other noises from the nursery, doubtless....there apparently exists no rule for the construction of hermits; St. Nicholas will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys on Christmas Eve forever, conferring kindness on other people's children to make up for deserting his own.
Twain is, of course, a national treasure in America. A Tramp Abroad, his account of a real trip through Germany, Switzerland and Italy, is presented as "nonfiction" but sprinkled with so many tall tales and other yarns as to make it unclear what part is fact and what fiction. He claims to have tried to ride a glacier down the mountain, become perturbed after a day of attempting, at the discovery of the actual speed at which glaciers move, and said "Fiddlesticks! I can walk it faster than that!"
Elsewhere, Twain describes Alpine farms that are vertical, such that people die from falling off their farms; German "folk legends" that lengthen the reader's leg in translation; French duelists who approach a bout with what amounts to peashooters at 500 paces with all the tears and melodrama of a pair of operatic patriots dying for their country; and meals designed by the more vicious members of the Borgia family to be eaten by their enemies.
The style alternates. Twain can slip from the highly educated man he was to writing in the "Them city people sure do confound me with their foolish ways and fancy talk" country drawl his characters were famous for. Similarly, the book's lavish illustrations include impressive, accurate drawings of vistas and ancient castles, as well as cartoonish line drawings of fools. The overall effect, as you'd expect, is wonderful.
Oh, and don't skip the appendixes. They're as awesome as the main book. Very high recommendations.
We're All Fucked: On Population, by Thomas Malthus
We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population, which is found to act even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of labourers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand. In the mean time the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land, to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage, till ultimately the means of subsistence become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the labourer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened, and the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated.
The big thing to know about Malthus is that poverty and famine are features not bugs. According to Malthus, the population grows faster than the food supply, and will keep doing so until it hits critical mass and there isn't enough food to go around, at which point the population will stabilize again (due to cannibalism?). Any -and he does mean ANY- increase in the quality of life will be offset by people making babies until that quality of life cannot be sustained and falls back again. You can't win. You can't break even. You can't quit the game.
If you thought assholes had seized on Adam Smith (see last month's bookpost) as an excuse to be cruel to the poor, wait till you see what they extrapolated from Malthus in an age before they had Social Darwinism as their excuse. Attempts at welfare and other relief for the poor were viciously attacked as threatening to bring about a malthusian population bomb. Ebeneezer Scrooge, when he urged the poor to die quickly, and reduce the surplus population, had read his Malthus with approval Let famine run its course for the greater good, said the Trumpkins of the day, while they pointed and laughed and gorged themselves on delicacies withheld from the poor.
Slightly more humanely, Malthus urged population control, an influence that stayed with society through such groups as Zero Population Growth, which shames people for having babies (though of course, people are also shamed for having abortions, or really, for having sex at all. If it gives pleasure for free, the capitalists will discourage it and the Puritans will punish it. Depriving a puritan moralist of the opportunity to shame someone is like tearing the guitar out of Eric Clapton's hands. But I digress).
Malthusianism, like Libertarianism or Communism, is one of those economic theories that looks logical, even inevitable, on paper, but that has rarely or never appeared in practice, even in an economy planned around it. Malthus wrote in 1798 as if the earth was about to exceed maximum sustainable population any day now. Here we are over two centuries later, 7 billion earthlings and counting, and we still have farmers destroying surplus food to keep prices artificially high. I saw a map once that featured a middling circle centered in the South China Sea and including Japan, Southeast China, IndoChina, Indonesia, most of the Indian subcontinent and a few other islands, and asserting that half of the world's population lived within that circle. I don't know how they manage, but if THEY are continuing to reproduce without vast constant famine, it would seem that North America and Europe have quite a ways to go.
The Handgentleman's Tale: The Gate to Womens' Country, by Sherri S. Tepper
Everyone agreed that it was dishonorable to return through the Gate to Women's Country. Only cowards did it. Cowards and physical weaklings, though even they could be put to work in the garrison kitchens or doing maintenance of some kind if they confessed their weakness to the Commander. Beyond being the butt of a bit of rough teasing or donkey play, they got on well enough.
Sherri S. Tepper was one of the victims of 2016, and so I felt like reading one of hers as we say goodbye to a horrible year. I've enjoyed some of her other work: The Family Tree; The Visitor; The Fresco, all of which have things happen in what is more or less our world.
The Gate To Women's Country is not "our world". It is a dystopian post-nuke future in which the women have taken over and set up an Atwood-in-reverse ecofeminist society where they keep knowledge a secret for themselves and boys are brought up in military garrisons outside the gates. At age 15, they are required to choose to Enter Women's Country and be servants to women, or to stay outside as warriors and become not much more than rutting beasts with Klingon values.
There are also nomads (called by an offensive name, unfortunately) who run away from all of it and are considered fair game to kill; and (of course, because this is a Tepper novel) a disgusting religious patriarchy where they eagerly beat and rape women to "chastise" them for arousing sinful desires in men: "Ooh, look at that one! I would love to chastise her!"
The main character is named Stavia. The action alternates between the "present", in which she rehearses her role in a traditional Greek tragedy rewritten such that the Trojan Women get the upper hand over the Greeks and the ghosts of fallen warriors; and flashbacks to when she was a girl and had a relationship with a boy in the warriors' camp. So infatuated is she that she does the unthinkable and allows him to read books.
The Saga Continues: Jeremy Poldark, by Winston Graham
The two women were vagrants. They had been caught flagrantly begging. They had no visible means of support. It was a plain case and the jury speedily found them guilty. But this was a crime on which the Hon. Justice Lister felt rather strongly and he delivered a long and damning homily on the evils of such a life. Looking at him, Demelza realized there was no mercy here. His diction was beautiful, his phrases as elegantly rounded as if they had been written out the night before. But the substance was to condemn. Abruptly, without any raising of the voice or change of expression, he sentenced the two women to be whipped and the case was over.
I had intended to have this 12-volume series read this year. The books are quite short. However, I only made it through three because I have to wait so long for them at the library. It's nice to see a resurgence of interest in Winston Graham (just as it was touching to see on social media the renewed interest in Krampus among the young this holiday season), but they might have waited a bit. Most of the third book is concerned with a WTF trial in which it is a hanging offense to do something that isn't even illegal in our time and country, though there are plenty of instructive examples on Parliamentary elections, the descent of honorable professions into profit-centric savagery, developments in medicine, and working class funerals. The title character is Poldark's son, who isn't born until the final chapter.
