2025 Readings 43

 OK, so this is not a book that I finished in a day, although, considering its length, I still blew through it fairly quickly. On our last trip to the library in Montpelier I checked out Robert Service's Lenin: A Biography. I've always had a bit of a man-crush on Lenin, mainly because I find him and his age fascinating. The biography didn't disappointed, although I think it would have benefitted from another hundred pages of so, devoted to events such as the actual events of the takeover of power, his conflict with Stalin, or the New Economic Policy; these were all discussed, but a deeper dive would have made it an even richer experience. This led to a discussion over the breakfast table this morning over the balancing act in biographies between evenly running through the subject's life and focusing in more deeply on a couple key moments or themes. Again, I liked this biography a lot and would definitely recommend it to others, but I do think it would have benefitted from a little more granularity in some key areas. In the end I came away with a sense that Lenin was even more of a prick than I thought he was, but there are people who accomplish extraordinary things in extraordinary ages, and seldom are they pleasant people. There were some very human moments in the story, however, and one that jumped out to me was his reaction to the death of his one-time mistress and long-time Bolshevik colleague, Inessa Armand:

     "Inessa called herself a 'living corpse'; it was not only cholera but also a broken heart that did for her. Ten days late she contemplated the meaning of her life:

For romantics, love holds the first place in a person's life. It's higher than anything else. And until recently I was far nearer to such a notion than I am not. True, for me love was never the only thing. Alongside love there was public activity. And both in my life and in the past there have been not a few instances where I've sacrificed my happiness and my love for the good of the cause. But previously it used to seem that love had a significant equal to that of public activity. Now it's not like that. The significance of love in comparison with public activity becomes quite small and cannot bear comparison with public activity.

On the point of death, she tried to persuade herself that her work for the Revolution meant more to her than the man she loved.

    "The matter-of-fact official telegram to Lenin cut him to the quick: 'It has been impossible to save Comrade Inessa Armand who was ill with cholera. She died on 24 September. We are accompanying the body to Moscow. Lenin had been responsible for her convalescing in the chaotic Caucasus rather than in France, and now she had perished there. It took a fortnight before her body was brought back in a leaden coffin to Moscow. The train arrived in the early hours of 11 October, and the cortege made its way from the railway station after dawn. Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna (his wife) had been waiting at the station. As the cortege neared the capital's centre, Lenin was obviously overcome with grief. Nadezhda Konstantinovna understood, and gripped him by the arm to hold him up. No one could forget the pitiful condition of the man. The young Bolshevik Yelizaveta Drabkina watched the horse-drawn hearse and the draped black flag: 'There was something inexpressibly sad about his drooping shoulders and lowly bent head.' Angelica Balabanova had the same impression at the funeral: 'I never saw such torment; I never saw any human being so completely absorbed by sorrow, by the effort to keep it for himself, to guard it against the attention of others, as if that awareness could have diminished the intensity of his feeling.'

    "Lenin did not record his feelings on paper. He had given up many pleasures for 'the cause': material comfort, profession, chess, classical music, and cycling. He had avoided a permanent association with Inessa: the Revolution for him was always dominant. But he grieved deeply when her corpse was delivered from Nalchik.

    "By his side were friends and associates who thought that he was never the same again. Some said that he would have lived longe had he not lost Inessa. Shaken he certainly was; yet he had not lost the power of his will. Since 1912 he had accustomed himself to living apart from her. He could also cope with the froideurs of Nadya. Throughout his career he displayed an ability to be undistracted the matters of the heart. Usually it had been his physical health of his polemics that had thrown him off balance. 'Romance' did not get in his way, and Inessa's death did not destroy him. If his external reaction is any guide, he was hurt worse than by any other event since his brother's execution in 1887. But he quickly recovered. He had an enormous capacity for emotional self-suppression. He loved politics and lived for the political life He was fixated by the importance of ideas. He was not a robot and did not deny, at least to himself, the benefits of a deep relationship, but personal love - the love of a man for a woman - was secondary to him, and, if politics so demanded, he thought he could survive without it."

 Robert Service also wrote biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, so I suspect I'll be reading more of his books in the future.

2025 Readings 42

 Over the weekend Janet and I drove down to Massachusetts to see her mom for Mother's Day, which meant that we ended up stopping at the Northshire Bookstore not once, but twice. And so, nine books later, and that was just my haul, Janet's was slightly larger (clearly, we have a problem). To be fair, the return trip on Sunday was entirely my idea, with my only excuse being that the bookstore had a 20% off sale for members. Of course, I will regret all of this when we're in the process of moving overseas and I need to store or rehouse or give away hundreds of books (but that's another post). 

