Snow in August by Pete Hamill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sentimental but I loved it.

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Hell by Henri Barbusse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rejecting Absolute Misery

I think the reason I enjoy Barbusse is the chance to escape into another reality, an unexpected metaphysics. I get the same sense while reading Poe. Both create an enclosed world in which things happen that are eternal and somehow immune from the trivial influences of everyday life. In the era of Trump I find this somewhat comforting.

The reader sees only what the unnamed protagonist sees in The Inferno. And since this narrator barely interacts with the fellow residents in his Parisian boarding house, what he sees is almost all there is. He and everyone else are Leibnizian Monads, self-contained, self-conscious entities which bound and re-bound off one another like balls on a billiard table. As one of his characters says, “I am crying because one is alone.” The peculiar grammar of this phrase is significant- one represents all.

But these are Monads who suffer acutely because they have windows which allow the world to touch their consciousness directly. One window in particular, a chink between bricks allowing visual access to the room next door, is the one the narrator becomes obsessed by. Life, it seems, is a matter of which window we choose to observe it from. And this one allows life to be seen without the normal social conventions so that its duplicity and perversion can be seen for what they are. People still lie and dissemble but they do so with a sort of integrity that reveals their true intentions, the ‘innards’ of consciousness so to speak.

Through this window the protagonist observes different versions of fear and love, or rather variations on an emotion of fearful love: “love is only a kind of festival of solitude.” It appears that we all share an experience of Leibnizian loneliness. The room he watches is some sort of temporary sanctuary for people whose lives have been damaged, they believe, by circumstances, or by sin, or by painful memories, or by design. But if we share loneliness, we are not entirely alone. An unexpected paradox.

This hidden perspective on life makes the observer-protagonist god-like and he initially appears to have delusions of grandeur: “I who was a spectator apart from men and whose gaze soared above them... “ But only because he is able to see reality without convention; he has no power to alter this reality, to coordinate it in order to produce a better outcome. Hence the implacability of “Fate” which is the inevitable “separation of human beings that deceive themselves.” The deception is accepting the lie that we are self-contained.

It is because we are not self-contained that we suffer. The problem of life however is not the removal of suffering; it the the realization of happiness within the suffering. As Amy, the female object of observation realizes, “‘I am the god of my own happiness. What I want,' she added, with perfect simplicity, 'is to be happy, I, just as I am, and with all my suffering... If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain?'" Indeed, what would remain is the monadic shell of a human being, a husk.

In Leibniz’s philosophy, God is responsible for everything. He directs the interactions among the human entities which are enclosed by their own experiences. His presumption is that none of us can appreciate the innermost experience of any other, that we are permanently insulated from everyone else. Given the obvious suffering abroad in the world such a philosophy makes God a sadist and human beings inert particles of self-consciousness who are condemned to Hell from birth.

Barbusse’s protagonist is a morally ambiguous character. But his very ambition to be god-like reveals something important to himself: “I, like other men, am moulded out of infinity.” Like other men. This seems to me the key to escaping the inferno - the god-like quality of not individual human beings, but collectively of the entire human species. What constitutes this divinity is the ability to discern, at least partially, what’s happening inside others. This capacity mitigates suffering by diluting it with empathy for the suffering of others.

In the early part of the story, the protagonist says, apparently without irony, “If everyone were like me, all would be well.” And, remarkably, this is what he finds to be the case. People are like him. We are more than the mere individual desire not to die because we are somehow mutually contained within each other. This is why "Every human being is the whole truth.” All of humanity is within the individual, as he is within the rest. There could hardly be a more striking revelation than this in any religion.

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The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne by Anna Bikont
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Culpable Amnesia

Between global histories of the Holocaust and individual biographies of those caught up in it lies this: a story of the story to uncover the facts of the massacre of a Polish Jewish village by its neighbours during WW II. Local involvement, even leadership, of the killing cannot be denied. Yet today's residents vehemently resist recognition of the roles their parents and grandparents played. Nor will they permit investigation of events that they simply prefer forgotten.

Bikont is an absolutely compelling writer, inter-weaving the history of the massacre with the story of the continuing cover-up. Among other things she demonstrates how anti-Semitism remains a particularly Polish problem. The complicity of the Polish Catholic Church in the Holocaust, its aftermath, and its historical obfuscation is especially troubling.

As recent events throughout Europe have shown, anti-Semitism is not only a matter of history, it remains a powerful force that needs only the slightest stimulus to be unleashed.

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A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgård
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A God Who Learns

Angels are dangerous creatures according to Thomas Aquinas. There is no mention of them in the creation stories of Genesis, he says, because their existence could become a distraction. The intense brightness of their pure knowledge can blind mortal beings to the divine. Knausgaard is aware of this danger and hints at the risk he's taking at the beginning of A Time for Everything when he says, "...darkness isn't the danger, light is. That is where all the pitfalls are to be found."

Nevertheless, Aquinas says, angels are messengers from the divine and deserve due attention. In particular, their assumption of material form is instructive in itself because it is a demonstration of the possibility of the infusion of the material by the spiritual. For Aquinas this demonstration becomes definitive in the Incarnation of the God-man Christ.