Guns Don't Kill---Trolls Do! Men At Arms, by Terry Pratchett
To understand why dwarfs and trolls don't like each other, you have to go back a long way. They get along like chalk and cheese. Very like chalk and cheese, really. One is organic; the other isn't, and also smells a bit cheesy. Dwarfs make a living by smashing up rocks with valuable minerals in them, and the silicon-based life form known as trolls are, basically, rocks with valuable minerals in them. In the wild, they also spend most of the daylight hours dormant, and that's not a situation a rock containing valuable minerals needs to be in when there are dwarfs around. And dwarfs hate trolls because, after you've just found an interesting seam of valuable minerals, you don't like rocks that suddenly stand up and tear your arm off because you've just stuck a pickaxe in their ear.
I traditionally spend much of Christmas reading a Discworld novel, on the theory that they contribute to a day of joy, and that I want to make the series last for me. Men At Arms is focused on Ankh Morporks city watch (Carrot; Vimes, et al), and has everything want in a Discworld book (other than Rincewind and Granny Weatherwxax): a disaster to be averted, an increasingly twisty plot, laugh-out-loud humor, and social commentary on issues appropriate to our world.
In this adventure, the watch has recently hired new Affirmative Action recruits, including a dwarf and a troll who are of course paired up in the most hilarious frenemy law enforcement duo I've yet seen, and a woman named Angua who is more than she seems and who feeds my heroine addiction to surfeit. Together with the regulars of the watch, they must avert civil unrest between the trolls and dwarfs, avert similar unrest among the various guilds, solve a series of murders involving a mysterious never before seen weapon despite orders from the City Patrician not to investigate, and keep Vimes from getting killed immediately before retirement so that he may marry his Very Superior Fiancee and live in luxury after a life of grime.
The fun is incredible. So is the food for thought. Highest recommendations.
Kant Touch This: The Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant
Suppose this story to be told: An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. When the Englishman asked him, “What is there in this to astonish you so much?” he answered, “I am not at all astonished that it should flow out, but I do wonder how you ever got it in.” At this story we laugh, and it gives us hearty pleasure; not because we deem ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man, or because of anything else in it that we note as satisfactory to the Understanding, but because our expectation was strained [for a time] and then was suddenly dissipated into nothing. Again: The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed; “for” (said he) “the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look!” When we hear this story we laugh loud, and the reason is that an expectation is suddenly transformed into nothing. We must note well that it does not transform itself into the positive opposite of an expected object-for then there would still be something, which might even be a cause of grief-but it must be transformed into nothing. For if a man arouses great expectations in us when telling a story, and at the end we see its falsehood immediately, it displeases us; e.g. the story of the people whose hair in consequence of great grief turned gray in one night. But if a wag, to repair the effect of this story, describes very circumstantially the grief of the merchant returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise who was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm, and who grieved thereat so much that his wig turned gray the same night-we laugh and it gives us gratification. For we treat our own mistake in the case of an object otherwise indifferent to us, or rather the Idea which we are following out, as we treat a ball which we knock to and fro for a time, though our only serious intention is to seize it and hold it fast. It is not the mere rebuff of a liar or a simpleton that arouses our gratification; for the latter story told with assumed seriousness would set a whole company in a roar of laughter, while the former would ordinarily not be regarded as worth attending to.
It may be that Werner S. Pluhar is a much better translator than the translators of the other Critiques that I read, but The Critique of Judgment was by far the easiest to read of any of Kan'ts works (see Bookposts from July through November this year) that I read so far, notwithstanding that it built on ideas from the first two Critiques in order to resolve the conflict between asserting objective standards for judging beauty and the idea that all taste is personal.
The ideas are simple and comparable to Burke's On the Sublime and the Beautiful, which Kant cites, and which I read and commented on last month, except that Kant speaks of "aesthetic judgment" (standards of beauty; ie those things that are self-justifying because they give pleasure just by existing and being beheld) and "teleological judgment" (which alternately means respect for something because of its size, and an attempt to use practical reason to pass judgment by moral/religious standards/establishing a logical purpose to the universe).
I was glad that Kant's definition of sublime involved the evocation of respect and not (as Burke said) fear. It was easier for me to go along with. Kant's full meaning of "sublime" is closer to "evoking a sense of boundlessness that is still comprehensible within the mind", such that for the philosopher, what many see as contemplating "God" is closer to contemplating infinity, complete with those paradoxes where the set of all numbers and the set of even numbers are equal because infinity.
Kant further divides judgments into "determinant" judgments that classify a particular as fitting a preconceived standard, and "reflective" judgments that identify a standard by contemplating one or more particulars.
Epic Epicures: The Physiology of Taste (or, Transcendental Gastronomy, by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
I. The universe would be nothing were it not for life and all that lives must be fed.
II. Animals fill themselves; man eats. The man of mind alone knows how to eat.
III. The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.
IV. Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are.
V. The Creator, when he obliges man to eat, invites him to do so by appetite, and rewards him by pleasure.
VI. Gourmandise is an act of our judgment, in obedience to which, we grant a preference to things which are agreeable, over those which nave not that quality.
VII. The pleasure of the table belongs to all ages, to all conditions, to all countries, and to all aeras; it mingles with all other pleasures, and remains at last to console us for their departure.
VIII. The table is the only place where one does not suffer, from ennui during the first hour.
IX. The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star.
X. Those persons who suffer from indigestion, or who become drunk, are utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.
XI. The order of food is from the most substantial to the lightest.
XII. The order of drinking is from the mildest to the most foamy and perfumed.
XIII. To say that we should not change our drinks is a heresy; the tongue becomes saturated, and after the third glass yields but an obtuse sensation.
XIV. A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye.
XV. A cook may be taught, but a man who can roast, is born with the faculty.
XVI. The most indispensable quality of a good cook is promptness.
It should also be that of the guests.
XVII. To wait too long for a dilatory guest, shows disrespect to those who are punctual.
XVIII. He who receives friends and pays no attention to the repast prepared for them, is not fit to have friends.
XIX. The mistress of the house should always be certain that the coffee be excellent; the master that his liquors be of the first quality.
