James Shapiro. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599

Shakespeare, then, was born into an England poised between worlds. While the Elizabethans didn't suffer the bloody religious wars that racked much of the Continent, its reformations meant among other things a stripping away of altars, paintings, ceremonies, vestments, sacramental rituals, and beloved holidays. At least in theory, for reformers seeking to purify a Church they saw encrusted with idolatry, this made good sense. But in practice, it also left a tear in the fabric of daily life. Traditional seasonal rhythms were disrupted, the long-standing equilibrium between holiday and workday unbalanced. The reformist effort to do away with the distracting rituals of Catholic worship resulted in a kind of sensory deprivation, for the rush to reform had overlooked the extent to which people craved the sights and sounds of the old communal celebration. It soon became obvious to Tudor authorities that reform had left a potentially dangerous vacuum. The official and avowedly Protestant Book of Homilies acknowledged as much when it incorporated into the homily "Of the Place and Time of Prayer" an imaginary dialogue between two churchgoing women confused by all these changes: "Alas, gossip," one says to her friend, "what shall we do now at church, since all the saints are taken away, since all the goodly sights we were wont to have are gone, since we cannot hear the like piping, singing, chanting, and playing upon the organs, that we could before?" (James Shapiro. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. New York: HarperCollins, 2005, pp. 150-51.)

(For more on this topic, see especially Eamon Duffy's masterful The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. Yale UP, 1992.)

Michael Ondaatje. Divisadero

All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell (p. 136).

He thought, strangely, not of his family but about Marie-Neige, with whom he had rarely spoken since his marriage. For a series of nights his mind leapt with excited freedom all around her. He would recall something and force himself to journey across the episode, slowly. He had seen her rise from sewing and arch her back, slip her left hand up within the sleeve of the other arm and tug at the muscle there. If he had been more relaxed as a man, he would have crossed the room and kneaded the muscle free of its stiffness. There'd been some sibling-like desire in him towards her. He began sorting the evidence of that. Where he had turned right, he now turned left and entered a room with her, or helped her carry bundles of laundry when it started to rain --they rushed into the house, their arms full, his shirt and her blouse speckled, no, sodden, with rain. She picked up a towel from the basket and dried his hair. His palms rested on her thin shoulders while his head was bowed towards her, aware her taut body was made up only of essentials (pp. 247-48).



'We have art,' Nietzche says, 'so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.' For the raw truth of an episode never ends, just as the terrain of my sister's life and the story of my time with Coop are endless to me. They are the possibilities every time I pick up the telephone when it rings suddenly, some late hour after midnight, and I hear the beeps and whirs that suggest a transatlantic call, and I wait for that deep breath before Claire will announce herself. I will be for her an almost unrecognizable girl save for an image in a picture (Michael Ondaatje. Divisadero. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p. 267-68).

(In the original, as Ondaatje notes in his Acknowledgements, it reads: Wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zugrunde gehen.)

Sven Birkerts. The Gutenberg Elegies.

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. That, God or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it, a pattern that we could discern for ourselves if we could somehow lay the whole of our experience out like a map. And while it may be true that a reader cannot see the full map better than anyone else, he is more likely to live under the supposition that such an informing pattern does exist. He is, by inclination and formation, an explorer of causes and effects and connections through time. He does not live in the present as others do--not quite--because the present is known to be a moving point in the larger scheme he is attentive to (Sven Birkerts. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994, p. 85).

(Despite its lovely title, this book wrings its hands with disappointing predictability. I just thought that Flanagan's (see previous blog) and Birkerts' "readings" of narrative are so disconcertingly at odds, that I couldn't resist placing these two passages side by side. Is plot really as old-fashioned as the third-person masculine pronoun? Incidentally, if you want to read a readable, heartbreaking book on the fate of reading in an electronic age, check out Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.)

Robert Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish

That a book should never digress is something with which I have never held. Nor does God, who makes whatever He wishes of the 26 letters & His stories work just as well Q-E-D as A-B-C.
The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers. I believe the King is with me on this one.... Warming to my idea, I put it to the King that this question of roads marks the fundamental divide between the ancient Greek & Roman civilisations. You make a straight road like the Romans & you are lucky to get three words: Veni, vidi, vici. You have a crooked goat path like the Greeks all over the Acropolis & what do you get? The entire damn Odyssey & Oedipus Rex, that's what (p. 164).

AND WHEN I finished the painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go around as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?
It began to worry me, you see, this destruction of fish, this attrition of love that we were blindly bringing about, & I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish (p. 200-201).

I was later to discover--too late--that like the Commandant, Jorgen Jorgensen suffered a sense of slippage. He had read too many books, & at the age of sixteen, inspired by their tales of romance & adventure, had one day in 1798 ventured out from his hometown of Copenhagen only to discover that the world did not correspond to anything he had read.
Things were rupturing & nothing held. Books were solid, yet time was molten. Books were consistent, yet people were not. Books dealt in cause & effect, yet life was inexplicable disorder. Nothing was as it was in a book, something about which he forever after harboured a dull resentment that finally found expression as vengeance (p. 251).

I wanted to tell a story of love as I slowly killed those fish, & it didn't seem right that I was slowly killing fish in order to tell such a story, & I found myself beginning to talk to the dying fish as their movements grew sluggardly, as their brains slowly ceased working from lack of oxygen.
I told them all about me, about being a bad bastard who forged himself anew as a worse painter, but a painter nevertheless. I wanted to tell a story of love as I slowly killed those fish, & I told them how my paintings were not meant for Science or Art, but for people, to make people laugh, to make people think, to give people company & give them hope & remind them of those they had loved & those who loved them yet, beyond the ocean, beyond death, how it seemed when I was painting important to paint that way (Robert Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish. New York: Grove Press, 2001, p. 386).

Thomas Ricks. Fiasco

[Abu Ghraib] was a tragic moment for a military with a long and proud heritage of treating its prisoners better than most--especially one that had come to Iraq thinking of itself as a liberation force, again solidly in the American tradition. During the Revolutionary War, the historian David Hackett Fischer noted, Gen. George Washington had "often reminded his men that they were an army of liberty and freedom, and that the rights of humanity for which they were fighting should extend even to ther enemies." This compassion toward prisoners was extended by Washington expressly in the face of the cruel British handling of American captives. Washington ordered Lt. Col. Samuel Blachley Webb, in a passage quoted by Fischer, "Treat them with humanity, and Let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortuante brethren." The United States Army was a long way from home in Iraq (p. 297).

Notably, this list of complaints found little fault with the front-line soldier but much with top officers and the civilian officials leading them. In this respect, the U.S. military in Iraq looked a bit like the British army in World War I, a force so poorly led that German generals mocked it as "lions led by donkeys." Looking back at the winter of 2003-4, one active-duty general said, "Tactically, we were fine. Operationally, usually we were okay. Strategically--we were a basket case" (p. 308).

When he deploys [Marine Maj. Gen. James] Mattis always packs the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman who was both a Stoic philosopher and an emperor. 'It allows me to distance myself from the here and now,' and to discern the connection to the eternal verities of warfare, he explained. Mattis also objected to the Rumsfeld Pentagon's emphasis on 'net-centric' warfare built around the movement of data. "Computers by their nature are isolating. They build walls. The nature of war is immutable: You need trust and connection." He dismissed the net-centric emphasis as "a Marxian view--it ignores the spiritual" (Thomas Ricks. Fiasco. New York: Penguin, 2006, p. 313).