This may all sound biblical. But it's not. It's largely Greek philosophy which begins by positing the immutability, the un-changeability of the divine as one of its primary characteristics. Knausgaard, in the guise of his fictional theologian Bellori, dumps this Greek presumption of divine stability by taking the bible somewhat more literally than even many evangelicals might like. "It is not the divine," Bellori claims in his On The Nature of Angels, "which is immutable and the human which is changeable, he wrote, the opposite is true and is the real theme of the Bible: the alteration of the divine from the creation to the death of Christ."

What Knausgaard is exploring is therefore not the influence of God on man through the heavenly envoys but the opposite. Man's experience is so alien to God that it has to be communicated gradually to him, beginning with the conversion of the angels. These are the pitfalls he means. Angels "regard us with total apathy," he says. They don't have a clue about who and what we really are. They have to learn. And so does God:

"The fact that the Lord's feelings towards mankind alternated between sorrow and despair and a fury so great that it could cause him to destroy whole cities means that the expectations he had of them, which they could never live up to, were inhuman - that is, divine. He never saw man in his own right, never for what he was, only what he ought to be. ...he never understood them. And how could He? God was far too large for man, their lives too small..."

This becomes even clearer in the exegetical discussion about the prophet Ezekiel: "Before Ezekiel, the Lord's applications to mankind had always taken place outside them; the boundary between the Lord and the chosen one was absolute. With Ezekiel this boundary was crossed for the first time." God was learning, and consequently changing, turning more man-like: "Does not Ezekiel describe God as a 'form in human likeness'?"

But man too was developing. He was becoming 'divinised' (an explicit doctrine of the Eastern Church), that is, he too was becoming capable of change. He was fighting his way back past the mighty Cherubim guarding the gates of paradise, and back into the divine presence.

Ultimately this provides a very different view of salvation than Greek philosophy. Becoming divine is indeed a liberation but not into a nirvana of eternal stasis. Rather it is salvation into a world of continuous development: "Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear."

I admit that the first time I read A Time for Everything I just didn't get it. I therefore apologise, probably to myself, for not allowing myself to be drawn into his alternative theology of change, to be, that is, just a little bit divinised.

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Numero zero by Umberto Eco
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Typical Eco playing with your mind to your mind's great satisfaction.

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All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inside the American Shtetl.
Captivating.

Most people outside of New York City will not know anything about the various Orthodox Jewish communities that thrive there and in its hinterland. And even most New Yorkers will not know that the primary purpose of these communities is not just to re-create the physical mode of living of the Eastern European shtetl-culture which was annihilated by the Holocaust, but more importantly to re-create the essential ethos of this culture: the continuous recognition of and submission to the Almighty in every detail and nuance of one's life.

As among Christian monastic groups or some Anabaptist sects, there is a spectrum of meaning to the term orthodoxy. But most Jewish Orthodox communities share a recognition, like the monastics, that an existence as separate as possible from the prevailing culture is necessary for the full performance of one's religious obligations.

But, unlike monastics, Orthodox Jews have families, frequently rather large families, that have to be maintained very much as part of religious duty. This means that children are born into a commitment that is much more than nominal. One's entire life, including language, studies, dress, the smallest details of decorum and relationships, are established by tradition as that tradition is interpreted by the religious leadership.

To use an entirely inapt but accurate metaphor: in religious devotion, Christians are the hens that contribute an egg or two, Orthodox Jews are the creatures that provide the meat of commitment with their very bodies.

So what happens when the child becomes an adult and takes issue with the cultural isolation enforced by the community? Particularly if the adult is male, has a family, but has few life-skills (even language) in the wider world, and yet remains Jewish in their very being?

In short it ain't pretty. Ostracism by the religious leadership is the least of the punishments involved. Total loss of family, of friends, of social environment, of economic sustenance, indeed even of one's sense of self is understandably devastating.

Reading this memoir of extreme spiritual dislocation, one, I think, must become torn. Tragedy exists in this situation for both the individual and the community. Both feel themselves failures. The striving to maintain a counter-culture which rejects the materialism of the enveloping society is heroic. The loss of even one person to that materialism is profoundly demoralising. Conversely of course the oppression and subsequent rejection experienced by that person is excruciating.

Appropriately, Deen's memoir ends not with a resolution or reconciliation but with the continuing but ultimately accepted agony of separation as the necessary price to be paid for what he believes is independence. Good luck is the only thing to say.

Postscript: For those who might be interested in the phenomenon of religious leave-taking, I can highly recommend the 1985 God in Fragments (Dieu Fracture) by Jacques Pohier, a Dominican friar forced out of that Catholic Order by dogmatists. It too was written in medias res as it were and mirrors many of the same emotions that Deen recounts.

Postscript 15Nov18: Several recent pieces on this community: https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/2752... https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life...

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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Before Trump There Was Moses

Want to understand the politics and the reasons why NYC is the way it is? Read it and weep.

Robert Moses was never elected to public office. Yet his power over public finance and social decision-making was greater than that of any elected official, including at times the President of the United States (His nemesis, however, was the president's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was also unelected to anything but just as crafty).