XX. To invite a person to your house is to take charge of his happiness as long as he be beneath your roof.
I'm guessing a whole lot of people know of Brillat-Savarin mostly from the "Show me what you eat and I will show you who you are" quote that opened the Japanese episodes of Iron chef. Looking at The Physiology of Taste, it's not hard to see why Kaga liked Brillat-Savarin. The two would have gotten along famously, had they lived together.
Nowadays, you can find entire sections of mega bookstores devoted to culinary essays and food criticism, from H.L. Mencken to Claiborne, Beard, Child, etc. Brillat-Savarin is to them what Anaxagoras and Socrates were to philosophy: Trail-blazing, rambling, doing something completely new and therefore not familiar with any of the existing rules. He's all over the map, segueing from recipes to manners and culture to discourses on the end of the world to folksy anecdotes. Most of it is just plain wonderful, in a "listen to your eccentric grandpa tell stories about the old days and never mind the rambling because he's funny and you might learn something" sort of way.
there are some useful sections about diets maybe, many more things, especially about cooking techniques, that are too archaic to be useful, and much about people and the things they put inside them that alternate between a snapshot of a bygone era and commentary on the universal human condition. Everywhere are diners saying "Oh, this is good"; "Ah, most excellently good"; and "Oh Sir! Never but here do we receive such delights!" Just say it along with them, and you'll be in the first "foodies club". Very high recommendations.
Poor William Says: Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
To this a spare Diet contributes much. Eat therefore to live, and do not live to eat. That’s like a Man, but this below a Beast
Have wholesome, but not costly Food, and be rather cleanly than dainty in ordering it.
The Receipts of Cookery are swell’d to a Volume, but a good Stomach excels them all; to which nothing contributes more than Industry and Temperance.
It is a cruel Folly to offer up to Ostentation so many Lives of Creatures, as make up the State of our Treats; as it is a prodigal one to spend more in Sawce than in Meat.
The Proverb says, That enough is as good as a Feast: But it is certainly better, if Superfluity be a Fault, which never fails to be at Festivals.
If thou rise with an Appetite, thou art sure never to sit down without one. Rarely drink but when thou art dry; nor then, between Meals, if it can be avoided.
The smaller the Drink, the clearer the Head, and the cooler the Blood; which are great Benefits in Temper and Business.
Strong Liquors are good at some Times, and in small Proportions; being better for Physick than Food, for Cordials than common Use.
The most common things are the most useful; which shews both the Wisdom and Goodness of the great Lord of the Family of the World.
What therefore he has made rare, don’t thou use too commonly: Lest thou shouldest invert the Use and Order of things; become Wanton and Voluptuous; and thy Blessings prove a Curse.
Let nothing be lost, said our Saviour. But that is lost that is misused.
Neither urge another to that thou wouldst be unwilling to do thy self, nor do thy self what looks to thee unseemly, and intemperate in another.
All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.
In the tradition of such tracts as Proverbs and The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the first Harvard Classics volume supplements Ben Franklin (see Bookpost, April 2016) and John Woolman (August 2016) with a short work of maxims of the "Alcohol in the middle of the day, washes a healthy liver away" variety. The three works in the volume are united mainly be being Colonial-era American writers.
This was the book I carried around while holiday shopping, to pull out and graze in on line. 80 pages of separate sentences and paragraphs similar to the more famous sayings in Poor Richard's Almanac. They're a little prudish maybe, but mostly sensible aside from their appeal to "because "God" says so, and I can't say as any of it was really offensive. Worth a look, anyway.
*pause*
Well...that's my year in books, I guess. Join me next year for Jane Austen, Balzac, Schopenhauer, Tocqueville, Faraday, Kierkegaard, the Brontes, Patrick O'Brien, Flashman, and a whole lot of others centered around the next era.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts
It has often given me pleasure to observe, that Independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide-spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids, and the mutual transportation and exchange of their various commodities.
With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence.
This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.
Did you think these old 18th Century books I've been reading all year don't have relevance today? Well, cue Lin-Manuel Miranda...
How in tarnation does a nation, stationed in a new
Location, patiently make a new administration
In a new configuration from the Articles of Confederation?
The creation takes some explanation.
The word-whooshing, contribution of elocution
Made the revolution proposing solutions
Proposing resolutions, preventing dissolutions
Three men making the case for the Constitution
And every day, the public was suspicious and dubious
The Confederation, naive, defenseless and n00bious
They looked in the papers for something salubrious
And found 85 articles, all signed "Publius"
Thirteen states strained between Florida and Maine
They saw their independence drip-dripping down to Spain
To the French, to the English and the Germans and the Dutch
If they got us in their clutches, they wouldn't leave very much
With the Constitution up, only four states could blackball it
Told to turn their backs and keep one hand on their wallet
But these essays in collection for all those who would eyeball it
They said, this here whatchamacallit--
What you call it?
The Papers of the Federalist
They wrote the Papers of the Federalist
It was well revered by centralists
And just you read, just you read---
There are checks and balances, they're everywhere, essential
Legislative, the executive, the jurisprudential
Do you think the public would let it beat 'em and cheat 'em
A people that would stand for that would never stand freedom
There is a demonstration of the separation of powers
A warning to let the nation flower before it sours
A voice saying, leaders leave your ivory towers
Give this government document to the people it empowers
There would have been nothing left to do for a system more vanilla
It might have been trapped between Charybdis and the Scylla
Of anarchy or seizure by a latter day Atilla
Divisiveness between the States, if only a scintilla
Cited by John Marshall in McCulloch versus Maryland
Don't leave it to majorities, a mob rule ain't no fairyland
Mightier than swords, their feathered pens make a stand
The New World going to have a new plan
The New World going to have a new plan
(The New World going to have a new plan)
The New World going to have a new plan
(The New World going to have a new plan)
Just you read it
Alexander Hamilton (Alexander Hamilton)
James Madison and John Jay too (John Jay too)
They didn't back down
But they didn't back the Bill of Rights
The Papers of the Federalist (Papers of the Federalist)
With borrowings from Montesquieu
Their writings were mostly wise
But we have to apologize
For that slave state three-fifths compromise
Our nation's threatened once again
With one foot in the grave
Its enemies in charge of the whole Federal enclave
Can the Founding Fathers show us how we can be saved?
