2025 Readings 19

 I just finished my 19th book of 2025, Robert Zaretsky's The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. As compared to some of the other books I've read lately, where I seem to be somewhat indifferent to (at least according to my rereading of my own posts), I absolutely loved Zaretsky's book and highly recommend it. In fact, I'm going to do the ultimate academic man-crush act: email Zaretsky to let him know how much I loved the book. I've actually only done this a few times. Scholars spend years and years grinding away at books which, because they're academic, never have much of an audience. Writing is a lonely profession, and academic writing is an especially lonely profession. So, I always want to let professors know that I've read their work and tell them how much I appreciated it. 

I first stumbled across Simone Weil's work when I read her essay on the Iliad as part of my research. She's yet another one of those brilliant writers or artists or thinkers that I can't believe I didn't know anything about (once again, I blame Indiana for the grossly inadequate education it gave me). Zaretsky's five core chapters gives you a sense of the aspects of Weil's thought that he explores: 1) "The Force of Affliction," 2) "Paying Attention," 3) "The Varieties of Resistance," 4) "Finding Roots," and 5) "The Good, the Bad, and the Godly." In my class on the Nature of Evil we read about her view of Affliction, so she's been  gaining more and more intellectual traction with me. I'm seriously thinking about using Zaretsky's book to construct a class around her thought for next spring semester (which, theoretically, might be my last semester at Champlain), using Zaretsky's book as the foundational piece. Zaretsky's book introduced me to other fascinating corners of her thought, and I was especially blown away by her view of Attention and Roots.

Let me include a paragraph from Zaretsky's discussion of Weil's philosophy focusing on Roots, to give you a sense of how accessible he makes a very complex thinker:

"Nevertheless, Weil's notion of uprooting captures one of modernity's defining characteristics: the fact and feeling of homelessness. For Weil, the act of uprooting is not just physical, but also social and psychological; one can be uprooted without ever having moved or having been moved. What Thomas Carlyle called the 'cash nexus' - the transformation of all human relationships into monetary transactions - pollutes our traditional and nurturing places. 'Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate,' Weil writes, 'and manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of numbers.' The rationalization and industrialization of the workplace grinds into bits the moral roots of countless workers. 'Although they have remained geographically stationary, they have been morally uprooted, banished, and then reinstated, as it were on sufferance, in the form of industrial brawn.' The bonds that once existed among artisans - the traditions and travels of masters and journeymen that tied them to the past and future - had been snapped. As a result, Weil writes, 'each thing is looked up as an end in itself.' The consequences are a catastrophe to which we have grown accustomed, being taught to embrace ends, not means; to see others as objects, not subjects; and to accept what Weil calls idolatry, and forget the integrity that once defined out relationship to work and ourselves."

As you'd expect, I pestered Janet with this paragraph as I was reading it. Her new book relates to community, and this is a marvelous fit. I can't recommend this book too highly. 

I'm getting close to having read twenty books this year, which brings me back to the article that started this count: the astonishing amount of Americans who don't read much of anything. Remember, that a whopping 46% of Americans in 2023 didn't read even one book - and only eleven percent of the American population read twenty books (which was listed as the far end of the reading spectrum). I never wanted to quantify reading because I naturally love it, but this is sort of an interesting experiment. I suspect I'm reading a little more than I normally read, although that has more to do with escaping the nightmare of these years than it does because I'm trying to impress myself with any particular number. On the surface it probably seems that I'm reading a lot, but this is also an indication of the fact that like most readers I normally have several books going at the same time. For me, there's 1) the book(s) on my nightstand, 2) the books in the living room where Janet and I often read at night, 3) the books squirrelled away upstairs in my office, 4) the Audible (although I'll probably switch to the library to wean myself even more from the evils of Amazon) books or Great Courses that I listen to on my way to school or at the gym, and 5) the book(s) on my desk at school. So, if I post one book here at the blog and then another one the next day, that's not an indication, probably, that I blew threw a book in one day, but rather that I finished a book in the different reading corners of my life.

Nothing To See Here

 We're in the middle of a little warming phase. The pro: the three feet of ice and snow on the roof is starting to slide off. The con: the three feet of ice and snow on the roof is starting to slide off.

Janet proposed that if one of those blocks of ice landed on you it would really hurt. I suggested that "hurt" should be replaced with "brutally kill" you.

