Matthew Stewart. The Courtier and the Heretic

Modernity dethrones humankind. It reduces all our thoughts, purposes, and hopes to the object of scientific inquiry. It makes laboratory rats of us all. Spinoza actively embraces this collapse of the human into mere nature. Leibniz abhors it. Even more than he wants to convince us that God is good, Leibniz intends to demonstrate that we are the most special of all beings in nature. In the entire universe, he says, there is nothing more real or more permanent or more worthy of love than the individual human soul. We belong to the innermost reality of things. The human being is the new God, he announces: Each of us is "a small divinity and eminently a universe: God in ectype and the universe in prototype." This is the idea that defines Leibniz's philosophy, and that explains the enormous, if often unacknowledged, influence that his thought has wielded in the past three centuries of human history.

The greatest obstacle Leibniz confronts in his quest to deify the human being is Spinoza's theory of mind. In Spinoza's view, the mind is nothing real; it is merely an abstraction over the material processes of the body. But, counters Leibniz, in the material world, nothing lasts forever; everything is at the mercy of impersonal forces; what passes for "unity" is merely temporary aggregation; and "identity" is a chimera in the never-ending flux of becoming and passing away. If Spinoza is correct, Leibniz concludes, then the human being, too, is merely chaff blowing in the silent winds of nature (Matthew Stewart. The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, p. 241).

Bill Buford. Heat

Miriam, who can't get a pastina to roll out the dough, no longer makes handmade pasta. When her daughter takes over, will she roll it out by hand? In Tuscany, you can't get the meat at the heart of the region's cooking, so Dario and the Maestro found a small farm that reproduces the intensity of flavor they grew up with. How long will that taste memory last? The Maestro will die. Dario will die. I will die. The memory will die. Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season (Bill Buford. Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 301).

(Although I will attempt to allow these good books to speak for themselves, I cannot resist adding, that I am utterly baffled that Timothy Egan's paint-by-number The Worst Hard Time should have won the National Book Award last year -- and that Buford's exhuberant, eloquent, detailed, and lovely account of the reinvention of self did not even make the list of finalists. At the very least, Taylor Branch's magnificent At Caanan's Edge, the third and final volume of his magisterial trilogy on the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr., should have won the award for 2006. They just gave Egan the award for Hard Time as a consolation prize for having failed to give credit where credit is due: for his exquisite and memorable account of life in the Pacific Northwest, The Good Rain.)

Alberto Manguel. A History of Reading

"Altogether," Kafka wrote in 1904 to his friend Oskar Pollak, "I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe" (p. 93).

But there is something other than entertainment which one derives from reading in bed: a particular quality of privacy. Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden(Alberto Manuel. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996, p. 153).