JAY--wrote four of it
MADISON--more of it
HAMILTON--the core of it
WE--adore it
And TRUMP--he's the sick fuck who tore it!
They were a statecraft supplement for us
So just you read--
(What they call it?)
The Papers of the Federalist!
Frexit: Rousseau and Revolution, by Will and Ariel Durant
It is hard to define morality, for each age makes its own definition to suit its temper and sins. Frenchmen had through centuries relieved monogamy with adultery, as America relieves it with divorce; and in the Gallic view judicious adultery does less hurt to the family--or at least to the children--than divorce. In any case, adultery flourished in eighteenth century France, and was generally condoned. When Diderot, in his Encyclopedie, wished to distinguish "bind" and "attach", he gave as example, "One is bound to one's wife, attached to one's mistress." To have a mistress was as necessary to status as to have money.
Of the Durants' enormous eleven-volume history of western civilization through Waterloo, Rousseau and Revolution, at 965 pages (not counting notes, bibliography and index in the back), is the second thickest volume in the set. it covers 35 years. The only volume that's thicker, The Age of Faith, covers 1,000 years. As I've learned over the course of six years of historical reading, civilization expands exponentially.
Most of the 18th Century books I read this year will be found here and in the previous volume, as will summaries of the major events of the period. The Durants wrote an eleventh volume, on the Napoleonic era, but at the time, they thought they were finishing up, and marking the fall of the Bastille as a decent milestone to use as a jumping-off spot. And so they do a lot of unnecessary wrapping-up and making notes on people and events, like Goethe, that were still to come.
The series is big on Europe, and its defects become more noticeable when "The West" no longer is confined to Europe. The colonies of North America, and their war for independence, are barely mentioned. Meanwhile, there are so many advances in government, economics, philosophy, science, music, literature and art that, in addition to referencing Diderot and the encyclopediasts of the age, the book becomes something of an encyclopedia itself. Still, it served as a springboard and introduction to many books I might not otherwise have included in this year's reading, and gave an outline of what to expect from them, for which I am grateful.
The 18th Century Murders: Written in My Own heart's Blood, by Diana Gabaldon; The High Constable, by Maan Meyers; The Prince Lost to Time, by Anne Dukthas
"Um...that gentleman is James Fraser, my...er...my--" "First husband wasn't accurate, and neither was "last husband" or even, unfortunately, "most recent husband." I settled for the simplest alternative. "My husband. And, er, William's father."
Mrs. Figg's mouth opened, soundless for an instant. She backed up slowly and sat down on a needlework ottoman with a soft *phumph*. "William know that?", she asked after a moment's contemplation.
"He does now," I said, with a brief gesture toward the devastation in the stairwell, clearly visible through the door of the parlor where we were sitting.
"Merde on--I mean, Holy Lamb of God preserve us." Mrs. Figg's second husband was a Methodist preacher, and she strove to be a credit to him, but her first had been a French gambler.
--from Written in My Own Heart's Blood
Somewhere in the darkness a dog howled. Betrancourt remembered how, years earlier, a soothsayer had told him that would be the last sound he would ever hear on Earth. Why did it happen, he thought. The men who had followed him from the tavern had, before old Betrancourt broke free and fled, mentioned Monsieur de Paris. If Monsieur de Paris wanted him, then sentence of death had already been passed.
--from The Prince Lost to Time
Hays leaned over to get a better look. Adhering to the back of the body, its teeth caught on the dead man's coat, looking for all the world as if it were biting the dead man's arse, was a human skull.
--from The High Constable
Written in My Own Heart's Blood is the last, so far, of the very thick Outlander novels, and one of the best. There's clearly more to come, but the plots have spread out to several times and places, from 1739 to 1980, and from Scotland to Boston to Savannah, with cameos from historical characters like General Washington, Nathan Hale and the Marquis de Lafayette, and a front row seat for the Battle of Monmouth. The viewpoint changes, Game of thrones style, between various characters, and Gabaldon's writing has improved greatly from the first book to the last.
The Prince Lost to Time is the only one of Ann Dukthas's works (in which the ageless detective Segalla investigates actual historical conundrums and comes up with quirky solutions consistent with the actual historical record) set in the 18th Century. The mystery is clunky; the point is to hypothesize a way in which the Dauphin did not die in the tower, that is consistent with the known facts.
Finally, rounding out a century of period mysteries is The High Constable of post-Colonial Manhattan, which is mainly recommended for people who like tales in which the mystery is secondary to personal development of the main characters. The central family has plenty of issues, not the least of which is the alcoholic son who is failing at work and life and accused of theft and murder, and who uses the experience to grow up and find his true calling amid a wealth of information about the family's Dutch/Quaker/Jewish heritage and the customs and newspaper clippings of the time, and not much mystery.
Rantin Rovin Robin: Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
WEE, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t!
Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
I have a surprisingly hard time commenting on poetry, given all the lyrics I write, but I felt obligated to tackle Burns, who is the only poet in the Harvard Classics set besides Milton to have an entire volume given to only his work. The Scots have elevated him to near sainthood, and the celebration of "Burns Day" on his birthday of January 25 is a ritual like America's Thanksgiving dinner...only with haggis. Different salutes for different galoots!
There are hundreds of them, ranging from the satirical to the poignant to stuff that's hard to even understand without trying to sing it out loud, because of the thick Scots-English, as in "Och aye mi bonny laddie y'are a wee dumb shytte". Many are verses written to a particular neighbor or lover, or epigrams and epitaphs originally scrawled casually on napkins, or political screeds in verse that probably had a lot more punch back when everyone was talking about Alderman MacArgus who tuk wynd amang the praesentin o'th' statue or about Graidy Donald wha had a comely doter-o.
And then among those, you'll find the famous ones you've heard, or at least recognize lines from, like Auld Lang Syne, "To a Louse", or "A Man's A Man For a' That". I grew up with more of these than some did, having a da' who was part Scot, and it made for awkward moments at camp where they'd start a round of "Green Grow the Rushes-o" and I would start singing "There's naught but care in every hand" while everyone else went "I'll sing you one-o".
I started the collection on or about January 25, and finished it in December. These need to be read a few at a time.