Stella Urquhart

 Last night I showed my students Bill Forsyth's Local Hero. I told them it was one of my favorite films of all-time and that it was the movie that introduced me to the beauty of independent cinema, mainly because it clearly didn't care what the audience thought, in a formulaic fashion, should happen next. Sadly, the conversation wasn't as rich as I had hoped, mainly because they didn't do the assigned readings on the Relational and Moral self (sigh); pearls, swine, yadda yadda. It reminded me of what a crush I had on the character of Stella Urquhart, played wonderfully by Jennifer Black. There are scenes in movies wherein I could imagine myself living, and running the hotel with Stella in Ferness is probably first amongst them. "I'll be a good Gordon, Gordon."

I love the end of this film so much. 

2025 Readings 18

 Last night I finished Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. I had been thinking about reading it for a while, and watching Woody Allen reference in Annie Hall (I forgot that scene, although not the theme behind the scene) recently doubtless inspired me to finally take the plunge. I don't know if I got out of it what I could have gotten out of it, but I still really enjoyed it. It features a smug Freudianism and assurance of shared understanding that made perfect sense in the early 1970s but which doesn't translate as well to the mid-2020s.The book devoted an extraordinary amount of time to a background discussion of Freud, which cleared up some of my misconceptions, and especially Otto Rank, who I knew almost nothing about it. I finished up Becker's book definitely wanting to dig into Freuds Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and Otto Rank's Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. Oddly, one of my critique's of Becker's book is that I thought, in the end, that his discussion of the denial of death got lost in the wealth of background information on Freud.

Mi Dolce Vita

 Here's a pretty random shot that I snapped during November's trip to Venice. We never met Marcello Mastroianni during our time in Venice, although I always imagine that his ghost haunts Rome instead. I don't think I lead a life of "heedless pleasure and luxury," but, on a more basic linguistic and pesonal level, I do lead a pretty sweet life. Janet and I have been talking a lot lately about whether we want to settle in Italy or Portugal (as I've said before, I'm pushing, gently, for the latter), but it always strikes me that we are blessed to be able to have this discussion. Yes, in many ways it speaks to privilege, although neither of us were born into wealth, but decades of working, and the nature of our jobs, is giving us an opportunity to have a discussion that many people can't have. However, the other side of that is that it's a conversation based on a perceived possible reality, which has less to do with accumulated wealth (we don't have a lot), but rather a perceived possible reality based on, well, possibility. It would be very easy during this dark days, and in light of my uncertain health, to self-limit our options, but we're both excited about creating a new life, and not simply wringing the last drops out of the old one.

This is only tangentially related to this picture and post, but if you get the chance definitely check out the films of Paolo Sorrentino, especially The Great Beauty. I've just discovered his films (thanks, as always, to the Criterion Channel), and they are truly wonderful.

2025 Readings 17

 "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

This coming Monday I'm giving a Blue Stool talk on the Mythology of American Exceptionalism. The Blue Stools, long hosted by my friend Chuck, are designed to be short public lectures, which are given during the breaks in between classes, hence they're all around twelve minutes long, presented, sadly, in a mad rush. Mainly they're designed to throw out an idea, and in the process inspire our students to keep learning, and to understand that learning is not something that simply begins and ends in the classroom itself. I haven't given one for years. When I came back from my year in the UAE I gave one related to the experience and the false perceptions that people on the this side of the Atlantic had about the Middle East. Truthfully, however, I'm not certain what I actually spoke on, partially because it wasn't filmed (I asked them not to do so because I was going to talk about the university where I taught and individuals there, who, even if I didn't mention their names, it would have been easy to figure out who they were; I wasn't saying anything terrible, but what might be constituted in the UAE as terrible is not necessarily what I would have thought constituted terrible) and also because I didn't have any notes (another one of my typical shortcomings as a speaker). They are going to film this one, but my passive-aggressive scheme to make sure that the talk never sees the light of day is to say fuck at least three times, evenly spaced throughout the talk.

