Description of the World - Part 67

Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (The past is always with us, but it isn’t the same past. I’m still waiting for the publication of The Greeks: Who the Hell Were They? because it’s been a long time since I’ve had any confidence in my ability to distinguish my own blurry view of antiquity from the images in the hall of mirrors. The Greeks themselves began the process of idealizing their own reality in Hellenistic times by selection and editing, and the work of definition and redefinition has proceeded ever since. There’s a heavy element of recursion at work in this process since we not only have a changing view of the Greeks but a changing view of the various takes that have been taken of the Greeks before us and even some appreciation of the effects of becoming aware of the history of the interpretations. Maybe each layer of reflection is only 1/137 as important as the one before—I don’t know if there’s such a thing as the fine structure constant in hermeneutics—but the summed result is an enormous, baroquely complicated object of thought.

Francis L. Wellman, The Art of Cross-Examination, Fourth Edition (I don’t know if I’ve every used the methods suggested in this eminently practical book, but some of the quoted transcripts are memorable. Thing is, though, I found myself sympathizing with the witnesses caught up by the cleverness of the lawyers that crossed ‘em like the paranoid at a commitment hearing who was jollied along for a couple of hours until he was disarmed into simply admitting, “Yes, I am the Christ.” The downfall of Oscar Wilde comes across rather differently now than it must have when Wellman commented on it. Well, I’m guessing that whether you root for the prosectors or defendants on Law and Order rerurns reveals a great deal about a person.)

Interlinear Greek-English New Testament, ed. George Berry (The volume is out of place. I moved it from the other room a couple of weeks ago to check my memory on how the Bible winds up. I had thought that the last verse of Revelation was “Verily, come quickly lord Jesus.” Close but not quite. It’s the next to last verse that testifies (literally) to the impatience of the believers for the end of the world and the language is a bit more indirect than I remembered: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” To be fair (or merely accurate), the fact that the Bible concludes with an apocalypse doesn’t mean that Christians always obsessed about end things. Much as the Jews were always nervous about Ezekiel, the Christians, especially the establishment ones, tended to soft-peddle the Revelation of St. John because eschatology is politically dangerous. As Nietzsche knew, religions tend to moderate the craziness that gave them birth, as per the self-sealing radiator theory of the sociology of religion. Unfortunately, religions are as likely to neutralize what was good as what was bad in their origins. The Zen Buddhists say “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him” The Christians didn’t waste any time when they met their founder on the road.)

Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Intellect and Pride (This is the first section of the author’s much longer book on France. I read the long version again last year. Oddly, I don’t think I ever got through this excerpt, which I must have acquired in the late 70s. It’s a damning inditement of my character that I find it easier to slog through two fat volumes than to read a shorter work.)

Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor(Prange was an obsessive researcher who piled up the materials for this definitive work on the outbreak of war for something like 35 years but never got around to finishing it. Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon finalized the book. Prange served as MacArthur’s house historian during the first several years of the occupation of Japan so he had access to huge amounts of information. As with any historical event, there are plenty of things we don’t know about what happened. There aren’t any grand or nefarious mysteries, however. Nevertheless, 700 (or 7,000) pages of documentation won’t convince conspiracy mongers from insisting that FDR let the whole disaster take place as part of his plan to get us in the war. Long before I read Prange, I wondered how anybody could believe that the government wanted half the fleet sunk. After all, a failed surprise attack on Hawaii would have gotten us into the war just as surely as a successful one. That argument didn’t work on my mother, who was sure that Roosevelt and Churchill planned the whole thing.)

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle (Long before Hunter Thompson, Carlyle pioneered a style of prose that leaves you out of breath even if you read it silently. Of course this work is especially dash ridden, even for Carlyle, at least in part because the version we have is actually a rewritten work, a long book reconstructed after the original manuscript was accidentally burned up by John Steward Mill’s valet. Some of the mannerisms also hark back to a German writer almost unknown among English speaking people, Jean Paul Richter. A random sample that can stand for many others: “It is the baptism day of Democracy; sick Time has given it birth, the numbered months being run. The extreme-unction day of Feudalism! A superannuated System of Society, decrepit with toils (for has it not done much; produced you, and what ye have and know!)—and with thefts and brawls, named glorious-victories; and with profligacies, sensualities, and on the whole with dotage and senility,—is now to die; and so, with death-throes and birth-throes, a new one is to be born. What a work, O Earth and Heavens, what a work! Battles and bloodshed, September Massacres, Bridges of Lodi, retreats of Moscow, Waterloos, Peterloo, Tenpound Franchises, Tarbarrels and Guillotines;—and from this present date, if one might prophesy, some two centuries of it still to fight! Two centuries; hardly less; before Democracy go through its due, most baleful stages of Quackocracy; and a pestilential World be burnt up, and have to grow green and young again.”  For the record, the day Carlyle describes wasn’t the Fall of the Bastille or even the Tennis Court oath but simply May 4th, 1789, the ceremonial opening of the Estates General. Excitable kid.)