I take back my fandom. 📚

I quit reading A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, round about page 100. At first, I thought “Perhaps I’ll set it aside and come back another time.” But the more I think about it, the more I doubt it.

At one point, in the most memorable line of those hundred pages, Fermor describes an uppity German house this way: “Except for the panorama of the lights of Stuttgart through the plate glass, the house was hideous – prosperous, brand new, shiny, and dispiriting.”

Mutatis ditto mutandis for Fermor’s use of words to build this literary construction.

Years ago, a British friend (think sheep farmer British, not Londoner British), upon hearing that I had fairly recently discovered a love of reading, insisted I simply had to read Laurie Lee As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. I don’t think I ever had the heart to tell my friend how unfinishable I found Lee. My memory of that book is over a decade old, but I’m certain it had at least a loveliness to it that I do not see in Fermor. I think I expected in Fermor something at least reminiscent of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon but found something closer to, and much less lovable than, Lee.

But that’s the funny thing. Neither Jan Morris, who introduced the book, nor Fermor in his own introduction, make any mention of Lee or West. Morris even goes so far as to describe Fermor’s book as unprecedented. (“He has no rivals, and so stands beyond envy.”) I was happily willing to overlook that baffling fact (along with Fermor’s praise for Alan Watts, which raised an early red flag), but not no mo’.

I accept that I might be wrong or just weird. Sincerest apologies to those lovely people who recommended it, but I am so excited to be reading something else tomorrow.

Currently Reading: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor 📚

Instantly smitten, I am. (Excerpt from the introduction)

Finished reading: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi 📚

A very refreshingly lovely novel. I confess that I stalled a couple months ago, about halfway through. As curative as its loveliness was, I admit to getting bored; it seemed for a stretch that there really wasn’t anything “happening,” which I assume, and also confess, is my own problem. But it was worth returning to. The two people who strongly recommended this book — my mother-in-law, when she gave it to my wife for Christmas, and a surgeon I work with when he returned from vacation — gestured in the same way with their hand over their heart when they did so. A few others spoke similarly of it when it was brought up. I, too, offer that gesture.

I wonder if, like newborn children, we go through our entire lives looking for a face, longing for a particular gaze that calms and fills us, that loves and welcomes us, that recognizes and runs to greet us.

Finished reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 📚

Delightful. Meghan and I had fun sharing the book. We’ll see the movie this afternoon at our quaint old local theater after some lunch-brunch in town, which will be our first second official date in, oh, 2 1/2 years 🙂.

Currently Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 📚

A surgeon at work has been recommending this book for months. The movie is also playing at our tiny little local theater next month for one week, which is unusual. I said at work yesterday that I think we may have found the thing that will finally unite the whole country — I don’t remember the last time I heard such wide and thorough praise for any one thing and from basically every direction. So, in the next month I should know what all the hubbub is about.

Finished reading: The Fortress by Meša Selimović 📚

It was my duty to defend Mahmut from humiliation. And myself, too. But I didn’t. I’d swallowed Avdagas insult, perhaps I’d even smiled, and now it stung me like a wound. I was ashamed of my cowardice, but still I thought, “Tis a good job I didn’t say anything to make him angry.” I thought both things at the same time! Inside me two men were living simultaneously and with equal strength, totally different, entirely opposite, the one glad not to have exposed himself to danger, the other profoundly unhappy that he was a shit, and both equally sincere and both fully justified. And only a moment before, under the eaves, I’d been thinking of the double narure of Mahmut Neretlyak as being a wonder. We’re all the same wonder, the same misery.

Loved this book! Bridge on the Drina meets All Quiet on the Western Front, at least at first. But the novel grows much lighter in weight before long.

The shop was in the bazaar, in the street called Mudzeli-ti, under the clock tower, tiny and insignificant, hot and stuffy in summer, cold as a dungeon in winter, close to the public toiléts that stank unbearably, so that Mula Ibrahim and I took turns to light incense and inulin, as in a church, to appease the evil power of stench. But our use of incense helped not at all, and we had no choice but to grin and bear it.
None of this mattered to me. I laughed, “A man can get used to any smell."
Mula Ibrahim just gave a good-natured smile and replied, without his usual mention of God’s name, since we were alone, “I always say: Let it be no worse."
“Which is what the wise man said when they were taking him to the gallows."
“And rightly, too. They could have killed him then and there, and he’d have lost even those few, last moments of life. There’s always hope, even on the way to the gallows."
“Pretty vain hope!"
“Still, hope. And that’s better than nothing. But this stench, mind you, suits me fine."
“How can it?"
“Well, it’s this way. Why do you think the public toilets are here? Because this is the center of the bazaar. And that’s just where I want to be, under everyone’s feet. Left to choose between pure air and paupers and a stink with profit, no wise man would hesitate. Two watermelons under one armpit won’t go, nor can two good things come together. So, let it be no worse."
“Amen."

I love the deep, relatable, every-day, often-funny, down-to-earth, hard-learned very-human wisdom that casually bounces across the pages of Serbian literature like this.

