To The Lighthouse

I have to confess that I have been afraid of Virginia Woolf. I have put off re-reading her for a long time now as I feared getting bogged down in stream of consciousness and never getting through it, kind of like Ulysses. But after listening to the first half of the book, to the point where Mrs. Ramsey begins to climb the stairs after the dinner party, casting her glance back down upon the dining room, knowing that it is the past and behind her, I wondered if perhaps it is the greatest novel of all time.

Woolf does such a marvelous job of capturing our minds, moving easily from one character to another, and does it in complete, understandable sentences. Even though the whole tradition of dressing and preparing for a formal dinner every night is such a foreign concept to me, I feel like Woolf has essentially captured the way we think, moving from thought to impression to feeling, quickly and easily, maintaining ironic distance to the events for each of the characters. Mrs. Ramsey is certainly the center of the universe, and it is she that pulls everything together as the psychic center of the novel, but even she has such an ironic distance to her role that it shadows every thing else in the book.

The second half of the book doesn't work quite so well for me, but with Mrs. Ramsey gone, perhaps that's as it should be. The book does come to a satisfying conclusion as Ramsey, Cam and James finally do reach the lighthouse--with all the wonderful symbolism of the sea and the light--as Lily Briscoe finishes the last stroke of her painting: "There, I've had my vision." Perhaps it's all about life persevering in spite of it all, the resurgence of all those feelings and ideas over a span of so many years, like re-infusing the house with life to ward off the eventual decay and destruction that beset it during years of neglect and absence. And yet, "No happiness lasts" is Mrs. Ramsey's verdict. In any case, the book is a tour de force that demands and will reward rereading and reflection.

Author: Woolf, Virginia

Date Published: 1927

Length: 7hr 45min

Narrator: Leishman, Virginia

Freedom for the Thought that We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment

Billed as a biography of the first amendment, the book is really a riff on some of the major themes and cases that have defined freedom of speech. Surprising that the first amendment wasn't really enshrined in American jurisprudence as we know it until the mid 20th century and later.

The first amendment had not been the absolute guarantor of free speech until the supreme court began definite it so, especially under justices Holmes, Brandeis, Frankfurt, Black. It was Homes who formulated the "clear and present danger" clause that has blocked so much espionage and sedition legislation and who also formulated the phrase "freedom for the though we hate." It has been judicial activism--coupled with the 14th amendment--that has enshrined the First Amendment, especially in cases like Near vs. Minnesota in 1927 and NY Times vs. Sullivan in 1964 that defined the standards of libel and public figure.

But Lewis is not an absolutist for the first amendment. In particular, he believes in limits when free speech impinges on the right to privacy for non public figures, and in some cases of protecting a report's sources when national security and clear public interest in involved, especially in present days when so many people claim to be journalists for electronic publications. "For one thing, it is plainly wrong to quote anonymous sources in pejorative comments on individuals." Lewis also has trouble with the supreme court's decisions on campaign finance, using the first amendment as a way of allowing unlimited campaign contributions that have made elections so expensive.

Author: Lewis, Anthony

Date Published: 2007

Length: 5hr 49min

Narrator: Lovejoy, Stow

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

I was surprised that I liked this book as much as I did. It is a good story that is all the more surprising to find out that it is nonfiction, although Berendt did take a lot of liberties in the storyline and the timeline. Lady Chablis, of course, steals the story, much more so than Jim Williams and the murder of Danny Hansford. It's really about a lot of unforgettable characters that populate Savannah that makes the book interesting. Most people read the book after seeing the movie. I'd like to see the movie after reading the book. And, no, I don't have much desire to visit Savannah.

Author: Berendt, John

Date Published: 1997

Length: 15hr 4min

Narrator: Woodman, Jeff

Zorba the Greek

This book had the most visceral impact on me of anything I had read when I first encountered it 40 years ago. When I finished it, I sat up in bed crying all night, certain that I would soon be dead. Fred Streng called it Makyo--illusions--and told me to forget about it. And yet I lived with the conviction that I would soon be dead for quite some time. 

I wanted to live the siren call to life of Zorba--or was it the movie or was it the album? Hard to say now. It still reads like the call to live the essential life unfettered by mind, by convention, by reason. But there is no glorification of the common man or of any innate goodness in man--the Cretans make short shrift of that argument. 

The book is not really about Zorba. It is about Boss. It's about his struggles to escape the bookish life and to be free in his own mind. He sets up Zorba and the Buddha as diametrically opposed forces, seeking to exorcize the Buddha while emulating Zorba. Zorba is certainly no saint--he has killed, he has robbed, he has lied, he has cheated. He has just taken on life as it has come at him. But he is presented as the epitome of freedom, free to do as he chooses when he chooses. It just takes a bit of madness, a lot of courage, a willingness to pursue an action whatever the cost, the damages, the difficulties, to be consumed by the passions of the life. Zorba was consumed in the moment, whether making love to Bouboulina, or shoring up the walls of the shaft, or rigging up the cable system, playing the santouri, dancing on the beach, or locked in mortal combat with Manolakas. The boss does feel freed from the constraints of his life, even as he leaves Zorba.

So do we live the vitalist life--open to passions and desires and dangers--this was the climbing life for me--or do we seek detachment and use mindfulness to escape the illusions and being caught up in the world, subject to the rages and the fears and the loneliness and depression of being alive? I'm afraid that Zorba did not speak to me this time like he did when I was 20 years old. And it's a huge loss for me. I've settled into old age and mediocrity, sliding into death and afraid of dying a bitter old man.

Author: Kazantzakis, Nikos

Date Published: 1946

Length: 320 pp

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The Plague

Has Camus become such an integral part of my thinking that his thought seems obvious? Man lives in an absurd universe. Bryson makes that clear in Short History. Shit happens for which we are not prepared to deal. Look at the real statistics on the plague--the black death--and look at the dislocations to the society and the economy when it struck.

Of course, Camus is dealing with individual response and reaction--individual consciousness. Isolation, alienation, and death are man's fate. But once you've said that, so what? I was kind of plodding along with the mediocrity of people's lives and the seeming mediocrity of the book--great ideas wrapped in mediocre literature. We are all reduced to the level of the bean counter, and we just dress up the details of life to get through the day.

But that's not true, either, when we come to the death of Othon's son and the vivid portrayal of his agony and death and the inability of any of the characters to do anything about it. This leads to the confrontation between Panelou and Rieux, the priest and the doctor. Panelou gives a sermon that accepted the child's death as a part of God's plan, and Rieux refused to accept it, even though he was powerless to stop it. This leads to the rooftop confession by Tarrou to Rieux: "each of us has the plague within him…we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we…fasten the infection on [someone else]. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest--health, integrity, purity--is the product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter…some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death." And then, of course, Tarrou dies.

Or maybe we are all like Grand, who tries incessantly to get one sentence right. Everything else, he feels, will fall together if he just gets the cadence and the imagery right with the once sentence, based on the unreal expectation of how people will react to it. So is what he does any different from the asthmatic bean counter? And is what Rieux does any different from them? Camus keeps playing exile as a major theme--exile from each other, from ourselves, from an indifferent universe.

Author: Camus, Albert

Date Published: 1947

Length: 10hr 53min

Narrator: Jenner, James