Pop'nfresh Gender Roles: On the Black Hill, by Bruce Chatwin
But Benjamin did not cry. He simply pursed his mouth and turned his sad grey eyes on his brother. For it was Lewis, not he, who was whimpering with pain, and stroking his own left hand as if it were a wounded bird. He went on snivelling till bedtime. Only when they were locked in each other's arms did the twins doze off--and from then on, they associated eggs with wasps and mistrusted anything yellow. This was the first time Lewis demonstrated his power to draw the pain from his brother, and take it on himself. He was the stronger twin, and the firstborn.
A very strange tale, almost but not quite magic realism, about 80 years in the life of a pair of identical twins born near the Welsh border in 1900.
Things change slowly, but they do change, from a long, rural idyll of a pair of childhoods, through two world wars, a depression, faint stirrings of technology, and ultimately a flood of new things. The boys share a bond so strong that when one of them is drafted and the other stays behind, the one at home feels the pain of the other's boot camp tortures.
And the gender roles are quirky. The farm where the boys live is called "The Vision", and, while being described as intensely masculine, is misty and poetic. Nearby is the feminine "The Rock", where the energy is wild and feral and described as "feminine" (untamed?). This seemed to me distracting from an otherwise touching, Dylan Thomas-esque story where characters are drawn full-fleshed with but a few words. High recommendations.
Dead Poetess Society: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
"This is Stanley Baldwin, who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long," said Miss Brodie. "Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan "Safety First." But safety does not come first. Follow me."
This was the first intimation to the girls of an odds between Miss Brodie and the rest of the teaching staff. Indeed, to some of them, it was the first time they had realized it was possible for people glued together in grown-up authority to differ at all. Taking inward note of this, and with the exhilaration of being in on the faint smell of row, without being endangered by it, they followed dangerous Miss Brodie into the secure shade of the elm.
Seems to me, the Peter Wier movie Dead Poets' Society was an all male reboot of Muriel Spark, who did it better in this novella about a teacher adopting half a dozen students in a strict private school/academy and attempting to awaken their imaginations and souls, thereby making enemies in the authoritarian faculty and ultimately being railroaded into dismissal.
There are differences. No suicide, although a minor character is killed in the Spanish civil war and some of the girls' eventual deaths years later are foreshadowed (the story, centered around the girls' senior year in 1931, flashbacks and flash-forwards extensively, gradually giving meaning to certain details and referencing both World Wars and beyond. The school is in Scotland, not New England, and has heavier Calvinist overtones that even the supposedly free-spirited Miss Jean bows to. And, of course, the "awakenings" of girls in a world where girls more than boys are forever being told to stay obedient and half-asleep and where any expression of passion is presumed to be sexual, has extra significance.
Mostly, the quality is in the language. It is a riveting story, expertly plotted, in which one cares deeply about the characters and dreads the sense of impending doom that looms over them like a gothic cathedral. Highest recommendations.
Point/Counterpoint: Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke; The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine
In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and in the transit from one form of government to another-you cannot see that character of men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country. With us it is militant; with you it is triumphant; and you know how it can act when its power is commensurate to its will. I would not be supposed to confine those observations to any description of men, or to comprehend all men of any description within them-No! far from it. I am as incapable of that injustice, as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremities; and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little, when no political purpose is served by the depravation. This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.
--from Reflections on the Revolution in France
No man is prejudiced in favour of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone. We have but a defective idea of what prejudice is. It might be said, that until men think for themselves the whole is prejudice and not opinion, for that only is opinion which is the result of reason and reflection. I offer this remark, that Mr. Burke may not confide too much in what has been the customary prejudices of the country.
--from The Rights of Man
The more I read about the French Revolution, the more alarmed I become about this day and age. It's as if---and yes, the comparisons will fail unless you squint pretty hard, but work with me here--a President for Life Romney, married to Hillary Clinton, tried to do the right thing by the starving people in hard economic times, but was persuaded by competing factions within the party. First he listened to a Mormon adviser, who urged that food stored be appropriated to feed the hungry, but then another Republican adviser screamed that this was socialism, and had the Mormon replaced with someone who urged laissez-faire market solutions and snatched the food back from the hungry, and eventually a mob of Occupiers and Black Lives Matter activists led by Sanders and Warren rose up and threw Romney out of office, while both they and the Tea Party spewed endless hate about Clinton being a Wall Street tool even as she had been trying to overcome past mistakes and was a liberal at heart. This is the point at which Burke and Paine had their famous exchange of ideas. What they didn't know, and what Burke correctly predicted, was that while the Bernie people were trying to get a wonderful Utopia established in which everyone had both rights and food, the Tea Party would seize on the new anarchy and kill the Bernie people, and everyone else who looked liberal to them, and then the Trump people would kill the Tea Partiers and set up a directorate and then Petraeus or Colin Powell or some other popular general would kill Trump and set up a military empire.
Sort of.
As I said last month, Burke was a Bourgeois liberal for most of his life, urging liberal reforms in England to stave off revolution. When revolution happened, he did what I probably would do and foresaw the ruin of the good as well as the bad, and was not happy about it. I expected to agree a lot more with Burke, but he did like Orson Scott Card after 9/11 and went full on flatline. He is not an Obama urging caution and wanting the down and out to be content with modest reforms so as not to risk throwing the bathroom out with the bathwater; he is Giuliani screaming at the ignorant rabble (of color) to shut up, go home, and stop talking uppity to their betters. In today's time, his arguments read like idiotic superstitions and blatant appeals to prejudice. True, we should hesitate before throwing down custom and tradition, and make sure that what we have to replace it is really better, but Burke takes it as a given that the old is better just because it is old. Kings can do no wrong. Churches speak for God above, and the very concept of civil rights for all people--including, you know, those smelly (Millennial) peasants who think the mere capacity to inflate their lungs entitles them to participation trophies--is an abomination against civilization. His prediction of chaos and blood proved right, but for all the wrong reasons.
In response, Thomas Paine comes back with the American ideal of Democracy and praises the Constitution (that revered three-year-old document at the time) as if he lived in 1967 and such ideals were taken for granted. Remember, he was writing during the brief period when the Bernie movement of the day was in charge, there was some semblance of order and at least the attempt to create a good government, before the mob took over and made blood flow through the streets.