They were both silent, one dead, the other living but distrustful. Yet I wanted to know. Rarely had I ever wanted anything so much, as though that knowledge would have opened to me many secrets concerning humanity.
I’d seen the death of a powerful man, killed by grief. I’d seen what was perhaps murder from a distance. I’d seen human hatred, but I was obsessed by only one thing: Was his last thought vengeance or love?
It seemed as though my entire life depended on it.
I decided for love. It was less realistic and less probable, but more noble. And better: This way everything had more meaning. Both death … and life.

Currently Reading: Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way by Lars Mytting 📚

Some books you pick up, open, and buy within the span of less than 60 seconds. This is one of those. Fun to flip through, yes, but thoroughly readable, as informative as inspiring — even for a Maine-born Ben-Logger (that there’s Hebrew, fyi… I think) like myself. And Mytting picked a whopper of a poem for his epigraph:

Finished “reading”: Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth 📚

A man after my own heart — even where I have differed from him. I was quite moved by his Erasmus Lecture last year, but I have read and followed very little of Kingnorth, so this was a welcomed collection and update of his Substack writings. And I think — I hope — his is a voice more can listen to, can actually hear, and genuinely and generously converse with.

For now, the useful work seems to be that outlined by Joseph Campbell: to conquer death by birth. Simone Weil concluded her study of the rootless West by suggesting that the best response for we who find ourselves living in it is ‘the growing of roots’ — the name she gave to the final section of her work. Pull up the exhausted old plants if you need to – carefully, now – but if you don’t have some new seed to grow in the bare soil, if you don’t tend it and weed it with love, if you don’t fertilise it and water it and help it grow: well, then your ground will not produce anything good for you. It will choke up with a chaos of thistles and weeds.

This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a “West” that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires – fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths – and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true.

Consider me simpatico.

Finished reading: Man in the Modern Age by Karl Jaspers 📚

The significance of entering into the world constitutes the value of philosophy. True philosophy is not an instrument, and still less is it a talisman; but it is awareness in the process of realisation. Philosophy is the thought with which or as which I am active as my own self. It is not to be regarded as the objective validity of any sort of knowledge, but as the consciousness of being in the world.

I would love to do a better write-up here, but time ain’t on my side. Instead, some notes I took along the way:

• Just about everything I feel about the modern precarity of being, knowing, doing, nicely contained in a little book nearly 100 years old; just about every criticism of the modern age — the modern age even up to now — that I have ever heard or felt is right here, written in 1930. Our modern malady is a lot older than the iPhone or the internet or the ubiquity of home televisions.
• Of course, there’s nothing in the book about AI, but several passages could easily be aimed at it. And I think every single problem we face with AI is essentially a problem that preceded it.
• Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun and whatnot. Most meaningful day-to-day questions were in some form faced by humans thousands of years ago as well as now. (No chronological snobbery, even in our maladies.) But if there are some forms specific to the “modern age” — and I believe there are a few — none of them are essentially new to our century or to my generation.
• Though many have taken the critique to greater depths and aimed at more specific targets of modern technology, Jaspers’ precedes Ellul, Mumford, even Heidegger, I believe. (I’m certain other writers preceeded Jaspers as well. You may even be thinking of some right now that make all this seem obvious.)
• It’s hard not to see Jaspers as helping to lay some of the groundwork for 20th-century writers who show a desperate need for, if not anarchism, at very least James C. Scott’s “anarchist squint.” When Jaspers says that, against the “herding of the masses” and the “increasing technicisation of daily life,” people cling to a “primitive world with increasing tenacity,” he means it as a good thing: what he means by “primitive world” is mutual, unofficial trustworthiness and “reciprocal obligations.”
• Though not simply a nay-sayer of liberalism, he clearly (fore)saw the same lack we are experiencing: the vacancy of liberalism’s meaning for life.
• I’m currently, along some other fine microbloggers, who are miles ahead of me in this (and probably every) regard, reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. So it shouldn’t be surprising that there is copious overlappage. Take this for example, the language of which will probably give away Jaspers, but the substance could easily be Kingsnorth today:

  The present moment seems to be one which makes extensive claims, makes claims it is almost impossible to satisfy. Deprived of his world by the crisis, man has to reconstruct it from its beginnings with the materials and presuppositions at his disposal. There opens to him the supreme possibility of freedom, which he has to grasp even in face of impossibility, with the alternative of sinking into nullity. If he does not pursue the path of self-existence, there is nothing left for him but the self-willed enjoyment of life amid the coercions of the apparatus against which he no longer strives. He must either on his own initiative independently gain possession of the mechanism of his life, or else, himself degraded to become a machine, surrender to the apparatus.

• Jaspers may have, in philosophical terms, predicted the mid-life crisis. 🙂
• In the end, he gives a decent description not just of our dilemma but of a responsible Yes to the world.

Finished reading: In Search of the Human Face by Luigi Giussani 📚

Splendid. I haven’t read a devotional-type book like this in quite a while. And never one so thoroughly quotable.

This [unbearableness due to the clamor of our weakness] is a great occasion for love, a great occasion for a loving affirmation.

The truth about our humanity cannot be reduced to the observation of its misery but to the wondrous and exalting announcement that this misery is loved. This loving, strong, and faithful presence, more than the fickle and vulnerable fragility that is the substance of humanity when left to itself, is our true richness.

Hopefully I’ll follow up with a few more, and perhaps a larger sample of quotes.