Moses created his power by creating the laws which New York State politicians passed without reading or understanding the fine print. He effectively institutionalised himself as, among other posts, the Chairman of the Long Island State Parks Commission, and the head of the Triborough Bridge Authority. These positions, thanks to his foresightful design, were immune to political review.

At the LISPC, he single-handedly designed the expansion of the New York City suburbs from the 1930's onward as totally dependent on the automobile and in such a way that would limit racial integration. At the Triborough Bridge Authority, he created a spectacularly successful cash cow whose funds could not be touched without his approval. And even the 1970's financial collapse of the City was not enough to attract this approval.

Yet other administrative positions, often held simultaneously in the City and the State, gave Moses blanket-control of every significant planning and planning-variance decision within the City. His tentacles of power extended even to the Northern reaches of the State through his control of electricity generation along the St. Lawrence River.

There is no evidence that Moses ever took a bribe or benefitted financially from his immense power. He started his career and pursued it as an idealist. He was nonetheless a dictator who routinely destroyed neighbourhoods, regularly flouted the law, coerced politicians of both major parties, and ultimately left a legacy of social devastation which will last for decades if not centuries.

Caro's documentation of Moses's strategy and activities is unparalleled. His attention to detail and nuance is acute. His judgments and conclusions are never precipitous and always subtle. This book should be on the required reading list of every course in democratic government in every country on the planet.

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Aloft by Chang-rae Lee
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Unless you have an interest in flying over central Suffolk LI, somewhat tedious.

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The Circle by Dave Eggers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Creepy Tech

There are certainly worse techie novels. Eggers brings together technology and philosophy in a highly creative way. Read this as a preferred alternative to many factual arguments about the implications of modern payments and communications technologies, like David Birch's Identity Is the New Money. It's not only more entertaining but a hell of a lot more inspiring.

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Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Life of the Mind in Queens

Bet you didn't know there was a Jewish socialist commune established by the federal government in the middle of New Jersey in the 1930's. I sure didn't. Or that Sunnyside in Queens was created as a model community. Or that Abraham Lincoln declared that "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not existed first. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much higher consideration..." This was his Message to Congress, on December 1861, six years before Das Kapital.

These are strong enough hooks to get me into Lethem's latest creation of New York lit. I can't help it: I devour everything he produces. It could be that he provides plausible explanations for how we got to where we are - emotionally as well as politically. Or it could be that his use of specific locations gives them, and therefore one's memories of them, some significance never before recognised. No matter, just as long as he keeps pumping out more outer-borough stuff.

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Jews Without Money by Michael Gold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Routinely Miraculous

Certainly not a great stylist but well worth reading to understand the grit of immigrant life.

Life on Hester Street: Coming off the boat from Ellis Island in the Battery with a tag on your jacket. No friends. An incomprehensible language. Not a dime in your pocket. Prey to hucksters, con men and all manner of exploitation. And yet you survive.

You create a life through sheer toil, luck, and acute attention to everything that happens around you. There is Yiddish theatre, Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish-speaking unions, and if not a rabbi from your own shtetl, certainly there is one who knew him.

Within a generation you have walked into a new house in Brooklyn or perhaps the remoteness of the Bronx. Meanwhile you suffer the usual heartaches, disappointments, and family tragedies.

Nothing unusual in any of it really, but only in the sense that it happened millions of times. New York City not as a melting pot but a gigantic anvil annealing a certain toughness, an indestructibility, in these former peasants who knew nothing of the world before they were thrown into it.

A miracle actually. Why no commemorative statue to the courage and daring it took?

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Midcentury by John Dos Passos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An Unhopeful Postscript

No one knew the America of his time better than Dos Passos. The follow-on to his USA trilogy, Mid-Century, I read as a sort of disappointed postscript. The USA books were somewhat dismal in their description of the emergence of the striving but purposeless corporate society after WW I. But they also had a spark of hope. Their sense was something along the lines of "Once this all settles down we might be able to do something about this mess."

Dos Passos adopts John Stuart Mills's very pragmatist ethic as his own: "If all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind." What he feared were the individuals and institutions that violated this principle.

So his characterisation of the labour leader Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers is pointed: "He was so convinced of the probity of his own intentions that he never could believe in the probity of people who had other ideas." He was, in short, a bully whose objective always included the silencing of opposition, inside as well as outside the union.

He also saw that bullying had become an unparalleled art form in America after WW II. The McCarthy Hearings, the Cold War, the growing middle-class self-satisfaction, the emergence of what President Eisenhower called the Military Industrial Complex were institutional manifestations of the Reuther personality. Dos Passos said what few others dared, "Institutions are built on zeal. They are also built on fear." Mid-century is a chronicle of pervasive but suppressed fear.

There was also an intellectual component to this institutional fear. It not only produced technological advances in destructive power, it also inhibited an indeterminate range of human activities. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'Father of the Atom Bomb' is quoted explicitly, "Any form of knowledge really precludes other forms. Any serious study of one thing cuts off other parts of your life." What economists call 'opportunity costs', that is the loss from not doing something else, was potentially enormous but because of their nature incalculable.