Burke is supported by what happened in the short term; he was specific. Paine is supported by the results over centuries; he was talking about ideals. Most of their arguments flew right over each others' heads because they were taking about different things. There is a great deal of food for thought, and a bunch of rhetorical chicanery, in both of them, and both should be read together.
Especially right now, when it seems ready to happen all over again, here.
What am I doing here? The Vocation of Man, by Johann Gottlieb Fichte
I can never become conscious either of the external powers, by which, in the system of universal necessity, I am determined; nor of my own power, by which, on the system of freedom, I determine myself. Thus, whichsoever of the two opinions I may accept, I still accept it, not upon evidence, but merely by arbitrary choice.
Has there yet been a satisfactory reconciliation of determinism versus free will that does not wholly reject determinism? If there is, I'd like to see it, because Fichte's mercifully short attempt is nit it.
Fichte assumes that people have a more insistent need for an orderly universe than people (me, anyhow) really do. He rejects free will mostly on the basis that we are to small to know much on a cosmic scale, that happiness leads inevitably to a desire for the existence of God (so that we can express thanks to it); but also (rightly, it seems to me) rejects determinism on the grounds that it deprives us of worthiness because of our right choices, or makes it unjust to blame us for our wrong ones--though, of course, the argument fails that because something is not fair, that means it cannot be the case.
The reconciliation, that we are free-willed tiny parts within a self-directed much larger whole, like self-aware white blood cells in a human body, is neither convincing nor spiritually/philosophically comforting. If that which really matters is too large to even be meaningfully perceived much less affected by our actions, and if we are guided pretty much by instinct, that does not seem to me to promote my well-being or that of anyone else. Your mileage may vary.
Fichte writes in a weird first/third person narrative as if the first person narrator is you the reader, passing from despair to rejoicing as I/you receive Fichte's wisdom, that the "vocation of man" is obedience to one's conscience as the voice of God. The technique is offensively presumptuous; he literally tells you what you are thinking as you read, and in my case at least, he is laughably wrong.
Also, German philosophers are certainly a stodgy lot.
Curmudgeon's Guide to Europe: A Tramp Abroad, by Mark Twain
There are some unaccountable reputations in the world. Saint Nicholas's is an instance. He has ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children, yet it appears that he was not much of a friend to his own. He had ten of them, and when fifty years old he left them and sought out as dismal a refuge from the world as possible and became a hermit in order that he might reflect upon pious themes without being disturbed by the joyous and other noises from the nursery, doubtless....there apparently exists no rule for the construction of hermits; St. Nicholas will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys on Christmas Eve forever, conferring kindness on other people's children to make up for deserting his own.
Twain is, of course, a national treasure in America. A Tramp Abroad, his account of a real trip through Germany, Switzerland and Italy, is presented as "nonfiction" but sprinkled with so many tall tales and other yarns as to make it unclear what part is fact and what fiction. He claims to have tried to ride a glacier down the mountain, become perturbed after a day of attempting, at the discovery of the actual speed at which glaciers move, and said "Fiddlesticks! I can walk it faster than that!"
Elsewhere, Twain describes Alpine farms that are vertical, such that people die from falling off their farms; German "folk legends" that lengthen the reader's leg in translation; French duelists who approach a bout with what amounts to peashooters at 500 paces with all the tears and melodrama of a pair of operatic patriots dying for their country; and meals designed by the more vicious members of the Borgia family to be eaten by their enemies.
The style alternates. Twain can slip from the highly educated man he was to writing in the "Them city people sure do confound me with their foolish ways and fancy talk" country drawl his characters were famous for. Similarly, the book's lavish illustrations include impressive, accurate drawings of vistas and ancient castles, as well as cartoonish line drawings of fools. The overall effect, as you'd expect, is wonderful.
Oh, and don't skip the appendixes. They're as awesome as the main book. Very high recommendations.
We're All Fucked: On Population, by Thomas Malthus
We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population, which is found to act even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of labourers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand. In the mean time the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land, to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage, till ultimately the means of subsistence become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the labourer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened, and the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated.
The big thing to know about Malthus is that poverty and famine are features not bugs. According to Malthus, the population grows faster than the food supply, and will keep doing so until it hits critical mass and there isn't enough food to go around, at which point the population will stabilize again (due to cannibalism?). Any -and he does mean ANY- increase in the quality of life will be offset by people making babies until that quality of life cannot be sustained and falls back again. You can't win. You can't break even. You can't quit the game.
If you thought assholes had seized on Adam Smith (see last month's bookpost) as an excuse to be cruel to the poor, wait till you see what they extrapolated from Malthus in an age before they had Social Darwinism as their excuse. Attempts at welfare and other relief for the poor were viciously attacked as threatening to bring about a malthusian population bomb. Ebeneezer Scrooge, when he urged the poor to die quickly, and reduce the surplus population, had read his Malthus with approval Let famine run its course for the greater good, said the Trumpkins of the day, while they pointed and laughed and gorged themselves on delicacies withheld from the poor.
Slightly more humanely, Malthus urged population control, an influence that stayed with society through such groups as Zero Population Growth, which shames people for having babies (though of course, people are also shamed for having abortions, or really, for having sex at all. If it gives pleasure for free, the capitalists will discourage it and the Puritans will punish it. Depriving a puritan moralist of the opportunity to shame someone is like tearing the guitar out of Eric Clapton's hands. But I digress).
Malthusianism, like Libertarianism or Communism, is one of those economic theories that looks logical, even inevitable, on paper, but that has rarely or never appeared in practice, even in an economy planned around it. Malthus wrote in 1798 as if the earth was about to exceed maximum sustainable population any day now. Here we are over two centuries later, 7 billion earthlings and counting, and we still have farmers destroying surplus food to keep prices artificially high. I saw a map once that featured a middling circle centered in the South China Sea and including Japan, Southeast China, IndoChina, Indonesia, most of the Indian subcontinent and a few other islands, and asserting that half of the world's population lived within that circle. I don't know how they manage, but if THEY are continuing to reproduce without vast constant famine, it would seem that North America and Europe have quite a ways to go.
