Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited

That day, too, I had come not knowing my destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford--submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in--Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days--such as that day--when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour (p. 21).

I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning (Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited [Little, Brown, 1945], p. 225).

(Although Evelyn Waugh's account of England's smart set in the 1920's and 30's is probably better read in one's youth, along with the novels of Thomas Wolfe, I thought it was interesting on a couple of counts -- in part, for its nostalgic longing for England's pre-WWI past; in part for its aversion to modernity (apparently he regarded James Joyce's later novels with the same loathing and despair that some regard our own post-modern age), and more in part for its conservative embrace of traditional Catholic faith. In this regard, his account of the drunken Sebastian Flyte, who ends up in a monastery near the end of the novel, is reminiscent of Graham Greene's whiskey priest in Power and the Glory, or even of the fallen Kichijiro in Shusaku Endo's Silence. While the tale of the narrator's off, on, off-again love for Sebastian's sister, Julia, is the stuff of which Hollywood films are made, and while the prose is as baroque as the fountain at the doorstep of the Brideshead mansion, I still think Waugh is an exquisite stylist, in love with the rhythms of the English language. I also think that Waugh is half in love with the debauchery that the novel ostensibly condemns. As in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, there is a genuine tension here between the novel's sermon and its unsettling affection for bone marrow and spices -- for the very whiskey, wine, and cocktails that flow throughout these tipsy pages.)

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace

"What is it? am I falling? are my legs giving way under me?" he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the fight between the French and the artillerists ended, and wishing to know whether or not the red-haired artillerist had been killed, whether the cannon had been taken or saved. But he did not see anything. There was nothing over him now except the sky--the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly creeping across it. "How quiet, calm, and solemn, not at all like when I was running," thought Prince Andrei, "not like when we were running, shouting, and fighting; not at all like when the Frenchman and the artillerist, with angry and frightened faces, were pulling at the swab--it's quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite sky. How is it I haven't seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I've finally come to know it. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquility. And thank God!..." (p. 281).

War isn't courtesy, it's the vilest thing in the world, and we must understand that and not play at war (p. 775).

Napoleon, whom we imagine as guiding this whole movement (as a savage imagines that the figure carved on the prow of a ship is the force that guides it), Napoleon, during all this time of his activity, was like a child who, holding the straps tied inside a carriage, fancies that he is driving it (p. 1008).

There is no greatness where this is no simplicity, goodness, and truth (p. 1071).

Though the doctors treated him [Pierre], let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered (p. 1102).

"Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it's only here that the new and the good begins" (p. 1118).

All the ancient historians used one and the same method to describe and grasp the seemingly ungraspable--the life of a people. They described the activity of individual men who ruled the people; and this activity expressed for them the activity of the whole people.

To the questions of how individual men made peoples act according to their will, and what governed the will of these men themselves, the ancients answered the first question by recognizing the will of a divinity who subjected peoples to the will of one chosen man, and the second by recognizing that the same divinity guided the will of the chosen one towards a predestined goal.

For the ancients, these questions were decided by faith in the direct participation of a divinity in the affairs of mankind.

Modern history, in its theory, has rejected both of these propositions (p. 1179).

For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people.

The historian is sometimes obliged, by bending the truth, to bring all the actions of a historical figure under the one idea he has put into that figure. The artist, on the contrary, sees the very singularity of that idea as incompatible with his task, and only tries to understand and show not the famous figure but the human being (p. 1219).

In descriptions of battles it is usually written that such-and-such army was sent to attack such-and-such point and was then ordered to retreat, and so on, as if supposing that the discipline that makes tens of thousands of men obey the will of one man on the drill ground will have the same effect where it is a matter of life and death. Anyone who has been to war knows how incorrect that is; and yet official reports are based on this supposition, and military descriptions on them. Make the rounds of a whole army right after a battle, even on the second or third day, before the reports have been written, and ask all the soldiers, the senior and junior officers, how it went; they will tell you what all these men experienced and saw, and you will form a majestic, complex, infinitely diverse, oppressive, and vague impression; and from no one, least of all the commander in chief, will you learn how it all went. But after two or three days, the reports begin to be submitted, talkers begin telling how what they did not see happened; finally, a general account is put together, and the general opinion of the army is put together from this account. It is a relief to everyone to exchange his doubts and questions for this false but clear and always flattering picture (Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace, transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky [Knopf, 2007], p. 1220).

(Although Tolstoy's massive, epic account of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 (war) and of the lives of the Russian aristocracy (peace) who became entangled in the Napoleonic wars threatens to turn into a "large, loose, baggy monster," as Henry James once wrote, it is also magnificent and moving. Among many things, its interwoven tales of the idealist Pierre, who fumbles for and finds wisdom, of Natalie, coming of age, of boys dashing off to battle-- all of these and many, many more are stories of how very little we are, and yet how very much each of us matters in the scheme of things. Given post-modernity's interest in wresting the pen from out of Shakespeare's fingers, however, and placing it in the hand of society (for which see Greenblatt's Will in the World and, more broadly, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel), I was especially fascinated by Tolstoy's debunking of the myth of the Napoleonic hero already in the mid-nineteenth century. The result is, as Tolstoy wrote of the fog of war, an account of history and humanity that is "majestic, complex, [and] infinitely diverse" (p. 1220). While it is not, perhaps, the after-action report to which we have become accustomed in this internet age, it's the stuff of life itself. And Pevear and Volokhonsky's agile, readable translation has truly brought all this life, to life.)