Finally, a sort of social smugness, an unjustified feeling of superiority with a distinct anti-intellectual caste, pervaded America. Dos Passos summarises this sentiment with poetic terseness, "So many Americans felt that their neighbour had no right to know more than they did." The entire country it seemed had lost its way. One character notes, "Idealism without ethics is no compass."

One must ask if the situation has improved by End-Century and beyond? The fact that Mid-Century has never been reviewed before on GoodReads suggests that the question is not popular.

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Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hopeless Migration

New York City was, perhaps still is, defined not so much geographically as spiritually by the unfulfilled aspirations of the people who migrate to it. And those migrants historically have come as much from the American hinterland as they have from across the ocean.

Manhattan Tranfer was a stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad in Newark, New Jersey before the tunnel under the Hudson connecting the mainline to Manhattan was completed. Once you arrived there, you had nowhere else to go but New York City. Dos Passos begins and ends his novel in this forlorn non-place. It is the entrance, for those already in America, into a world that was unique even within the uniqueness of America.

No one in this world is a native. All come because they are dissatisfied and become more dissatisfied as they acclimate to its brutality. It is a place of power not beauty, of deceit rather than wit, of crowded isolation.

These migrants want what others already have in New York City. They think that means money and opportunity. But more often they find that it’s disappointment and squalid, bare survival.

Immigrants from abroad come with nothing but hope. Migrants coming through Manhattan Transfer come with illusions rather than hope, and leave with less of both.

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The Instructions by Adam Levin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Talmud in a Weird World.

According to some Kabbalists, there is at least one Messiah in every generation. He of course may refuse to recognise his calling or, in any case, is likely be rejected when he announces himself to the world. Nonetheless the Messiah is essential for the attainment of justice: "..it is good to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether you do justice or not."

So what if, just what if, a young Chicagoland boy feels himself called, responds to that call with caution but also with persistence, and creates a following of other young Jewish kids? He might know the odds are against him but so what:

"If ever you are asked if Adonai can create a boulder too heavy for Him to lift, you will answer the fool who asked you: 'Fool, we are two of seven billion such boulders, you and I.' And when the fool insists that Adonai cannot then properly be called almighty, you will not argue, for the fool will be correct. Instead you will answer: 'He is Adonai nevertheless. We re superior to the Angels not because we control ourselves, but because Adonai does not control us.'"

Then what if that young boy choses to resist the admonitions and restrictions of unsympathetic adults as well as the low level threats of school yard anti-Semites? What might happen? Well, a surprisingly thrilling saga of human rebellion and retribution. And an even more surprising confrontation with the Almighty himself: "Our thoughts to You are what You are to us. Noisy but hidden...Even if you can read our faces you can do so only in the way we read Your scripture." In other words "You may interpret us as human beings but don't claim, for heaven's sake that you can understand much less judge us."

It's hard not to be on the side of the putative Messiah, against Adonai as well as the bigots and bureaucrats, despite the disruption and even death that he initiates. At over 1000 pages, Levin has to be good to keep the reader. And that he does. Amazing for a first novel.

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The Dewey Decimal System by Nathan Larson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You have to like anything NYC to like this guy.

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That Night by Alice McDermott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Floreat Suburbia

I lived in this neighbourhood at this point in history. And I never thought the cultural desolation and dislocation that I remember of that time and place could be redeemed. Alice McDermott in That Night and in Charming Billy has given me cause to doubt my existential prejudices. Perhaps the treeless, soulless streets of 1950's NYC suburbs provide material of general worth to ponder. As of now I am amazed at McDermott's ability to simply describe what the time and place were like. That's enough to be getting on with.

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U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money by John Dos Passos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Present at the Birth of Corporate Man

The modern de Tocqueville in fictional format. There is no better observer of the 20th century American character than Dos Passos. He chronicles that unique mixture of frenetic American activity coupled with an equally energetic despair.

Striving in America isn't based on hope but serves to avoid reflection on the need for hope or its source. It isn't possible to understand the attraction of a man like Donald Trump to a huge swathe of the American population without an appreciation of the characters Dos Passos constructs to populate his inter-war novels.

It is during this period that the cultural and political mould of the United States solidified to produce not the revolutionary, or the pioneer, or the successful immigrant, but the corporate man and woman who have to get on in a world that they little understand and don't much like. Trump is the son of one of these people and would continue the tradition.

Postscript: Dos Passos continued a focus on corporate life that I think was started by Theodore Dreiser and continued by authors like Louis Auchincloss and William Gaddis. They each in their own way record what might be called the corporate aesthetic as it emerged in America. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Although of an entirely different genre, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime might be considered as a sort of fictional birth notice of corporate America. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript 29Dec19: https://apple.news/AutauXztHQS2BlRtVA...

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Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Probably the best immigrant novel ever written.

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The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The American prep school experience is the subject of Louis Auchincloss’s 1965 novel The Rector of Justin. The eponymous rector founds a school to produce an end product of comprehensible human import: young men of character who understand certain values like responsibility, discernment, and integrity. He fails utterly because, well, times were changing. The emerging corporate world did not need character, it needed high expectations which can be ’sold’ as valuable in themselves to others in order to both motivate and enrich. Auchincloss knew that the world he had been brought up in was dying. And he saw the implications for the future, not just for education but for what we casually call civilisation.