The Handgentleman's Tale: The Gate to Womens' Country, by Sherri S. Tepper
Everyone agreed that it was dishonorable to return through the Gate to Women's Country. Only cowards did it. Cowards and physical weaklings, though even they could be put to work in the garrison kitchens or doing maintenance of some kind if they confessed their weakness to the Commander. Beyond being the butt of a bit of rough teasing or donkey play, they got on well enough.
Sherri S. Tepper was one of the victims of 2016, and so I felt like reading one of hers as we say goodbye to a horrible year. I've enjoyed some of her other work: The Family Tree; The Visitor; The Fresco, all of which have things happen in what is more or less our world.
The Gate To Women's Country is not "our world". It is a dystopian post-nuke future in which the women have taken over and set up an Atwood-in-reverse ecofeminist society where they keep knowledge a secret for themselves and boys are brought up in military garrisons outside the gates. At age 15, they are required to choose to Enter Women's Country and be servants to women, or to stay outside as warriors and become not much more than rutting beasts with Klingon values.
There are also nomads (called by an offensive name, unfortunately) who run away from all of it and are considered fair game to kill; and (of course, because this is a Tepper novel) a disgusting religious patriarchy where they eagerly beat and rape women to "chastise" them for arousing sinful desires in men: "Ooh, look at that one! I would love to chastise her!"
The main character is named Stavia. The action alternates between the "present", in which she rehearses her role in a traditional Greek tragedy rewritten such that the Trojan Women get the upper hand over the Greeks and the ghosts of fallen warriors; and flashbacks to when she was a girl and had a relationship with a boy in the warriors' camp. So infatuated is she that she does the unthinkable and allows him to read books.
The Saga Continues: Jeremy Poldark, by Winston Graham
The two women were vagrants. They had been caught flagrantly begging. They had no visible means of support. It was a plain case and the jury speedily found them guilty. But this was a crime on which the Hon. Justice Lister felt rather strongly and he delivered a long and damning homily on the evils of such a life. Looking at him, Demelza realized there was no mercy here. His diction was beautiful, his phrases as elegantly rounded as if they had been written out the night before. But the substance was to condemn. Abruptly, without any raising of the voice or change of expression, he sentenced the two women to be whipped and the case was over.
I had intended to have this 12-volume series read this year. The books are quite short. However, I only made it through three because I have to wait so long for them at the library. It's nice to see a resurgence of interest in Winston Graham (just as it was touching to see on social media the renewed interest in Krampus among the young this holiday season), but they might have waited a bit. Most of the third book is concerned with a WTF trial in which it is a hanging offense to do something that isn't even illegal in our time and country, though there are plenty of instructive examples on Parliamentary elections, the descent of honorable professions into profit-centric savagery, developments in medicine, and working class funerals. The title character is Poldark's son, who isn't born until the final chapter.
Guns Don't Kill---Trolls Do! Men At Arms, by Terry Pratchett
To understand why dwarfs and trolls don't like each other, you have to go back a long way. They get along like chalk and cheese. Very like chalk and cheese, really. One is organic; the other isn't, and also smells a bit cheesy. Dwarfs make a living by smashing up rocks with valuable minerals in them, and the silicon-based life form known as trolls are, basically, rocks with valuable minerals in them. In the wild, they also spend most of the daylight hours dormant, and that's not a situation a rock containing valuable minerals needs to be in when there are dwarfs around. And dwarfs hate trolls because, after you've just found an interesting seam of valuable minerals, you don't like rocks that suddenly stand up and tear your arm off because you've just stuck a pickaxe in their ear.
I traditionally spend much of Christmas reading a Discworld novel, on the theory that they contribute to a day of joy, and that I want to make the series last for me. Men At Arms is focused on Ankh Morporks city watch (Carrot; Vimes, et al), and has everything want in a Discworld book (other than Rincewind and Granny Weatherwxax): a disaster to be averted, an increasingly twisty plot, laugh-out-loud humor, and social commentary on issues appropriate to our world.
In this adventure, the watch has recently hired new Affirmative Action recruits, including a dwarf and a troll who are of course paired up in the most hilarious frenemy law enforcement duo I've yet seen, and a woman named Angua who is more than she seems and who feeds my heroine addiction to surfeit. Together with the regulars of the watch, they must avert civil unrest between the trolls and dwarfs, avert similar unrest among the various guilds, solve a series of murders involving a mysterious never before seen weapon despite orders from the City Patrician not to investigate, and keep Vimes from getting killed immediately before retirement so that he may marry his Very Superior Fiancee and live in luxury after a life of grime.
The fun is incredible. So is the food for thought. Highest recommendations.
Kant Touch This: The Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant
Suppose this story to be told: An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. When the Englishman asked him, “What is there in this to astonish you so much?” he answered, “I am not at all astonished that it should flow out, but I do wonder how you ever got it in.” At this story we laugh, and it gives us hearty pleasure; not because we deem ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man, or because of anything else in it that we note as satisfactory to the Understanding, but because our expectation was strained [for a time] and then was suddenly dissipated into nothing. Again: The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed; “for” (said he) “the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look!” When we hear this story we laugh loud, and the reason is that an expectation is suddenly transformed into nothing. We must note well that it does not transform itself into the positive opposite of an expected object-for then there would still be something, which might even be a cause of grief-but it must be transformed into nothing. For if a man arouses great expectations in us when telling a story, and at the end we see its falsehood immediately, it displeases us; e.g. the story of the people whose hair in consequence of great grief turned gray in one night. But if a wag, to repair the effect of this story, describes very circumstantially the grief of the merchant returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise who was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm, and who grieved thereat so much that his wig turned gray the same night-we laugh and it gives us gratification. For we treat our own mistake in the case of an object otherwise indifferent to us, or rather the Idea which we are following out, as we treat a ball which we knock to and fro for a time, though our only serious intention is to seize it and hold it fast. It is not the mere rebuff of a liar or a simpleton that arouses our gratification; for the latter story told with assumed seriousness would set a whole company in a roar of laughter, while the former would ordinarily not be regarded as worth attending to.
It may be that Werner S. Pluhar is a much better translator than the translators of the other Critiques that I read, but The Critique of Judgment was by far the easiest to read of any of Kan'ts works (see Bookposts from July through November this year) that I read so far, notwithstanding that it built on ideas from the first two Critiques in order to resolve the conflict between asserting objective standards for judging beauty and the idea that all taste is personal.