One of the books I picked up was Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, which was absolutely wonderful. I bought it Saturday early afternoon, and even considering travel and plans for most of Saturday evening and Sunday, I still finished it last night. It's mainly straight history, but at times slides into a novelistic retelling of the history. It tells several related stories of scientists and mathematicians and their roles in revolutionary changes, but also what lunatics they often were - so, come for the math and science and stay for the sex, drugs, and religious visions - or come for the sex, drugs, and religious visions and stay for the math and science. Either way, this is highly recommended.

2025 Readings 41

 OK, so I'm essentially cheating here. In between teaching a class in the spring that featured Fernando Pessoa - and giving two talks (the Philosophy Week presentation and the upcoming talk I'm giving in Portugal) - I ended up reading The Book of Disquiet from beginning to end (as compared to just occasionally dipping into it need be for the class and the presentations). So shoot me. Sorry, it's just a great, great book, and, as I've mentioned several times, The Book of Disquiet is definitely the book of my 60s. However, since I have a separate thread simply based on my reflections on Pessoa's work (see Disquiet on the right side of the screen) I don't know what I have to say here, other than the fact that you should all read the book - and read it repeatedly.

2025 Readings 40

 I just finished a reread (or, I guess to be more accurate, a re-listen) to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I first read only a couple years ago. It's a novel that I'm sure I will read again - and hopefully again - over the next few years. And in this case I do mean read, as compared to listen to it on Audible, not simply because of my growing opposition to All Things Amazon, but also because I think, in this case, the recorded version doesn't do complete justice to the novel. It's not that it's bad, because it's not, but he presents the main protagonist, "our hero," Hans Castorp in a more agitated state that I imagine him to be; essentially, I internally "hear" Hans slower than he is presented in the audio version. If you have the chance to listen to it on Audible definitely take the opportunity because it's a great novel and a very good performance, but I think I want to tackle it as it was intended next time. 

On this visit to the International Sanatorium Berghof I found that I loved the sections I initially oved even more - and disliked the sections I initially loved - even more. It is a wonderful novel, and I warmed to it in a way that I never warmed to Death in Venice (although I've tackled that much shorter work at three different periods in my life) - inexplicably, I've not read Buddenbrooks (although that's in the queue for this year of reading). My other discovery on this reading was how much I feel that I am, in fact, Hans Castorp, and not simply because of our shared mediocrity. It may relate to my time at Champlain coming to an end, but I've been thinking about how Hans came to the sanatorium to visit his cousin for a planned trip of three weeks and ended up staying for seven years - whereas I came to Champlain with the thought of of staying two years and stayed for over a quarter-century. Like Hans, I'm perpetually torn between - and always trying to reconcile - different philosophical structures (although mine, unlike Hans - he didn't live as long - are consistently redefining themselves). Plus, I think the two of us were consistently misdiagnosed over the years, and thus had too much time stolen from us.

Anyway, I really love the novel and heartily recommend anyone to take on the challenge of reading it - it is a difficult novel, but also a beautiful one. Let me share a brief section, which will give you a sense of the flow of the novel. I was going to share the section where Hans's cousin Joachim dies - or the very end where Hans will almost certain die - but instead here's the beginning of Chapter 7, where Mann shares how long Hans was actually in the sanatorium, which then slides into a discussion of time and literature (which is very typical of Mann):

   Can one narrate time - time as such, in and of itself? Most certainly not, what a foolish undertaking that would be. The story would go: "Time passed, ran on, flowed in a mighty stream," and on and on in the same vein. No one with any common sense could call that a narrative. It would be the same as if someone took the harebrained notion of holding a single note or chord for hours on end - and called it music. Because a story is like music in that it fills time, "fills it up so nice and properly," "divides it up," so that there is "something to it," "something going on" - to quote, with the melancholy reverence one shows to statements made by the dead, a few casual comments of the late Joachim, phrases that faded away long ago, and we are not sure if the reader is quite clear just how long ago that was. Time is the element of narration, just as it is the element of time - is inextricably bound up with it, as bodies are in space. It is also the element of music, which itself measures and divides time, making it suddenly diverting and precious; and related to music, as we have noted, is the story, which also can only present itself in successive events, as movement toward an end (and not as something suddenly, brilliantly present, like a work of visual art, which is pure body bound to time), and even if it would try to be totally here in each moment, would still need time for its presentation.