See here for a review in larger context: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is available in English translation.

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A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgård
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A God Who Learns

Angels are dangerous creatures according to Thomas Aquinas. There is no mention of them in the creation stories of Genesis, he says, because their existence could become a distraction. The intense brightness of their pure knowledge can blind mortal beings to the divine. Knausgaard is aware of this danger and hints at the risk he's taking at the beginning of A Time for Everything when he says, "...darkness isn't the danger, light is. That is where all the pitfalls are to be found."

Nevertheless, Aquinas says, angels are messengers from the divine and deserve due attention. In particular, their assumption of material form is instructive in itself because it is a demonstration of the possibility of the infusion of the material by the spiritual. For Aquinas this demonstration becomes definitive in the Incarnation of the God-man Christ.

This may all sound biblical. But it's not. It's largely Greek philosophy which begins by positing the immutability, the un-changeability of the divine as one of its primary characteristics. Knausgaard, in the guise of his fictional theologian Bellori, dumps this Greek presumption of divine stability by taking the bible somewhat more literally than even many evangelicals might like. "It is not the divine," Bellori claims in his On The Nature of Angels, "which is immutable and the human which is changeable, he wrote, the opposite is true and is the real theme of the Bible: the alteration of the divine from the creation to the death of Christ."

What Knausgaard is exploring is therefore not the influence of God on man through the heavenly envoys but the opposite. Man's experience is so alien to God that it has to be communicated gradually to him, beginning with the conversion of the angels. These are the pitfalls he means. Angels "regard us with total apathy," he says. They don't have a clue about who and what we really are. They have to learn. And so does God:

"The fact that the Lord's feelings towards mankind alternated between sorrow and despair and a fury so great that it could cause him to destroy whole cities means that the expectations he had of them, which they could never live up to, were inhuman - that is, divine. He never saw man in his own right, never for what he was, only what he ought to be. ...he never understood them. And how could He? God was far too large for man, their lives too small..."

This becomes even clearer in the exegetical discussion about the prophet Ezekiel: "Before Ezekiel, the Lord's applications to mankind had always taken place outside them; the boundary between the Lord and the chosen one was absolute. With Ezekiel this boundary was crossed for the first time." God was learning, and consequently changing, turning more man-like: "Does not Ezekiel describe God as a 'form in human likeness'?"

But man too was developing. He was becoming 'divinised' (an explicit doctrine of the Eastern Church), that is, he too was becoming capable of change. He was fighting his way back past the mighty Cherubim guarding the gates of paradise, and back into the divine presence.

Ultimately this provides a very different view of salvation than Greek philosophy. Becoming divine is indeed a liberation but not into a nirvana of eternal stasis. Rather it is salvation into a world of continuous development: "Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear."

I admit that the first time I read A Time for Everything I just didn't get it. I therefore apologise, probably to myself, for not allowing myself to be drawn into his alternative theology of change, to be, that is, just a little bit divinised.

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Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Lyudmila Ulitskaya
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Heresy That Dare Not Speak Its Name

In the 14th century Catherine of Siena rebuked Pope Gregory XI for allowing lax behaviour among the clergy, and for his own behaviour by remaining in Avignon rather than re-establishing residence in Rome. She got away with it because what she didn't question was papal authority, particularly the authority to define and enforce belief. She could only chide and appeal to conscience, and even then never assert her own conscience as in any way equal to the pope's.

Shmuel Oswald Rufeisen, also known as Brother Daniel and the model for the central fictional character of Daniel Stein in Lyudmila Ulitskaya's novel, is a Polish Jew who becomes a Carmelite friar and spends most of his adult life in Israel ministering to a small congregation of Hebrew-speaking Christians near Haifa.

Brother Daniel has learned to mistrust authority, particularly ideological authority which attempts to regulate belief. He takes his own conscience more seriously than Catherine did hers. And, unlike Catherine, he does not try to impose his views on others. He neither chides nor condemns his congregants or his ecclesiastical superiors. He simply trusts his own conscientious judgment more than the judgment of those who have power over him. And with good reason.

As a teenager he was pressed into service with the Gestapo and forced to participate in the extermination of Lithuanian and Belorussian Jews, many of whom he knew personally. Narrowly escaping from execution by the Communist partisans, Daniel received both the Stalin and Lenin medals for bravery from the Soviet Union but was under suspicion of Polish nationalism.

Daniel was also critical of the life of the church, somewhat more radically, if less outspokenly, than Catherine. Ulitskaya puts words in the mouth of the fictional Daniel which very well could have been in the mind of the real Carmelite friar: "We know that in every age it has been raw politics which has determined the direction of the life of the Church." For Daniel the politics of authority is the same in the church as it is in government or corporate life, namely an attempt to impose belief in the interests of authority itself. And he won't have it.