This odd introduction relates to the seventeenth book I read this year: Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In between the impending talk - and also the continued nightmare of the Trump junta - I naturally found my way back to Kundera's work. This is a book that I've read several times, the first being around thirty-five years ago, when folks were still routinely reading this novel as well as The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case anymore, and it's rare that you see his novels on the shelf. I still remember reading, and then writing down, his definition of the Czech word litost, "a state of torment created by the sudden light of one's own misery." Although, truthfully, that might have just been part of an exoticizing of my own suffering - or maybe I was just listening to too many Smiths albums. Fernando Pessoa said that his greatest regret was never being able to read Dickens's The Pickwick Papers again for the first time. Maybe one of my greatest regrets is not being able to read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting again for the first time. This is true not simply because it would mean that I was a younger man, but rather that that younger man was more intellectually hungry and also that my mind, my intellectual/cultural soil, was more ripe for planting (less over-planted). I still enjoyed the novel, although not as much as when I was younger, but, again, I'm not in the place to be as profoundly moved as I was all those decades ago. Now I mainly felt sad, which I suspect is a product of living in a country in the process of being invaded, not a Czechoslovakia invaded by the Soviets, but an invasion still the same. 

2025 Readings 16

 "And Dante is not the only poet whom Virgil has conducted to the threshold of paradise."

Marcel Proust

This reading was definitely a short one, which is a strange thing to point out when you're talking about Marcel Proust. A while back I stumbled across a very brief collection of Proust's writings called Days of Reading. It opens with a piece that Proust wrote honoring John Ruskin after his death (and if you know your Proust you know that he loved Ruskin), and then it passes on to a couple essays that gave their name to the collection. They a lovely homage to the sheer joy of reading, and so they naturally spoke to me. For example, here's a lovely passage on the feeling of loss that one feels when they finish a book (and it made me think of every time I finish rereading The Chess Garden or Bleak House or, naturally, In Search of Lost Time): 

"Then the last page had been read, the book was finished. The frantic career of the eyes and of the voice which had been following them noiselessly, pausing only to catch its breath, had to be halted, in a deep sigh. And then, so as to give the turbulence loose inside me for too long to be able ot still itself other movements to control, I would get up and start walking up and down by my bed, my eyes still fixed on some point that might have been looked for in vain either inside the room of without, for it was the distance of a soul away, one of those distance not to be measured in metres or in miles, unlike others, and which it is impossible moreover to mistake for them once one sees the 'remote' stare of those whose thoughts are 'elsewhere.' Was there no more to the book than this, then? These creatures on whom one has bestowed more attention and affection than on those in real life, not always daring to admit to what extent you loved them, and even, when my parents found me reading and seemed to smile at my emotion, closing the book with studied indifference or a pretence of boredom, never again would one see these people for whom one has sobbed and yearned, never again hear of them."

Oh, and, obviously, I'm swiping that opening line for the Epics chapter on the Aeneid.

My Book on College Teaching

 And another odd Scudder rabbit hole. Truthfully, I'm not even certain where this book came from. I don't remember ever buying it, so it must have been a gift from someone over the years. It's John Scudder's (1798-1855) 1849 book Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers About the Heathen. Obviously, not every Scudder who went to India to serve as doctors and missionaries was a liberal-minded as our family propaganda paints them out to be. I'm going to definitely do some research on this little gem.

I'm currently teaching COR 303, which is essentially a book about how history works, as compared to an actual history course. I think I'm going to bring in John Scudder's book, and Vida Scudder's Socialism and Character and On Journey, and Samuel Scudder's Every Butterflies: A Group of Biographies. Actually, I think Ida (I haven't even mentioned her, although I did visit her hospital in India), Vida and Samuel were all within a generation of each other. That would make an interesting novel

Maude

 I have definitely been going down a Scudder family rabbit hole lately, which may just be an attempt to give myself an excuse not to grade the small mountain of papers I'm plowing through. The other reason, which I was thinking about this morning, is that as we think about moving overseas there is some conscious or unconscious need to put a bow on the Scudder time in America.  If we leave we're not planning on coming back, which would be an uncomfortable end to a four hundred year experiment in the new world (not for all Scudders, obviously, but at least for this little sub-shoot of the family tree). Anyway, here's a picture of my Grandma Maude, my paternal grandmother, who I always felt I had more in common with that any other member of my family. This is a picture which must have been me in my mid- to late-20s and Maude, down in the old house on Mulberry Street in Rising Sun. I swiped it from a post that my cousin had left on my Factbook page (I was doing research to figure out the last time I was on FB, only to happily discover that it was almost two years ago).

We really were too similar: smart, snarky, gray hair (this is before mine went completely white - I now have her hair), and the end our respective health let us down.

Old Goodman Scudder

 I mentioned winter madness in my last post, and here's a post that hints at that phenomenon. when I was waiting out the storm on Sunday, and warming up from my first attempt to dig out the cars, I started tracking my family genealogy. Beth, my youngest sister, has seemingly taken on the mantle that my paternal grandmother Maude bore, that of the keeper of All Things Scudder. Oddly, I've never taken much interest in my family tree, which may be an indication of my natural contrarianism, or that as a historian I already have enough history clogging my brain. Sunday's rabbit hole may also reflect the fact that I was reading Vida Scudder's autobiography, On Journey; I'll have much more to say about her later. At this point it's enough to point out that while socialism is a recessive gene in the Scudder line, she and I prove that it does occasionally pop up. Here's some info on Thomas Scudder, the first of my line of Scudders to make it to this side of the Atlantic. Yes, we were Puritans lunatics and we did settle in Salem.

So, yes, I do want to be known as "Old Goodman Scudder" from now on, although I guess that makes my son "Young Goodman Scudder."

UTKR Winter 2025 Edition

 As I've mentioned previously, this has been a brutal winter. It does allow for the snapping of some nice pictures, some of which will doubtless end up on our Christmas card next year, but it definitely wears on you. When you check the local Calais weather every morning - and then toggle to see the day's weather in Lisbon, Portugal - you know you're all but done with Vermont. 

And this wasn't even the biggest ice cycle. There was one on the back of the house which was getting desperately closing to simply forming a column (and hopefully a load-bearing one).

And the storm wasn't done yet. We ended up getting just over a foot, adding on to the heavy coating of snow we already had. At it's peak I think we had around three feet of snow on the roof. In this case we were probably lucky that we live in a log cabin, with the roof supported by heavy beams.

I think tanning season is a ways off.

I do love this picture, although it screams winter madness.

The drive up Kent Hill Road yesterday morning. I woke up at 4:15 to dig out the cars (again), so that I could somehow make it out of our driveway. Luckily, our plow guy had come the previous afternoon, but in the meantime we had received another five or six inches. Once I got the car out of the driveway (at the top it sort of felt like the car was swimming - thank God for the Outback with snow tires and X-Mode), I discovered that Kent Hill had not been plowed, nor County Road all the way to the Montpelier line (typical). It was a tough drive to campus.

A rare photo of me smiling during this winter. Groan.

2025 Readings 15

 And here's another book that circled around me for years before I sat down for a complete read: Farid ud-din Attar's The Conference of the Birds. Attar, who lived from c. 1145-c.1221, is another one of those Sufi writers who I love. As I've recounted before, when I was converting to Islam the Imam asked why I was considering the decision. I provided him a number of reasons (it was not a rash decision), and in the end I mentioned my love of so many Sufi writers. He smiled and said, "Yeah, about that," which speaks to the troubled relationship that the Sufis often have with "mainstream" Islamic thought - or, more appropriately, the trouble that "mainstream" Islam has with Sufism. Of course, some of the most influential Islamic thinkers, people who have led an immeasurable number of folks to the faith, were Sufis: Attar, Rumi, Hafez, Ibn Arabi, Ibn Battuta, and probably even Ibn Khaldun, etc. Over the years I've read portions of The Conference of the Birds, and it's made its way into the Epics book and also the proposed Ramadan in Winter book. Only recently did I decide to plow into it fully. Ramadan is coming up soon and, in addition to rereading the Qur'an, I usually try and read one or two other related works as part of that month of self-reflection, so i guess I'm just getting an early start with The Conference of the Birds. The work itself is a beautiful allegory focusing on a group of birds, all representing different aspects of the human condition, who are led by the Hoopoe to visit the mystic Simorgh. Consequently, a goodly portion of the work is made up of conversations between the different birds and the Hoopoe, which in the process tells us something about faith and human nature. That said, I think a larger portion of the book is made up of a wonderful series of parables that get at many of the same themes. 

For example, here's an exchange between one of the birds and the Hoopoe:

A bird who fears death

Another bird spoke up: "The Way is long,

And I am neither valiant nor strong.

I'm terrified of death; I know that I - 

Before the first stage is complete - must die;

I tremble at the thought; when death draws near,

I know I'll shriek and groan in snivelling fear.

Whoever fights death with his sword wil meet

Inevitable, absolute defeat;

His sword and hand lie smashed. Alas! What frief

They grasp who grasp the sword as their belief'

The hoopoe answers him

The hoopoe said: 'How feebly you complain!

How long will this worn bag of bones remain?

What are you but a few bones? And at heart

Each bone is soft and hastens to depart.

Aren't you aware that life, from birth to death,

Is little more than one precarious breath?

That all who suffer birth must also die,

Their being scattered to the windy sky?

As you are reared to live, so from your birth

You're also reared to one day leave this earth.

The sky is like some huge, inverted bowl

Which sunset fills with blood from pole to pole - 

The sun seems then an executioner,

Beheading thousands with his scimitar.

If you are profligate, if you are pure,

You are but water mixed with dust, no more - 

A drop of trembling instability,

And can a drop resist the surging sea?

Though in the world you are a king, you must

In sorrow and despair return to dust.

Obviously, if you know your Sufism you can see several of the main themes jumping out in this section. I can't believe that it took me so long to read the entire work. Clearly, The Conference of the Birds is highly recommended. It's also one of those books that I can clearly see reading again and again. As Janet and I begin, slowly, to put together our plans for moving overseas, one of the biggest challenges is deciding what books to take and what to disperse out into the world (I suspect I will do most of the dispersing, whereas Janet's will be slowly making their way across the Atlantic). My main criteria is: Will I read this book again several times in my life? If so, they will make the journey. Consequently, The Conference of the Birds will find a new home, but in my new home.

2025 Readings 14

 One of the obvious measures of how much you love a book it that not only do you have multiple copies of it, but you also have books about the book. So, not only do I have the classic C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation of all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, but I also recently purchased the complete Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of In Search of Lost Time (the more preferred rendering), beginning with Lydia Davis's award-winning translation of Swann's Way. I haven't started the new translation yet, and I may not get to it until Summer 2026 (for several reasons), but I'm definitely looking forward to it. And over the years you pick up books related to the classic work, such as Saul Friedlander's Proustian Uncertainties. For a book that, in reality, not as many people have read it as you would think - or at least less than you would think should have read it - In Search of Lost Time has produced a small library of supporting works. I really liked Friedlander's book, and he focused on key issues such as the role of family in the story, Proust's complicated relationship to Judaism both in real life and in the novel, homosexuality, the influence of The Arabian Nights, the unique position of the narrator in the novel, and classic foundational aspects of the novel such as time, death, and memory. I've read the novel fours (after all, it's only 3300 pages long), but I pick up new things every time, which is why these supporting books are so helpful. For example, here's Friedlander's observation about the nature of the narrator: "Fundamentally, when the author holds the reins, the Narrator fulfills a dual main function: he is the dreamy conveyor of an emotional world, that of childhood, of loves and of pin; he is also the sharp observer of the social currents that swirl around him. As a dreamer, he can unveil aspects and puzzles of the unconscious; as an observer, he is allowed to ferret out the most ridiculous features of the puppets strutting on the social stage, and also their darkest secrets. This dual persona allows him o move from one world to the other and hold the whole story together." On one level the reader already understands this, but, as I always tell my students, the more contextual tools the better. If you're a fan of Proust, or only thinking of taking up the challenge of In Search of Lost Time, I highly recommend Friedlander's book.

Their Actual Greenness

 Literature - which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality - seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.

What moves lives. What is said endures. There's nothing in life that's less real for having been well described.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 27

OK, I'm now taking back my previous comment. This passage from Pessoa just made me very happy, and also helps to explain why I've been reading so much lately. It's not simply hiding away from the world, it's more importantly a conscious and unconscious movement towards the beautiful.

My Contemptible Being

 Dolorous Interlude

An object tossed into a corner, a rag that fell on to the road, my contemptible being feigns to the world.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 37

Once again, Pessoa manages to capture my mood. Now, if only he would improve it. I was talking to a good friend yesterday and she asked what to do when you're feeling frustrated with work. She added, and don't tell me to read Pessoa or Proust. I replied that I would never make that suggestion if the goal is to pull yourself out of the blues, although I find them both immeasurably beautiful and safe havens where I increasingly go to hide away from the world. This current dystopian madness is providing few instances for happiness, especially, as I opined the other day, for teachers, because it seems that everything we've tried to do in our career was an abject failure. Having said that, I did give her an answer that I think both Pessoa and Proust would vouchsafe: let's grab lunch or an adult scholarly beverage. The other side of this hellscape is that it's proving to be the golden age of friendships.

2025 Readings 13

 Here's the other tome I was in the middle of: Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. I finished it last night, after taking three distinctive breaks to read shorter works. She's obviously a brilliant writer, but I also have to honestly say that I didn't love this book. Or, to put it a different way, I admired the book more than I loved it. That said, this may be one of those instances where I went into it with unfairly high expectations and thus I'm judging it, in turn, unfairly. One night I turned to Janet (we go to bed early out here in the wilderness) and said, "I don't know who she was writing this novel for." In the end, like all legitimate artists, she was creating it for herself, obviously, but what I meant was that there seemed to be a very small audience who would be able to follow along with the story. Being a historian, I know a fair bit about Russian and Polish history, and even more than my fair share about Jewish mysticism and Sabbatai Zevi and the Zohar and even Jacob Frank (although, to be fair, that mainly relates to a fascinating Great Courses lecture on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism). So, I think I probably brought more to the challenge of reading The Books of Jacob than most folks, but there were times when I simply didn't know where she was going with the story. However, in this case this probably ended up standing in the way of me enjoying the book more (that and the obvious fact that I'm not as smart as I think I am, which is a given). Toward the end I remember thinking that I simply didn't know any more about why Jacob Frank did what we did than when I started. However, I think I was criticizing her for not more successfully writing the book that I expected her to write as compared to the book that she wrote, which is, as I referenced above, impressive as hell. The world that Jacob Frank lived in was fascinating and almost beyond comprehension, and she expresses it beautifully in the novel. If I had gone into the book ready to appreciate it as a Gogol-esque celebration of a rich cultural and religious age - and less determined to turn it into an exploration of Jewish mysticism and the true inner workings of Jacob Frank's mind - I'm sure I would have enjoyed it on a whole different level, and, in the end, loved it - but, that's on me.

2025 Readings 12

 "It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about."

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Yesterday I noted that I was in the middle of a couple massive tomes, and this morning I finished one of them: Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. This is one of those books which, like others on this list so far, that has been circling around me for years. I'd see references to a specific passage in The Origins of Totalitarianism and I'd track it down in my copy but I never tackled a complete readings until this year.  Not surprisingly, I was drawn to reading it now in response to our seeming effortless slide into authoritarianism. Firstly, I felt I needed more intellectual tools to use in making sense of this age. Secondly, and related to the first point, obviously, I was trying to determine whether or not I could construct a course around it at Champlain. While the latter quest was probably a failure, I would argue that the former was a success. I could definitely use concepts of it in class, but I think it would be too much of a challenge for my students to tackle. That's a lot for me to admit since I routinely have them read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment or Anthony Yu's abridgement of Journey to the West, The Monkey and the Monk. Still, you have to pick your battles (or, to paraphrase The Art of War, you don't fight a battle until you've already won it; I'm afraid that battle would be lost on day one). Hannah Arendt possessed an extraordinary genius, and I have used her Eichmann in Jerusalem in class successfully, but she definitely has an idiosyncratic writing style and doesn't bother with setting up her points as if she were constructing an argument that college undergraduates, or at least my college undergraduates, could follow. It can be at times an oddly almost conversational style, which actually makes listening it it easier than reading it; it's like she's sitting with you and chatting while on the drive in to campus. Plus, she assumes a ton of knowledge, which is fine because she's speaking to an educated audience, and lord knows we need more of that and not less. She will throw out lines that force you to put the book down and recalibrate your way of thinking, such as the passage cited above. It's like predicting the dark side of the Internet before anyone had ever dreamt of the Internet.

I don't normally include an extended quoted passage, but this one is both brilliant and tells you so much about how she approaches the topic and also how she wrote (for good and bad, I suppose). It's featured in her final chapter, "Ideology and Terror."

"The truth is, rather, that the real nature of all ideologies was revealed only in the role that the ideology plays in the apparatus of totalitarian domination. Seen from this aspect, there appear three specifically totalitarian elements that are peculiar to all ideological thinking.

"First, in their claim in total explanation, ideologies have the tendency to explain not what is, but what becomes, what is born and passes away. They are in all cases concerned solely with the element of motion, that is, with history in the customary sense of the word. Ideologies are always oriented toward history, even when, as in the case of racism, they seemingly proceed from the premise of nature; here, nature serves merely to explain historical matters and reduce them to matters of nature. The claim to total explanation promises to explain all historical happenings, the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future. Secondly, in this capacity ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience from which it cannot learn anything new even if it is a question of something that has just come to pass. Hence ideological thinking become emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five sense, and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enable us to become aware of it. The sixth sense is provided by precisely the ideology, that particular ideological indoctrination which is taught by the educational institutions, established exclusively for this purpose, to train the 'political soldiers' in the Ordensburgen of the Nazis of the schools of the Comintern and the Cominform.  The propaganda of the totalitarian movement also serves to emancipate thought from experience and reality; it always strives to inject a secret meaning into every public, tangible event and to suspect a secret intent behind every public political act. Once the movements have come to power, they proceed to change reality in accordance with their ideological claims. The concept of enmity is replaced by that of conspiracy, and this produces a mentality in which reality - real enmity or real friendship - it no longer experienced and understood in its own terms but is automatically assumed to signify something else.

"Thirdly, since the ideologies have no power to transform reality, they achieve this emancipation of thought from experience through certain methods of demonstration. Ideological thinking orders facts into an absolutely logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality. The deducing may proceed logically or dialectically; in either case it involves a consistent process of argumentation which, because it thinks in terms of a process, is supposed to be able to comprehend the movement of the suprahuman, natural or historical processes. Comprehension is achieve by the mind's imitating, either logically or dialectically, the laws of 'scientifically' established movement with which through the process of imitation it becomes integrated. Ideological argumentation, always a kind of logical deduction, corresponds to the two aforementioned element of the ideologies - the element of movement and of emancipation from reality and experience - first, because its thought movement does not spring from experience but is self-generated, and secondly, because it transforms the one and only point that is taken and accepted from experienced reality into an axiomatic premise, leaving from then on the subsequent argumentation process completely untouched from any further experience. Once it has established its premise, its point of departure, experiences no longer interfere with ideological thinking, nor can it be taught by reality."

And, yes, I think this is where we are with Trump's takeover of America, and I feel empowered to process this seemingly unimaginable (although, sadly, to a historian totally imaginable) period of time when we're throwing away democracy and the rule of law with both hands. That said, you can definitely see that challenge of turning this loose on students. I will have to find ways to bring this into class, because I feel it does serve the needs of our educational goal, less political (I'm always amused by people who think we're actually indoctrinating our students with socialist ideals; I'd be happily surprised if they read the syllabus) than pedagogical. I'm supposed to be presenting a Blue Stool talk at Champlain next week and a talk for Vermont Philosophy Week in April, which might be good places to tackle the concepts raised by Arendt in regards to our modern American hellscape, but there's not nearly enough time to do justice to them. That said, maybe I'll unofficially shoot for the 2026 Vermont Philosophy Week.

Not Being a Madman

 I only regret not being a child, since then I could believe in my dreams, and not being a madman, since then I could keep everyone around me from getting close to my soul . . .

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 127

Yesterday I was sitting in my office at school talking to my officemate Erik. I think we were both in a sad mood (or maybe I'm actually meant to move to Portugal because I naturally possess more than my fair share of their famed saudade). It may have been simply because it was a Monday - or maybe it was because our students were wearing us down - or maybe it was because of this Trumpian avalanche of hatred and madness that is burying all of us, but the mood of the discussion was pretty grim. I found myself proposing that what made this time in history so horrible was that we're teachers, and everything about it spoke to the failure of everything we've worked at for years; or, in my case, decades, since I gave my first individual lecture in 1982 and taught my first free-standing class in 1984). Weren't we supposed to teach our students to think, certainly, but also to feel? To understand the world? Is this one of the hallmarks of when it's time to retire, when you stop believing in your dreams - and could still clearly remember a time when you did? In regards to the second part of Pessoa's point, I think all of us are feeling more than a little violated at the moment. I'm definitely feeling it, which is why I'm actively turning away from the news and social media, and disappearing into books and also this blog. Maybe being considered a madman (or being considered a madman by more people) would actually bring some peace.

Artifacts

 I snapped this picture while roaming, doubtlessly hopefully lost, in some alleyway in Venice. It's one of those reminders (which is probably why I snapped the picture in the first place) of the rich history of Venice, but it also speaks to the complexity of trying to make sense of that history of any history for that matter (which is probably why I snapped the picture in the first place). It's easy to see it as symbolic of the central role that Venice played in international trade for centuries, although, in the great scheme of things, is it really any different than those godawful black lawn jockeys that used to be so popular in so many parts of the US (and I'm sure you could see them today without much searching, sadly)? In addition to general trade, Venice played a huge role in the slave trade, so it's much more likely that this is a representation of a slave than of some visiting African prince. 

This is another in a very long line of instances of me getting stuck in place, fixated on some little historical artifact, which I guess means that I chose the right career. That said, it's a lot harder to stand around examining these fascinating little corners of the world when standing in one place for five minutes is painful.

A Dull Boy

 After several Vermont winters that didn't feel like Vermont winters, and for which we foolishly complained, we're definitely getting a Vermont winter this year. Oddly, we haven't had a massive snow fall yet - one of those beasties where we get over a foot of snow - and instead it's just been consistently cold and we've had a couple inches seemingly every bloody day. We might get eight inches of snow this coming Sunday, which might mean two or it might mean a foot, but we're already sufficiently buried. Normally we get some of our biggest snowfalls in March, as huge rainstorms with tornadoes in the South turn into blizzards up here, so there's still plenty of time for more misery.

It's definitely starting to feel like outtakes from The Shining . . .

The Weight of Being

 If I carefully consider the life men lead, I find nothing to distinguish it from the life of animals. Both man and animal are hurled unconsciously through things and the world; both have their leisure moments; both complete the same organic cycle day after day; both think nothing beyond what they think, nor live beyond what they live. A cat wallow in the sun and goes to sleep. Man wallows in life, with all of its complexities, and goes to sleep. Neither one escapes the fatal law of being what he is. Neither one tries to shake off the weight of being.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 166

I'm going to disagree with Pessoa on one key point here: animals would never vote for Trump, because they would never vote against their own self-interest, which tens of millions of Americans have done, some of them three times, and they would happily do so again (and I'm sure the GOP sycophants in Congress will love to give them a chance for a fourth vote). As I've proposed previously, we are witnessing the grandest cognitive dissonance experiment in history. Millions upon millions voted for an undelivered tax break (unless you're rich) or cheaper groceries (which are going to up in price), but cannot admit that they made a dreadful mistake. Instead, they are changing their words and deeds, and becoming more cruel and fanatical, to alleviate, unconsciously, the psychic dissonance they are feeling. Once again, as we've always known, animals are simply better than we are.

2025 Readings 11

 My reading in 2025 has slowed a bit, at least as charted by my blog. Actually, I'm in the middle of some big tomes so rest assured that I'm still percolating along. This morning I finished Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is definitely not a massive tome, but I started while taking a short break from the longer works. It's embarrassing to admit that I've never read any Shirley Jackson, not even her famous and influential short story "The Lottery." I've seen a couple different film versions of The Haunting of Hill House, although, inexplicably, I've never read the original (although I'm going to check it out now). I've seen We Have Always Lived in the Castle referenced as her masterpiece, but since I haven't read her other work I don't feel qualified to reflect on the validity of that statement, but I will say that I loved the novel and highly recommend it. 

The opening of the novel is, justifiably, appreciated: "My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. . . . The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf." The narrator, rendered by her sister as Merricat, is the perfect voice for a Gothic novel, and that's usually how the work is described. Jackson perfectly captures the general creepiness of New England.

 

No Brainer

 As my excellent friend Linda proposed this morning: No Brainer.

As I've proposed, my enthusiasm for winter in Vermont is at its nadir.

2025 Readings 10

 I'm in the midst of a couple massive tomes, so, for the purposes of this count, it seems like I've stopped reading, but rather math (as usual) or maybe just logistics, is my enemy. I just finished a collection of Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens (which was also, obviously, not a short read). Some of them I was familiar with because I've read them in his collection of Christmas stories, but they plucked a couple ghosts stories out of The Pickwick Papers and included them in this collection. The observation I shared with Janet while reading these stories is that Dickens clearly needed space. It's funny how he can effortlessly tie dozens of characters and a convoluted plot together in an eight-hundred page novel, but somehow he simply doesn't do it as well in a shorter format. He couldn't seem to strip down the story to fit the more limited space, so sometimes his shorter works were a bit jarring and confusing. There are exceptions, of course, because it's difficult to imagine a more perfectly constructed story than A Christmas Carol. It was a good collection to read in the middle of a Vermont winter and during the holiday season as their are spirits everywhere.