   That much is perfectly obvious. But that there is a difference is equally clear. The time element of music is singular: a segment of human earthly existence in which is gushes forth, thereby ineffably enhancing and ennobling life. Narrative, however, has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative's imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches out over light-years. A musical piece entitled "Five Minute Waltz" last five minutes - this and only this defined its relationship to time. A story whose contents involved a time span of five minutes, however, could, by means of an extraordinary scrupulosity in filing up those five minutes, last a thousand time as long - and still remain short on boredom, although in relationship to its imaginary time it would be very long in the telling. On the other hand it is possible for a narrative's content-time to exceed its own duration immeasurably. This is accomplished by diminishment - and we use this term to describe an illusory, or, to be quite explicit, diseased element, that is obviously pertinent here: diminishment occurs to some extent whenever a narrative makes use of hermetic magic and a temporal hyper-perspective reminiscent of certain anomalous experiences of reality that imply that the senses have been transcended. The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person's dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man's ability to experience time - dreams, that is, whose imaginary time span vastly exceeds their actual duration and which are characterized by an incredible diminishment of the experience of time, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoker puts it, the intoxicated user's brain seems "to have had something removed, like the mainspring from a broken watch." 

   A narrative, then, can set to work and deal with time in much the same way as those depraved dreams. But since it can "deal" with time, it is clear that time, which is the element of the narrative, can also become its subject; and although it would be going too far to say that one can "narrate time" it is apparently not such an absurd notion to want to narrate about time - so that a term like "time novel" may well take on an oddly dreamlike double meaning. And indeed we posed the question about whether one could narrate time precisely in order to say that we actually have some like that in mind with this ongoing story. . . .

In Praise of KA

 My friend Kevin possesses many virtues, and not just his hidden love of the CFL. As I've proposed several times, no doubt, he's also a fantastic cook. Last week he whipped up some shrimp and grits with chorizo. Marcelle, Kevin, and I wolfed it down after my last final of the season, which was a wonderful way to end an utterly dreary semester.

It was, seriously, one of the best meals I've ever had in my entire life.

In Praise of SW

 I wanted to post this picture of my great friend Steve, which I snapped last week during Finals Week. He teaches a first year class that features martial arts, and during the final exam period he brings the students out into the quad and has them break thin boards. If nothing else it gives them some exercise and sunshine, but, more importantly, he takes the opportunity to build up their self-esteem. He has them write perceived obstacles on the boards before breaking them, and then encourages them to keep the boards throughout their time here at Champlain so that they can remind themselves of how they can defeat their demons.

Steve pumping up the students. He, unfairly, never gets the credit he deserves for being a very talent teacher who is utterly devoted to this students.

2025 Readings 39

 It seems like I've fallen behind in my readings, which would make sense because I just plowed through the end of the semester, but actually it's because I've been in the middle of some massive books: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, and Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, and Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. I finished the third of the three on Sunday night. Murakami has a special place in my heart, partially because I will always associate him with helping me get through a terrible time in my life. As I've no doubt discussed here on the blog, I remember spending most of the first holiday season after B and I split, squirrelled away, hiding from the world, reading Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Since then I've read it several times (and doubtless will again), along with other favorites such as Kafka on the Shore and Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and 1Q84 and Sputnik Sweetheart and South of the Border, West of the Sun and A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, etc. Obviously, I'm a huge fan. Truthfully, I haven't enjoyed some of his later works as much, although I don't know if that says as much about him as it does about me: we all change. I can remember the machinations I went through to track down a copy of 1Q84 when I lived in Abu Dhabi. It was 1Q84 where I think he became much more hit and miss, and at times almost lapsing into being a gentle self-parody of him (when will one of the characters descend into a well - or receive an unsettling call from a mysterious woman while he's cooking pasta, etc.). Nevertheless, I've enjoyed every one of them, and maybe I'm just judging his latest works unfairly. The City and Its Uncertain Walls reads as a revisiting of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Kafka on the Shore (more, undeniably, the former than the latter), and at a certain point I felt that the "uncertain walls" were a commentary on his own perception of his works. I don't know if, in the end, it added up to anything, but I don't think that Murakami novels actually ever are designed to add up to anything, it's all about the journey. This journey simply feels less inspired.