Doctrine, according to Daniel, is a political not a religious, and even less a spiritual, matter. Both historically and socially; doctrine is used to identify Us vs. Them and as test of social solidarity. Authority is that which defines the identity and supervises the test. What he encounters in the Church is qualitatively no different from his experience with Nazi and Communist military and civil authority.

What matters for Daniel, however, is not doctrine per se, or even its implications for behaviour towards others, but behaviour itself defined in terms of the Christ-mandated rule of charity. Ulitskaya puts the point in the mouth of his assistant: "I recognise that what you believe doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is how you personally behave…Daniel has placed that right in my heart." Ethics for Daniel cannot be derived from doctrinal belief, which is merely an expression of power and submission.

This is of course heresy, and Daniel recognises his position: "Today my views on many matters have diverged from those generally accepted in the Catholic world, and I am not the only person in that situation." But he turns the apparent heresy on its head: "Great faith, simplicity and boldness are to be found in [the] reluctance to acknowledge grandeur and power." If heresy it be, it is virtuous heresy which goes beyond the tentative virtue of Catherine.

The real heresy, which Daniel comprehends, is not to recognise the central message of Christ: the "expansion of love." To subjugate this message to the needs of authority is always and everywhere destructive to this message and therefore wrong. Daniel sweeps the entire Church into a position that would have given Catherine palpitations even though he is only paraphrasing St. Paul: "[Christ] did not hand down any new dogmas, and the novelty of his teaching is that he placed Love above the Law."

It is the failure to admit this real heresy that is the root of Christianity's problems - within itself and with the world - from its inception in Daniel's view: "The Church drove out and cursed the Jews and has paid for that by all its subsequent divisions and schisms." In Daniel's defence Ulitskaya provides a plethora of Christian, Jewish and Muslim examples of the true heresy of authority, its obvious ubiquity and its consequences in prejudice, intolerance, psychosis, and terrorism over the centuries.

Of course, Daniel is ultimately no match for the persistence of authority, which merely replicates itself within the 'everlasting' corporate structure of the Church. Authority marginalises him, and waits him out. His church is closed, his congregation scattered, his annoyance to the hierarchy of the Order and the bishops is all but forgotten. So: "[Daniel’s] specific mission had failed…working as a priest, praising Yeshua in his own language, preaching christianity with a small c, a personal religion of the mercy and love of God and of one’s neighbour, and not the religion of dogmas and authority, power and totalitarianism."

Paradoxically this has always been the real criterion of success for the message of Christ. His little Church on the slopes of Mount Carmel could only ever be temporary and unprotected against the world. One can mourn but only triumphantly, as Daniel's followers do: "Poor Christianity! It can be only poor. Any victorious Church…totally rejects Christ."

Daniel Stein addresses the heresy which Catherine would not: that authority is superior to individual conscience. Individual conscience is certainly not the basis for general mores. But neither is it any less authoritative than the consciences of those with rank and privilege. Any authority - the pope, the text, or a theologically-educated interpreter - when it attempts to impose belief is wrong.

This is the heresy that dare not speak its name within polite religious society. It is the heresy that is at the root of the decline in Christianity. It is the essential untruth rather than the fundamental virtue of any organisation putting itself forward as promoter of the message of Christ. It is Daniel Stein not Catherine of Siena who has practiced that virtue unequivocally.

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The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Richard Nixon in drag. How irresistible is that?

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The Provocateur by René-Victor Pilhes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Outstanding observation of modern business culture. As fresh as it was in the 70's.

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Bonjour Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay by Corinne Maier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Things you should know BEFORE you retire.

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Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Endless Adolescence

Meh. An amalgam of Harry Enfield (as Kevin the Teenager), Charles Anthony Bruno (Strangers on a Train), with a smackerol of Patrick Bateman (American Psycho). Praised in some quarters for its balance of philosophy and gritty dialogue, it's difficult to tell whether Whatever is really meant to be taken seriously...and, if so, as what. An angry, possibly psychotic 30ish IT nerd with an awkward adolescence has a breakdown and recovers...or perhaps he doesn't. It doesn't matter much either way. Maybe it's necessary to be French to get it.

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Riders in the Chariot 
by 

Patrick White

 

BlackOxford's review 

Apr 16, 2016  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: favourites, australian 

Don't die without reading. 

In order to tempt readers into Riders in the Chariot, I can think of no better strategy than simply sampling White's prose:

- ...the travesty of experience.

- ... they had been taught firmly to suppress, like wind in company, the rise of unreason in their minds.

- Reason finally holds a gun at its head - and does not always miss.

- Miss Hare continued, "I still have to discover. Perhaps somebody will tell me. And show me at the same time how to distinguish with certainty between good and evil."

- Happy are the men who are able to tread transtional paths, scarcely looking to left or to right and without distinguishing an end.

- ...faith is never faith unless it is to be wrestled with.

- To abandon self is, after all, to accept the course that offers.

- Everything has always happened before. Except to children.

- I would like to persuade you that the simple acts we have learnt to perform daily are the best protection against evil.

- ...he shuddered to realiuze that there could never be an end to the rescue of men from the rubble of their own ideas.

- Children and chairs conversed with him intimately.

White is witty, humorous, philosophical, and gently ironic in about equal measure. He constitutes an entire literary world on his own. An Australian national treasure.

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Humbled by the Word

The Master. What educated person could live without his factional fiction? Borges created a genre which itself is now a fact in Western culture. And that fact, inadequately but accurately put, is that words lie. They can lie beautifully and even beneficially, but they nevertheless lie. And we love them for it.

Words cannot reveal but oh how they direct one’s attention, often to opposing points of the compass. Words do not cut the world at its joints but separate off bits of reality arbitrarily with bloody and ragged edges that look different from every angle. Words then hide their duplicity behind a facade of neutrality and objectivity. Their beauty distracts us so we hardly notice the flesh behind the masque.

Words lurk. They wait patiently, sometimes over millennia, for the unwary reader, whom they invade without conscience. Every use of a word is a Trojan horse meant to surreptitiously further someone's agenda: to convince, to inform, to threaten, to attract, to mislead, to embarrass, but never merely to designate reality accurately or completely.

It is only when we think that we control words, when we think that we know with some certainty what they really, really mean, that they become dangerous. Speaking and writing words do not control them but spread them like a virus coughed into a crowd. Philosophers know that words speak people as much as that people speak words. Words, texts, essays, books, libraries are as controllable as an atomic explosion, and spread even more fallout.

So humility is the prime virtue of the writer who knows he is controlled by every word he uses. He revels publicly in his literal humiliation by the words he publishes. He tells the truth by letting us know he lies with his words. He humbles himself before his words in order to become their master. He is more clever than words because they don't know how to be humble. Their hubris is their vulnerability.

This is why Jorge Luis Borges may be the humblest writer ever to exist.

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Pope Francis Among the Wolves: The Inside Story of a Revolution by Marco Politi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Vatican Follies

Not quite a revolution but certainly a cabinet shuffle.

Political parties are banned within the Catholic Church. The prohibition, of course, doesn't stop politics nor the creation of organised factions to promote policy changes. But the politics and factional rivalry resemble that of a Stalinist or Maoist state. Rumour and innuendo, not press conferences, are the preferred modes of communication.

Another complicating factor in Vatican politics is that religious belief is not entirely separate from organisational policy. This is evident, for example, in issues like the status of divorced Catholics. Their admission to sacraments is in one sense their own business since only God and their consciences know their spiritual state.

But to leave matters to God and conscience is not something senior clerics are wont to do. For them wars may be a matter of the toleration of human weakness, and clerical sexual perversion may demand understanding and charity. But the possibility of losing control over the marital status of Church-members demands strict and unambiguous policies. Who's in and who's out is the most fundamental corporate power. Mostly, the policies at issue involve not the inseparability of partners but church-control over separability. Only the Church can join; so only the Church can separate. It's about power not grace.

Pope Francis is having a pretty hard time trying to convince his fellow Princes of the Church that their mission is the salvation of souls through example and virtue rather than the preservation of organisational power by position and fiat. He's more or less equivalent to Donald Trump at a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

His colleagues know they can wait him out. And if they lose the occasional skirmish, well there is nothing that can't be corrected in time. Most of these men are what are called in America 'strict constructionists.' That is to say, they believe that the interpretation which they put on scriptural and other historical documents are definitive. Why? Because they are convinced of it, they are men of faith.

So unlike Stalinist or Maoist politics, Francis cannot condemn or even criticise his political opponents. They in turn cannot be seen to undermine much less depose him of the papal office. So a sort of ballet in slow motion is taking place within the Vatican. It is a dance that may not mean much to or for the rest of us, but only because it has been going on for so many centuries that the institution of the Church has already destroyed its own credibility and moral authority.

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Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy & Scandal in the Rome of Galileo & Caravaggio 
by 

Karen Liebreich (Goodreads Author)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Apr 16, 2016  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: church 

Believing One's Own Press

Almost novelistically written, this is worthwhile both historically and as a tale of how institutions become corrupt, particularly those which claim to be spiritually immune from corruption. There is a saying in my family: "Big in front, Big in back." In other words, those who proclaim sanctity most strenuously are hiding something significant

Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis's Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican by Gianluigi Nuzzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pernicious Arrogance

Popes may come and go but the Curia is always with us. Gianluigi Nuzzi’s Merchants in the Temple exposes the inner workings of the Roman Curia, the archaic and self-serving core of Catholic organisation.

While the specifics of his research and conclusions are topical, his underlying message is generic and essentially timeless. There is little essential difference today from the conditions which Martin Luther criticised in the 16th century or for that matter Paul of Tarsus identified in the 1st century. The picture Nuzzi provides is not just that the Catholic Church is organisationally corrupt. It is unmanageably corrupt and persistently self-destructive.

In other words, there is no clear means through which the centuries of Gormenghast-like tradition and structure can be cut through or improved by anyone, even the pope, to reach some effectively functioning heart. The question therefore arises: what makes it so intractable to improvement? Is there something peculiar about the Catholic Church that prevents it from embodying the ideals it espouses? I think there is, a sort of self-inflicted Achilles heel of arrogant self-regard that is the impediment to any serious reform.

All organisations spawn similar ills: careerism, fraud, cultivated ignorance and incompetence, exploitation of the weak by the strong, among many others. Religious organisations generate an additional set of malicious effects like hypocrisy, self-righteous rationalisation, and self-serving promotional activities among them.

But the Catholic Church goes all other organisations one better when it comes to organisational dysfunction by making itself virtually immune to the recognition much less the correction of problems through its doctrinal conceit. Dogmatically the Catholic Church is self-defined as a societas perfecta, that is it is a community which has everything it needs to perform its function in the world, namely the salvation of souls.

The origin of this idea of the societas perfecta isn't biblical but classical: Aristotle used it to describe the polis or civil state of ancient Greece. It was applied to the Church in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas and promoted assiduously by 19th century popes who felt that the Church wasn't getting its due respect from the increasingly secular European states. In one papal encyclical of the period, the doctrine is stated thus:

It [the Catholic Church] is a perfect society of its own kind and in its own right, since it has everything necessary for its existence and its effectiveness in and of itself, in accordance with the will and power of the grace of its Founder. As the goal of the Church is more sublime, its power is always far superior, and it can therefore not be considered less than the Civil state, as to not be in a state of subordination to such a state.

Although the idea of the societas perfecta has been soft-pedalled since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's, it is still on the books, as it were, in both formal pronouncements and in the fundamental attitudes of those who run the organisation, the pope, the bishops, the clerics, and many of the lay folk who work within it.

The effect of the doctrine is pernicious in at least two ways. First, if the Church has all it needs to perform its salvific function, one might enquire what it is precisely that are the necessary and sufficient organisational characteristics the doctrine is referring to. However, such an enquiry would be vain. The response of the Church is effectively: Well, what's there already, what you see is what is necessary and sufficient.

What everything? Rituals? Structures of authority? Historical decisions? Yes, everything. Of course there may be the odd bad apple priest-paedophile or the occasional dissolute pope, or even whole portions of the organisation that collectively make serious mistakes morally and doctrinally. But these things are the equivalent of pilot-error and have nothing to do with the air-worthiness of the great Zeppelin of the Christian enterprise.

In other words, what is essential in the Church can't be distinguished from what is in the Church - the ultimate in Whig history. The doctrine of societas perfecta implies, therefore, an extreme hyper-conservatism lest some necessary baby get thrown out with the dirty, smelly bathwater accumulated over centuries. Unlike any theory of civil society, there is no earthly sovereignty of 'the people', or any other regulator, to keep excess in check or periodically throw the bastards out.

The second problem with the doctrine is that it inhibits any external pressure toward self-reform within the Church. There is essentially a single telephone line from the top of the Church direct to the divine, a line which no one has yet to hack or tap.

The point of the encyclical Immortale Dei quoted above is to put civil authority in their place; it is outside and subordinate to the realm of the Church. The encyclical is an institutional 'Bugger Off' to anyone external to the Church who has the temerity to criticise any aspect of the Church's organisation.

When the US bishops complain, as they frequently have done in recent years, that the government of the United States is being anti-Catholic, what they mean is that legislation has been passed which in some way touches on their ecclesial authority. And they don't like it of course, just as the executives of General Motors or Goldman Sachs or California Power and Gas don't like regulation which limits dangerous design, financial scams and consumer gouging. The difference of course is that none of these other organisations have such a well-developed theory of immunity from prosecution for their harmful effects on the world.

There is another doctrine of the Church that proclaims that it is a mystery. That is certainly the case when it comes to fixing the things that are wrong in it, from sexual abuse, to the oppression of women, to the insanity of its sexual doctrines. But there is far less mystery about the source of many of these problems and the inability to address them effectively over centuries. The organisational hubris expressed in the abiding doctrine of societas perfecta and embodied in unaccountable structures of ecclesiastical power like the Roman Curia are where reform has to take place.

There is only one thing I take issue with in the book: its title. Its vaguely anti-Semitic character is probably unintended by the author. Nonetheless it is a typical example of the off-hand deniable slur against Judaism that has passed into general culture. A bit like adopting black-face in vaudeville. It should really stop.

30Aug2018: The show never stops: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/wo...

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Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Continuity as Illusion


I question whether even the Chinese understand China. Perhaps because if they did the result might be mass suicide.

Much better, like the Catholic Church, to re-shape the meaning of words to the needs of the day while keeping the form constant. A sort of rationality can thus be maintained within the most irrational of situations. Then again, perhaps that is exactly what they’re up to: ‘The corrupt pope I’d dead, let us make him a saint.’

Deng's practical repudiation of the Maoism that almost killed him while maintaining the forms of Maoist 'thought' is the theme of this breath-taking political biography. Among other reasons for reading it is that none of the Chinese literature of the last 30 years is comprehensible without it.

Could it be that the Communist Party of China, indeed the entire Chinese political system, is merely an enormous irony enacted for the edification of unknowledgeable foreigners who believe that there must really be some underlying logic to Chinese society? Its purpose then would be to keep us busy (or entertained) by expressions that mean precisely the opposite of their literal translations. Either that or they really are mad.

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