The ideas are simple and comparable to Burke's On the Sublime and the Beautiful, which Kant cites, and which I read and commented on last month, except that Kant speaks of "aesthetic judgment" (standards of beauty; ie those things that are self-justifying because they give pleasure just by existing and being beheld) and "teleological judgment" (which alternately means respect for something because of its size, and an attempt to use practical reason to pass judgment by moral/religious standards/establishing a logical purpose to the universe).
I was glad that Kant's definition of sublime involved the evocation of respect and not (as Burke said) fear. It was easier for me to go along with. Kant's full meaning of "sublime" is closer to "evoking a sense of boundlessness that is still comprehensible within the mind", such that for the philosopher, what many see as contemplating "God" is closer to contemplating infinity, complete with those paradoxes where the set of all numbers and the set of even numbers are equal because infinity.
Kant further divides judgments into "determinant" judgments that classify a particular as fitting a preconceived standard, and "reflective" judgments that identify a standard by contemplating one or more particulars.
Epic Epicures: The Physiology of Taste (or, Transcendental Gastronomy, by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
I. The universe would be nothing were it not for life and all that lives must be fed.
II. Animals fill themselves; man eats. The man of mind alone knows how to eat.
III. The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.
IV. Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are.
V. The Creator, when he obliges man to eat, invites him to do so by appetite, and rewards him by pleasure.
VI. Gourmandise is an act of our judgment, in obedience to which, we grant a preference to things which are agreeable, over those which nave not that quality.
VII. The pleasure of the table belongs to all ages, to all conditions, to all countries, and to all aeras; it mingles with all other pleasures, and remains at last to console us for their departure.
VIII. The table is the only place where one does not suffer, from ennui during the first hour.
IX. The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star.
X. Those persons who suffer from indigestion, or who become drunk, are utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.
XI. The order of food is from the most substantial to the lightest.
XII. The order of drinking is from the mildest to the most foamy and perfumed.
XIII. To say that we should not change our drinks is a heresy; the tongue becomes saturated, and after the third glass yields but an obtuse sensation.
XIV. A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye.
XV. A cook may be taught, but a man who can roast, is born with the faculty.
XVI. The most indispensable quality of a good cook is promptness.
It should also be that of the guests.
XVII. To wait too long for a dilatory guest, shows disrespect to those who are punctual.
XVIII. He who receives friends and pays no attention to the repast prepared for them, is not fit to have friends.
XIX. The mistress of the house should always be certain that the coffee be excellent; the master that his liquors be of the first quality.
XX. To invite a person to your house is to take charge of his happiness as long as he be beneath your roof.
I'm guessing a whole lot of people know of Brillat-Savarin mostly from the "Show me what you eat and I will show you who you are" quote that opened the Japanese episodes of Iron chef. Looking at The Physiology of Taste, it's not hard to see why Kaga liked Brillat-Savarin. The two would have gotten along famously, had they lived together.
Nowadays, you can find entire sections of mega bookstores devoted to culinary essays and food criticism, from H.L. Mencken to Claiborne, Beard, Child, etc. Brillat-Savarin is to them what Anaxagoras and Socrates were to philosophy: Trail-blazing, rambling, doing something completely new and therefore not familiar with any of the existing rules. He's all over the map, segueing from recipes to manners and culture to discourses on the end of the world to folksy anecdotes. Most of it is just plain wonderful, in a "listen to your eccentric grandpa tell stories about the old days and never mind the rambling because he's funny and you might learn something" sort of way.
there are some useful sections about diets maybe, many more things, especially about cooking techniques, that are too archaic to be useful, and much about people and the things they put inside them that alternate between a snapshot of a bygone era and commentary on the universal human condition. Everywhere are diners saying "Oh, this is good"; "Ah, most excellently good"; and "Oh Sir! Never but here do we receive such delights!" Just say it along with them, and you'll be in the first "foodies club". Very high recommendations.
Poor William Says: Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
To this a spare Diet contributes much. Eat therefore to live, and do not live to eat. That’s like a Man, but this below a Beast
Have wholesome, but not costly Food, and be rather cleanly than dainty in ordering it.
The Receipts of Cookery are swell’d to a Volume, but a good Stomach excels them all; to which nothing contributes more than Industry and Temperance.
It is a cruel Folly to offer up to Ostentation so many Lives of Creatures, as make up the State of our Treats; as it is a prodigal one to spend more in Sawce than in Meat.
The Proverb says, That enough is as good as a Feast: But it is certainly better, if Superfluity be a Fault, which never fails to be at Festivals.
If thou rise with an Appetite, thou art sure never to sit down without one. Rarely drink but when thou art dry; nor then, between Meals, if it can be avoided.
The smaller the Drink, the clearer the Head, and the cooler the Blood; which are great Benefits in Temper and Business.
Strong Liquors are good at some Times, and in small Proportions; being better for Physick than Food, for Cordials than common Use.
The most common things are the most useful; which shews both the Wisdom and Goodness of the great Lord of the Family of the World.
What therefore he has made rare, don’t thou use too commonly: Lest thou shouldest invert the Use and Order of things; become Wanton and Voluptuous; and thy Blessings prove a Curse.
Let nothing be lost, said our Saviour. But that is lost that is misused.
Neither urge another to that thou wouldst be unwilling to do thy self, nor do thy self what looks to thee unseemly, and intemperate in another.
All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.
In the tradition of such tracts as Proverbs and The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the first Harvard Classics volume supplements Ben Franklin (see Bookpost, April 2016) and John Woolman (August 2016) with a short work of maxims of the "Alcohol in the middle of the day, washes a healthy liver away" variety. The three works in the volume are united mainly be being Colonial-era American writers.
This was the book I carried around while holiday shopping, to pull out and graze in on line. 80 pages of separate sentences and paragraphs similar to the more famous sayings in Poor Richard's Almanac. They're a little prudish maybe, but mostly sensible aside from their appeal to "because "God" says so, and I can't say as any of it was really offensive. Worth a look, anyway.
*pause*
Well...that's my year in books, I guess. Join me next year for Jane Austen, Balzac, Schopenhauer, Tocqueville, Faraday, Kierkegaard, the Brontes, Patrick O'Brien, Flashman, and a whole lot of others centered around the next era.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts