In being true to the name of this blog, here are a few notes about books I’ve finished this month. Along with a few initial impressions of my own, I’ve also included a quote to whet your appetite. In the comments below, let me know:
What you read last month? What you’re looking forward to reading this month?
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
Maybe it’s my pride. Maybe it’s my prejudice. But I just couldn’t find my way into this classic work. The whole thing was a slog. Cultural imagination did not do me any favors on my first read: throughout the entire novel my imagination oscillated between Kiera Knightley’s face—perpetually scrunched somewhere between a grimace and smile—and so many faintly rosy cheeked portraits of regency women, as dull as they are pale. In a sense, this book was an exercise in meditation for me—constantly attempting to bring the mind back from my mind’s cacophonous images and focusing my attention back on the words. But the words were a problem too.
Unexpectedly, my main gripe with this novel is the language. Readers of this blog will know that I’m no stranger to decorous (and occasionally overwrought) prose. But there’s a difference between lyricism and frippery. Whereas I enjoy holding simple moments up to a light so they might refract like prisms, Austen’s characters excel in say as little as possible with as many words as possible. It was tiresome for me to rummage through heaps of empty phrases, trying to find out what was actually at stake in this story. Maybe it’s because I’m a man. Maybe it’s because I’m an American. But manners, formalities, and etiquette mean very little to me, especially not when they belong to a culture where people are more concerned with upholding the delicate façade of social pretense than being able to walk a mile.
In order to assuage me, some friends of mine and lovers of Austen told me that I should read her as satire of the very manners that infuriate me. This afflicted me anew. If understanding what was happening was frustrating enough, also having to satirically inverting the meaning of it all was outside my power. (This hint also came late in the story for me to apply this hermeneutic. The damage was already done.)
In hindsight, it consoles me to think that Austen is just as frustrated as me by the world she describes. Certainly, that world seems to have caused Lizzy her share of frustrations. Maybe the next time I read this book I’ll read it in the tone of commiseration, where Austen’s characters and I together mend the wounds inflicted by a barrage of manners and the heavy fire of sustained etiquette.
But why Mr. Darcy came so often to the Parsonage it was more difficult to understand. It could not be for society, as he frequently sat there ten minutes together without opening his lips; and when he did speak, it seemed the effect of necessity rather than of choice—a sacrifice to propriety, not a pleasure to himself.
Aeneid by Vergil
With July, I rounded out what I have come to call “The Troifecta.” The Iliad in May, the Odyssey in June, and now the Aeneid in July. After so many weeks of sympathizing with the Greek side of the story, it was initially a bit jarring to shift into the perspective of the Trojans. But when Aeneas recounts how he and (what was left of) his family fled fallen Troy, I encounter one of the most poignant tales I’ve ever read: Aeneas, his father on his back, and his son by the hand, became a triptych of refugees; the spirit of Aeneas wife appears to him, only to tell him she was already gone; his threefold attempt to hold her as she vanished into the empty air. All of it hits me deep.
Like many in America, I live here because my grandparents fled a country falling into chaos to come to a new land for a new life. Like Aeneas, their need to uproot and move was sudden and unwanted. Also like Aeneas, they leaned on their faith in order bear this journey with both its hopes and its sorrow. (The Rosary for my grandfather and animal sacrifice for Aeneas.) When my grandfather left Germany, his youngest brother was around six years old. Despite the odds, they did meet again; the next time they saw each other, that brother was in his seventies. If the First World War didn’t happen, I’m sure I’d live in Munich, regularly enjoying white sausages and Weißbier in my lederhosen after Holy Mass at the Asamkirche. But that’s, sadly, not my life.
My family’s story is not unusual. The Western world is one of dislocation. Most of our nations are nations of immigrants. Thus, it strikes me as odd how few people have read or even know about the Aeneid. Most people have some inkling of what it means to go on an “odyssey,” but few people even know what an “aeneadic” journey would even imply. In any case, I highly suggest reading both the Greek and the Latin epics, and see how there are heroes on both sides of that senseless war in Troy: some heroes have homes to go back to and some must find a new one.
“Farewell now; cherish still
your son and mine.”
With this she left me weeping,
Wishing that could say so many things,
and faded on the tenuous air. Three times
I tried to put my arms around her neck,
three times enfolded nothing, as the wraith
slipped through my fingers, bodiless as wind,
or like a flitting dream.Book II, translation Robert Fitzgerald
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Until a few years ago, I had never heard of The Leopard. Then one day the name came up during a interview with Douglas Murray, who offhandedly mentioned: “Of course the two truly great novels of the 20th Century are Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate.” My mind raced: Why have I never seen them ranked on a list of classics? Why have I never even heard of them at all? What are these books? Above all, I was struck by how confident and resolute he was in this recommendation; I was haunted by how utterly oblivious I was to what struck him as simply a matter of fact: “Of course, it’s the greatest…”
This summer I finally chased down this majestic and elusive animal for myself. This novel describes the end of an era; the Risorgimento or unification of Italy brought together disparate feudal states into the single nation state we know today; in the process, this revolutionary period dissolved the regional aristocracy of Italy. A Sicilian Downtown Abbey, if you will. Among those lost lords of the old order, our author Lampedusa was himself a prince whose family lost their Sicilian kingdom amid this modernization; he perfectly balances the narrative’s perspective between a nostalgic vision of the past and a unsure openness to what will come next, encompassing it all in one eternal contemplation of the precarious moment in which Don Fabrizio finds himself:
“We were the Leopards, the Lions, those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth… If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change.”
Lampedusa’s writing is masterful. In The Leopard’s opening pages, I found myself in a palace with “parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls” and “divinities frescoed on the ceiling,” all while the family’s daily recitation of the Rosary echoes from “voices interwoven in lilting hum.” There’s a casual lavishness, a laidback opulence to Don Fabrizio’s world. But Lampedusa’s descriptions of the arid Sicilian landscape and the Prince’s barrel chest and massive hands also evince a backbone of rugged strength and endurance to this story and this family.
For some time now, I’ve wonder if our world is being handed over hyenas and jackals. Maybe reading about the lives of lions and leopards can restore a bit of beauty and nobility to our own age before it’s lost.
Don Fabrizio had always known that sensation. For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hour-glass. In some moments of intense activity or concentration this sense of continual loss would vanish, to reappear impassively in brief instants of silence or introspection; just as a constant buzzing in the ears or ticking of a pendulum superimpose themselves when all else is silent, assuring us of always being there, watchful, even when we do not hear them.
With the slightest effort of attention he used to notice at all other times too, the rustling of the grains of sand as they slid lightly away, the instants of time escaping from his mind and leaving him for ever. But this sensation was not, at first, linked to any physical discomfort. On the contrary this imperceptible loss of vitality was itself the proof, the condition so to say, of a sense of living; and for him, accustomed to scrutinising limitless outer space and to probing vast inner abysses, the sensation was in no way disagreeable; this continuous whittling away of his personality seemed linked to a vague presage of the rebuilding elsewhere of a personality (thanks be to God) less conscious and yet broader. Those tiny grains of sand were not lost; they were vanishing, but accumulating elsewhere to cement some more lasting pile. Though ‘pile’, he had reflected, was not the exact word, for it suggested weight; nor was ‘grain of sand’ either for that matter. They were more like the tiny particles of watery vapour exhaled from a narrow pond, mounting then into the sky to great clouds, light and free.
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
When not moonlighting as an armchair philosopher, my day job is a web developer for several worldwide brands. This summer I decided to bring my love of books and discussing ideas with people to the office, and I’m now heading up a book club for my entire department, with Slow Productivity being our first book. Since we work in the technology and e-commerce world, we deal with many of the questions of workflow, asynchronous work, burnout, etc. which Newport deals with here. I won’t say too much about it now, because there is a forthcoming study guide for this book which I will post for my subscribers here.
But I will note that this book hits upon a “tao of work” idea I’ve been thinking about lately. Productivity and creativity in my career are often determined not by what I do, but what I chose not to do (wu wei)—namely cutting out “busyness.” I believe it was Josef Pieper in Leisure: the Basis of Culture who called busyness a “more active form of procrastination.” Not doing busyness is the key to doing business. This book is very practical and I’m looking forward to my discussions with my team and also my readers about some of its ideas:
Take whatever timelines you first identify as reasonable for upcoming projects, adn then double their length… The fear here, of course, is that by doubling these timelines, you’ll drastically reduce what you accomplish. But your original plans were never realistic or sustainable in the first place. A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.
Links
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
Aeneid by Vergil
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
Leisure: the Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper