To a Mountain in Tibet

The most telling moment in Colin Thubron's To A Mountain in Tibet comes just before he reaches the summit of Drolma pass while making the kora or circumnavigation of Mount Kailasa. At 18,000 feet, he is struggling with each step to reach the high point of his journey, and pilgrims come zipping past him in their quest for redemption. This is the month of Saga Dawa, when Tibetan Buddhists and Indian Hindus come to the mountain to "dispel the defilement of a lifetime." For Hindus, Mount Kailas is the home of Shiva, the dancing god of ceaseless change and destruction, while for Buddhists, Mount Kailas is "the mystic Mount Meru," the axis-mundi, the center of the universe, inhabited by numerous buddhas and bodhisattvas. For Tibetans it is also the center of the old kingdom of Zhang Zhung, where Tibetan kings descended from the sky and where Padmasambhava ousted the ancient Bon worship and established the domination of Buddhism in Tibet.

As the pilgrims hurry past Thubron, "They look unquenchably happy...what they are seeing, I cannot tell...Buddhist lore claims that if the eyes are purified, the land transforms." Yet so little of this happiness or this transformation comes through in Thubron's description of his trip. He spends days trekking to the mountain, describing, sometimes in exquisite detail, the land, the people, the temples and shrines that he passes, and everything seems bleak and depressing. Now on the high point, both literally and figuratively, of the kora, the final image of his journey is neither joy nor remdemption, not even accomplishment, but depression: "a shadowy melancholy descends: the bewilderment when something long awaited has gone."

Of course, that feeling that something long awaited or cherished has vanished is the essence of Buddhism. The central tenet, the first of the Fourfold Noble Truths is the truth of suffering--dukkha. All existence is empty and impermanent (anatta and anicca), and suffering arises when we try to hold on to the past or even the present. There is no there there, and suffering arises when we try to grasp what is not there. Thubron perceives this, I think, although he doesn't mention it explicitly. Much of it arises when he thinks of his recently deceased mother, or his long-dead father and sister, knowing that they live only in his grief and his memories: "You cannot walk out your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are."

Thubron chooses not only to make the kora, the 34 mile circumnavigation of Mount Kailas but to spend ten days trekking along the Karnali River to get to the mountain. Along the way, he describes the poverty and the hopelessness of the lives he passes through: "And what happens to the villages?...they become the ghetto of the unenterprising, the sick, the old." But this deterioration of village life is nothing compared with the devastation of Tibetan culture by the Chinese. "In a land maimed since 1950 by Chinese occupation, by mass killings and displacement, the Cultural Revolution, with its wholesale destruction of things old, struck at Tibet's heart." He stops at the shrines and the temples on his journey, describing the monks, the statues, the deities in a confusing welter of details where Hindu, Bon, and Buddhist stories compete for attention. It is a cold and dismal place full of alien beings in an alien culture. It is a world pervaded by chortens and prayer flags and trash--and death.

"Perhaps, as some say, the Tibetans' is a death-haunted culture. Certainly their death cults haunts others." At one point Thubron visits a durtro on the side of Mount Kailas where Tibetans take the bodies of their dead to be hacked into small pieces and left for the vultures. It is also a place where some Tibetans go to lie among the remnants of the dead and enact their own passing. Thubron is sickened by the site and rushes away: "Only a belief in reincarnation might alleviate this bleak dismay. Without it, the once-incarnate dead become uniquely precious, and break the heart." Even at the top of Drolma pass, Tubron finds another cemetery not for physical corpses but pieces of memory of the dead. "This cemetery, for all its squalid aspect, is for many the heart of their kora."

This is also where Thubron finds the contradiction inherent in Buddhism, for "the Buddhist living cannot help the deceased, whose souls do not exist...nothing cherished or even recognizable endures...nothing of the individual survives." That becomes the lesson that Thubron finds so hard to bear: "From all that he loves, a man must part." Thubron has ben lugging the memory of his mother, his father, his sister up and around the mountain with him, but what he really mourns is the loss of himself. It's not only regret for lost chances and all that he has not become but also for what has been and will never come again. Not just the life unfulfilled but the life fulfilled as well. It's all gone now. All that is left is "pure loss: the loss that mourns the tang of all human difference, of a herdman's impromptu song, perhaps, the lilt of a laugh in Grindelwald, or the fingers that caress a favourite dog." It is the universal feeling of a life that has come and gone, forever, never to return. That is the lesson of the Buddha, and it is a bitter, bitter pill to swallow.

Author: Thurbron, Colin

Date Published: 2011

Length: 227 pp.

electronic print

Empire of the Summer Moon

The whole concept of a homeland is total bullshit. I don't care if it's the Nordic race, the Jewish people, the Serbs of eastern Europe, the Hispanic southwest, or the Comanches of the Comancheria, from the staked plains of New Mexico to the Arkansas River. It was also taken from someone else a bit earlier. Towards the end of S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon, Quannah Parker is asked how the Comanches came to lose their "ancestral homeland." He responds by steadily pushing his questioner down the log that they are sitting on until that person falls off the log. That's how, he says. Yet that's how the Comanches themselves came to be the "Lords of the South Plains." They came down out of Wyoming sometime between 1625 and 1750, breaking off from the main Shoshoni tribe, and pushed the Apache and all other tribes off the southern plains until they had it all to themselves.

The Comanche were an ugly people, not only or even primarily physically ugly--"short, dark-skinned, heavy-limbed, squat-legged and ungraceful"--but culturally and spiritually ugly as well. Gwynne describes them as the most primitive of the primitive. Prior to their emergence on the south plains, they were culturally impoverished and pushed into marginal living conditions by the more powerful tribes of the northern plains. But then they became the baddest bad-ass motherfuckers on the block. Gwynne ties this transformation back to Pope's rebellion in 1680 when the Spanish hightailed it back to Mexico, leaving most of their horse herds behind. Somehow the Comanche developed the skill and the culture to become better horse warriors that anyone else. "Few nations have ever progressed with such breath-taking speed from sulking pariah to dominant power."

The Comanche became so powerful that they chased the Apache off the plains and out of Texas. They kept the Mexicans from expanding further from the Rio Grande River, and they kept the Tejanos from venturing east of what is now Interstate 35 from San Antonio to Dallas. Even that was risky, as the Parker clan found out when they tried to homestead over 10,000 acres on "the absolute outermost edge of the Indian frontier." They were soon raided--in 1836--by a Comanche party that left five men dead and five women and children captured. One of the kidnapped girls was Cynthia Ann Parker who was adopted into the tribe, became the wife of the powerful leader Peta Nacona, and gave birth to Quannah Parker, the last of the great Comanche leaders.

The Comanche were a warlike and vicious people who employed brutal tactics against their victims. Anyone who has read the Lonesome Dove saga, especially Dead Man's Walk or Comanche Moon, knows the detail: torture, rape, murder, mayhem. It worked. The Comanche stopped western expansion in Texas until a new technology changed the balance of power, again. With repeating revolvers and eventually repeating rifles, first the Texas Rangers (under John Coffee Hays) and later, after the Civil War, the U. S. Cavalry (under Ranald Mackenzie and Nelson Miles) learned to take the fight to the Comanche. More importantly, the annihilation of the southern buffalo herds starved the remaining Comanche into submission.

Empire of the Summer Moon is a sordid tale. The savagery of the Comanche was matched on numerous occasions by the anglo culture determined to wrest the land away. It was in retaliation to the Council House treachery in 1840, when 25 Comanche leaders were killed and another 30 taken hostage (later to be killed) in San Antonio under the pretence of peace negotiations that Buffalo Hump led his famous raid through the heart of Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, vividly described in Comanche Moon. In any case, after the Civil War, the Comanches had a few tricks left, such as Quannah's eluding Mackenzie's forces in the Palo Duro with his whole village, but it only became a matter of time until the remaining Comanche were competing for space in Oklahoma with the other tribes that had been removed there. And the whites eventually took most of that land as well. How soon will it be until another people arise and dispossess the culture that claims the land now? Really, it is only a matter of time.

Author: Gwynne, S. C.

Date Published: 2010

Length: 15h 4m

Narrator: Drummond, David

Buffalo Girls

This was another interesting listen to a book that I first read years ago. It was probably among the first four or five McMurtry books that I did read, and I recall not liking it very much. Yet this time the book turned out quite differently from what I remembered and it had some interesting moments and turns that made it quite a bit more enjoyable.

The narrative structure of the book alternates between Calamity Jane's letters to her daughter and various episodes told from different characters' points of view. McMurtry brings in a host of historical figures that lend creedence to the events: Calamity, of course, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickock, Sitting Bull, and Teddy Blue. Other characters may be drawn from real life, but if so, they are not as well known: Dora, Bartles, Jim Ragg, No Ears, Potato Creek Johnny, Doosie. All of them were characters who had escaped out west, but their time had come and gone while they were still alive, so a kind of wistfulness pervades the book as the way of the beaver trapper, the gold prospector, the indian fighter, the indian warriors, the cowboys, and the madame lose meaning. They must adapt to the new west, and most are not very successful. Calamity becomes a drunk, Jim Ragg becomes enamored of the only beaver he can find--at the London zoo, No Ears finds that his knowledge is no longer wanted by the younger members of his tribe, Teddy Blue gives up driving cattle and takes up running a ranch. Only Buffalo Bill seems to thrive as he takes the Wild West Show on the road, parading as entertainment what had been the substance of their lives.

In the end, the book belongs to Calamity, and the final letters to her daughter provide a surprise ending and a final poignancy to the story, underlying much of the bleakness and hopelessness running through the book.

Author: McMurtry, Larry

Date Published: 1990

Length: 9hr 53min

Buckley, Betty

Defenders of the Faith: Christianity and Islam Battle for the Soul of Europe, 1520-1536

Billed as a showdown over eastern Europe between Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire and Suleyman the Magnificent of the Ottoman empire, the leaders of the two great superpowers of the late Renaissance age, "Defenders of the Faith" is about so much more, with personalities, intrigues, and events passing by quickly enough to pull together themes and ideas that may not have been so apparent to me in my previous reading on the Reformation. The gist of the story is this: the Protestant Reformation was able to get off the ground because Charles needed the support of the German princes to face the threat of the Ottoman Turks, who were threatening to establish a hegemony over eastern Europe. "Had Suleyman prevailed at Vienna, as odds suggest he should have, Europe would have been Islamic to the Rhine River in the early sixteenth century."

Three main themes permeate the book: the growth and spread of Martin Luther's heresy in the northern German states, the ongoing conflict between Charles V and Francis I (of France) over control of Milan and other Italian city-states (with the Papal states caught in-between), and the evolving threat of the Muslim empire in the east. But as with any Reston history, it is the personalities of the various players that drive the story. Charles is caught between trying to honor both his pledge to defend the faith as well as guarantee the rights of the German princes who elected him; Frances I diverts his attention from chasing skirts long enough to assert his rights over Milan and find himself captured in battle; Henry VIII of England first defends the church against Martin Luther but later breaks from that church so he can bed Ann Boleyn; three different popes--Leo X, Adrian I, and Clement VI--vacillate between Frances and Charles in seeking to keep the Papal states intact while simultaneously opposing Luther and trying to rally the different nationalities to recognize the Islamic threat; Ibrahim Pasha, Suleyman's right hand man, develops a monstrous ego claiming personal responsibility for the Turks steamrolling through Hungary and the Balkan states; and his boss, Suleyman, must contend with the battles between his primary wives--he had over 40--while leading major campaigns in Egypt, Hungary, Rhodes, Persia, and Austria. And behind all of them is the beer-swilling, hot-headed monk, Martin Luther, telling the popes and Charles and anyone who questions him to kiss his ass.

Luther went head to head with a number of papal legates and theologians leading to the Diet of Worms in 1521, which condemned both Luther and his teachings. By all rights he should have been incarcerated and incinerated. But Charles honored the right of safe-conduct to and from the Diet that he had given to Luther, even though he was advised to follow the example from a hundred years earlier when Jan Hus was grabbed and burned under similar circumstances. The German princes, divided as they were over Luther's message, either refused to enforce the edict, or felt powerless to do so, fearing to set the whole region in warfare.

When Charles tried to force his will in 1529, the northern princes united in opposition to the imperial decree. This led to the declaration of Protestation, and the Reformation was born. Charles issued an ultimatum to these princes two years later, but he had to back down when it became apparent that he would need their help in facing Suleyman.

After the Diet of Worms, Charles was also preoccupied by the machinations of the poes and Francis over control of Lombardy and Milan. A series of battles eventually led to Francis' defeat and capture at Pavia in1525, "the last battle for heroic chivalry and the first battle of modern warfare."  Francis then lied through his teeth to gain release, and Charles challenged him to hand to hand combat in a bit of street theater that amused European courts. Charles then discovered Clement VII conspiring with Francis to free northern Italy, and he unwittingly unloosed the dogs of war on Rome in the infamous "Sack of Rome" in 1527. "The glorious Renaissance of Italy was coming to an end. The great age of Italian history was dying in a bathos of collective guilt, an acceptance of divine punishment, and self flagellation, a desperate need for healing, and a longing for order."

By that time, Henry had grown tired of his queen, Catherine (who was also the aunt of Charles V), and had become hot for Ann Boleyn. While Henry's toadie, Wolsey, sought to ease the way for Henry's lust, Charles put the screws on Clement to refuse Henry's demand for a divorce. Henry retaliated by defending his right to screw whom he pleased, and confiscated all church land in England to begin his own religion.

But this only begins to tell half the story. Suleyman captures Rhodes with the loss of tens of thousands men versus 120 Knights of Rhodes, devastates the "flower of Hungarian nobility" at Mohacs, and misses capturing Vienna in 1529 only because his artillery is bogged in the mud of the Balkan plains. A return visit to Vienna in 1532 set the stage for "a contest for the mastery of the world." The Turkish invasion stalled out on a diversionary assault on the castle at Guns, however, and the final apocalyptic battle never materialized. Suleyman turned his attention to the Shiite heresy in Baghdad, and Charles sought to reunite his empire under one religion. It was too late to eradicate Protestantism, however, and even a decisive victory over the Protestant forces in 1547 led to the legalization of Lutheranism two years later. Suleyman likewise failed to erase Shiism, and we see the results today in Iran and Iraq.

This was the third book of Reston to look at the European--Islamic conflict through the lens of seemingly distant events: the Crusades, the expulsion of the Moors in Spain, and the battle over Vienna. Of course that conflict is far from being over as the rhetoric of 9/11 and the Madrid bombings remind us. Reston does a nice job of focusing on personalities and motivations, which means that he brings a lot of imagination to sparse evidence. It might not make for totally factual history, but it does make for a good read.

Author: Reston, James
Date Published: 2009
Length: 448 pp
electronic print

Augustus, Rome's First Emperor

This was a well written book that tried to keep me interested in Augustus Caesar. Since most of the source material for his life comes from his own spin doctors, it's not given to introspection or internal motivation. But Everitt does a pretty god job of bringing out what tensions he can find in the story and tells a pretty good tale.

It was actually pretty surprising that Octavian--his name before becoming emperor--became the big winner in the Roman political sweepstakes. Given his childhood status as an adopted son after the death of his biological father, his rise to power is pretty improbable. His surprise adoption by Julius Caesar gave him the wealth and the clients needed to make his political chops, and many of his opponents accused him of being Julius' boy toy while in Spain, a charge which Everitt thinks is overblown. Since that inheritance from Julius was made public only after the ides of March, Mark Anthony should have kicked his ass right then. But he was somehow able to out maneuver Anthony in the following years and eventually win all the marbles for himself. He really owes much of his success to his boyhood friends, Agrippa and Maecenas. Agrippa saved his ass more than once on the battlefield as Octavian really had no stomach for war, and Maecenas  was the Karl Rove of his day, pulling together political support and making the backroom deals that gave Octavian the power to triumph over Anthony. Anthony didn't help his own cause by dallying with Cleopatra, giving Octavian the opening he needed for a fairly major smear campaign.

Later, much of Augustus' advice came from the political infighting of his own family. By then, the Roman republic was finished as the senate had pretty much ceded all practical power to him, and he stepped into the role as the first Roman emperor pretty easily. Being in Augustus' family was no easy role, however. He shipped both his daughter and then a granddaughter off to remote islands when their behavior did not comport with the political image he wished to convey. Likewise, he probably had his grandson strangled as one of his final acts before going off to his villa to die. He could be one cold hearted bastard. He became preoccupied with his succession and the power struggles that would follow his death, especially after two other grandsons, who he had been grooming to take his place, suddenly and unexpectedly died.

Of course, the upshot over his preoccupation with the dynastic succession was that while the empire lasted another 1400 years, the role of the emperor wasn't nearly what Augustus hoped for. Tiberius took over under duress when Augustus died--after Augustus forced him to divorce his first wife to marry one of Augustus' daughters--but he left the throne to Caligula, and things went downhill quickly, leading to the rise of the praetorian guards holding power over the emperors. They appointed Claudius, who was poisoned by his wife, so that her son Nero could take over, leading to a series of civil wars lasting through the end of the first century. But the empire itself had been put on a firm administrative basis that allowed it to survive until 1453, albeit contracted around Constantinople after 325.

Author: Everitt, Anthony

Date Published: 2006

Length: 15 hr 37 min

Narrator: Curless, John

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us." Alain de Botton

Lucretius has been on my mind a lot in the past few days since I finished reading "The Swerve." Mind you, I haven't read a word of "The Nature of Things" outside of the quotations in the book, but clearly, he has had a fairly significant impact on my thought. I guess that's because death has been on my mind a lot for the past few weeks. I've just kind of developed the, what, feeling?, attitude?, premonition?, that I'm not going to live much longer. And here comes Lucretius, saying, in effect, "What, me worry? We're all going to get the chop some day and it will be sooner rather than later for some of us, and that's just the nature of things." Or as Goldblatt puts it, "Death is nothing to us. To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed."

So really, he nails it completely. Is that spot on your face cancerous? Is that rattling in your lungs another clot forming? Is the fact that your piss barely dribbles out a sign of prostate cancer or bladder failure? Is some drunk roughneck not gonna see you in time on the side of the highway and take you out? Is it today, tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade? Whatever. Don't get hung up on it. Enjoy the wonder and the weirdness of it, from that fact that anything exists. to our own consciousness of existence and of ourselves. I mean, it is all too weird and incomprehensible that I'm here, sitting in this chair, writing down thoughts about Lucretius and anxiety over death.

And especially weird that a book comes along taking on the issues that I've been pondering for some time, but in a format of historical nonfiction about a "book finder"--Poggio Bracciolini-- who rediscovered Lucretius' poem "The Nature of Things" in a southern German monastery about 1500 years after it had been written. The way that Goldblatt tells the story, it's really improbable that the poem came to light at all, and yet it has made all the difference to the history of western thought since it began to recirculate in humanist circles. To tell that story, Goldblatt covers the development of literate culture in late republican Rome, the demise of literacy in Europe in the aftermath of the Gothic wars and the "decline of the Roman empire," the "revaluation of all values" as both learning and pleasure were both radically devalued by Christianity, the monastic culture that kept reading alive for its spiritual benefit but that paradoxically kept some of the texts of the ancient literate culture that diametrically opposed the values of the monastery.

To make the story even more intriguing is Poggio's role in the debacle of the Papal schism. It makes a grand narrative built around Poggio's discovery of the manuscript shortly after he lost his job and his livelihood as the secretary to Pope John XXII, who was forced to abdicate, along with two other claimants to the Papacy, by the council called by the Holy Roman Emperor. This was the same council that captured and burned Jan Hus at the stake after luring him with promises of safe conduct. (And it was the memory of this betrayal that forced Charles V to allow Martin Luther to leave the Diet of Worms unharmed a little over a hundred years later, a move which Charles later greatly regretted.)

In the midst of this ecclesiastical maneuvering, Poggio discovers the text of a 1500 year old poem that is totally secular. How did it make it through the years of neglect, being recopied again and again--for that is what it took to have lasted that long--when its message was totally antithetical to what the church, the monasteries, and the monks believed? The copyists must have not read the texts that they so painstakingly reproduced.

"There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design," is how Goldblatt summarizes Lucretius' message. Lucretius traces his views back to Epicurus, who in turn looks back to Democritus' atoms as the stuff of all the universe. "You needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything....That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat it to yourself the simplest fact of existence--atoms and void and nothing else...your life will change." Everything that is is just a temporary recombination of atoms, and that's all there is. There is no immaterial soul that survives the body, there is no afterlife with rewards and punishments. And so, the only thing left to us, then, is to enjoy it while we've got it, 'cause it ain't gonna last very long. For Epicurus and Lucretius, it was in physical pleasure, but also, or even mainly, in friendships and contemplation that life finds its highest meaning. 

The life of simple pleasures was all that matter: "Man's natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more." So think: Epicurus--and then think Henry David Thoreau? More weirdness? It turns out that the church naturally did a hatchet job on Epicurus as well as Lucretius, the idea that epicurean means nothing more than overwrought sensual pleasure and debauchery. As Tertullian--he who would enjoy watching the souls of the unsaved burning in hell, even though he also said, "Credo quia absurdum," I believe because it is absurd--said, "If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul is mortal....the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels." So morality depends on rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

But then I guess Thomas More and Machiavelli thought so as well. Goldblatt writes that More composed Utopia in response to Lucretius to show what a society could look life if it adopted a free-thinking philosophy devoted to the pursuit of happiness for all. But he insisted that belief in a soul and in an afterlife were absolutely necessary to make it work--which of course totally contradicts the intention of what Epicurus and Lucretius had to say. Machiavelli pronounced that laws and customs were worthless without fear of what might happen in the afterlife. More's friend Giordano Bruno had a much better handle on Lucretius, "Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius' hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction, is inherently sexual."

(I do have trouble reconciling this view of Bruno with the Bruno of the Kabbalah/Trismegistus theme given him by Dame Francis Yates. Somehow, calling down mystical influences through the stars or helping the Sefiroth piece itself back together doesn't quite gibe with which I hear Lucretius saying. Somehow, Bruno is the heir of Lucretius/Copernicus on the one had and Ficino/Pico on the other. Dame Yates saw this strain leading eventually to Newton and the Royal Society. Goldblatt also traces a lineage from Lucretius to Newton.)

And once the cat was out of the bag, it seems, Lucretius became one of the founders of the modern age, not only in Bruno and More and Newton, but in Shakespeare and Montaigne as well. "Montaigne articulates what it feels like from the inside to think, write, live in an Epicurean universe." Of course, the parallels between Lucretius and Spinoza are obvious, but Goldblatt doesn't go there. He does point out that "Lucretius' materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other enlightenment figures," including, most notably, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the pursuit of happiness into the Declaration of Independence, and who finally described himself as "an Epicurean." Of course, what we know about Jefferson's habits make him an epicurean of the old school as well.

Ultimately, Goldblatt is probably a better story teller than an accurate historian. His story has all the earmarks of being a pivotal moment in the history of western thinking. It seems like there is a straight line from Poggio's discovery of the manuscript to Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Would the thinking of western science have turned out all that much differently if Poggio had not made his his discovery in 1417? I'm not sure that I'm convinced that it would have. But, really, when you come down to it, that's not all that relevant to me right now. What is important is that "The Swerve" has given me another handle on the thoughts and issues that seem to dominate my life these days. It turned out to be the right book at the right time.

Author: Greenblatt, Steven

Date Published: 2011

Length: 284 pp

electronic print

Hannibal: One Man Against Rome

It was not a great book, but it was both enjoyable and informative for me. I had a vague knowledge that Hannibal used the wealth of the Spanish (rather, Iberian) silver mines to build up the Carthaginians militarily, cross the Alps, defeat the Romans decisively at Cannae in the single deadliest day of combat in history and then hang around southern Italy for a while before being chased around the Mediterranean by the Romans. Now his story is much clearer to me.

With Rome's growth through the defeat of most of the different cities and tribes of central Italy, and with its vested interests in maintaining client relations with those states it conquered, it was probably inevitable that Rome and Carthage would clash. And it was probably inevitable that Hannibal would eventually lose. But he came as close as he could to making it work. As it was, he hung on for close to 15 years in southern Italy, terrorizing the Romans and hampering their grain supply. But since he could not control the seas--and it had only been fairly recently that Rome became a naval power--he could not land supplies and reinforcements. Had he been able to join forces with his brothers as planned, then perhaps he could have broken the Roman domination of the cities and ports that he needed, especially Tarentum.

But Hannibal was at the mercy, really, of the mercenary army that he built from the various tribes and peoples of Africa and Europe, and he convinced most of them that he offered them freedom from domination from Rome. Roman treatment of these various peoples that they conquered--for example, the Ligurians, the Brutians, the Capuans, the Macedonians, the tribes of Portugal and Span, shows how determined and ruthless the Romans were: 80,000 Macedonians sold into slavery from one city; all the males of Portugal massacred.

And who knows what history would have been like if Hannibal had been able to force Rome into some kind of peace? Lamb certainly takes a sympathetic tone towards Hannibal, maintaining that he was really a freedom fighter against the Roman juggernaut, banding together diverse peoples who would all stand to regain their independence should Rome capitulate in some way. But it seems far fetched that Hannibal wasn't as merciless or as imperialist as the Romans he fought. Lamb maintains that Hannibal's destiny came from the pledge that he took at his father's insistence that he never become a "friend"--an amicus--of Rome. This came at the conclusion of the "first" Punic War when Rome and Carthage clashed over trading rights in Sardinia and Sicily. The Roman response to this clash had been to build a navy from scratch--with scenes of building a fleet based on a captured Carthaginian vessel and then teaching men to row from dry land mockups--and establish dominance in the Mediterranean. It was like, "game over, man" from that point on for Carthage as a sea power.

Author: Lamb, Harold

Date Published: 1958

Length: 11 hr 12 min

Narrator: Griffin, Charlton

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind

Scholarly, the book is not. It's another book written to accompany a British television series, but it tells the story so well, if a bit over the top at times ("There was never anything like the great library and museum before, nor has there been since: the single place on earth where all the knowledge of the entire world was gathered together…the key to understanding…simply everything."), it is both enjoyable and informative, filling in the blanks of a lot of my knowledge. I mean, I know the outlines of Alexander's march through Anatolia, the near east, Egypt and thence back through southwestern asia well enough. And I have an inkling, though admittedly not nearly as good, of the Hellenistic kingdoms that shook out from his conquests. But Ptolemy was just a name to me, and it was enlightening to see his efforts at forging an empire in Egypt what would accept a Greek ruler by combining Egyptian religious thought with Greek concepts of rationality, economics, and politics.

The wealth of the Nile, "the most production agricultural land in the known world," held it all together, of course, producing something like 20 million bushels of grain a year in seemingly endless fertility. Not for nothing was it called the bread basket of the Roman Empire in later years. But if Pollard and Reid are correct, it was Ptolemy I's vision of Alexandria as the intellectual center of the world that really made the difference. And since Ptolemy, a boyhood friend of Alexander, also received his education from Aristotle alongside Alexander, the museum and library of Alexandria were driven by Aristotle's vision of collecting and understanding all knowledge.

The observations and the knowledge that came out of the museum underlie much of modern science: the geometry of Euclid, the algebra of Diophantes, the geography of Ptolemy. But even then, many of the observations that anticipated the findings of modern science were lost during the "Dark Ages": Eratosthes' measurement of the earth's circumference and tilt, Aristarchus' heliocentric model of the universe, knowledge of the body obtained through dissection (widely practiced in Egypt but strictly forbidden elsewhere), and who knows what else.

The stability of Alexandria depended on wise rule, but this only lasted about three generations. The downfall of the dynasty began with Ptolemy IV, leading to a period of aoubt 150 yers of economic and social decline, until Cleopatra ascended the throne. She sought to restore Alexandria through alliances with Caesar and Anthony, but ultimately brought about the collapse of the dynasty. Did Julius Caesar inadvertently destroy the great library, some 400,000 volumes of all the known works of antiquity? That's what Livy would have us believe, but Pollard and Reid are not so sure. In any case, by the time that "Octavian walked into Alexandria [in 30 BC], the Ptolemaic kingdom came to an end." Alexandria entered into the Roman Empire where it remained until destroyed by the Arab conquest of the Middle East. It also became a city riven by ethnic tensions (the city was originally laid out one third Egyptian, one third Greek, and one third Jewish) and by the vagaries of the different Roman emperors. Caracella, the worst of the lot, executed all males below the age of 25, among others, an estimated 20,000 persons--this after murdering his brother to gain sole possession of the throne.

Much of the thinking in the museum now became more attuned to philosophical and metaphysical speculation, and the big names in Alexandria's intellectual history take a religious turn, beginning with Philo's concept of God as "creativity itself," and the world having been created by "Logos, the word of God." After than, Alexandria became a major source for the development of Christian theology. The speculations of the pagan philosophers Ammonious Sacchus and Plotinus found Christian counterparts in Clement and Origen, who applied Alexandrian rationality to Christian beliefs in coming up with a coherent theology and philosophy of the world. This speculative theology also led to one of the first great battles over heresy in the early church with Arius. Arius' fight with Alexander, the patriarch of Alexandria, and his toadie, Athanasius, triggered the formation of the council of Nicea in 325 under Constantine, leading to the expulsion of the Arians who could not support the formulation of the Trinity put forth in the creed.

Much ugliness ensued in later years. Theophilus sought to destroy pagan philosophy in Alexandria following Theodosius proscription of paganism in 391. Theophilus physically assaulted managed to destroy the contents of both the "daughter library" and the Serapeum, the temple built by Ptolemy I combining the remains of Alexander with the worship of the Searapis bull. Theophilus' successor, Cyril, then incited his bully boys, the Nitratian monks and the Parabolans, using physical force to grab secular power in the city and to also murder the philosopher Hypatia, "the last of the Alexandrian Hellenes." 300 years later, the Sultan Omar I ordered what was left of Alexandria to be destroyed. "Religious bigotry had after a thousand years of enlightenment finally dragged Alexandria into oblivion."

So the story of the Rise and Fall of Alexandria is a good story of light vs. dark, with the dark side winning out in the end, perhaps with a warning for the rest of us. Knowledge is a precious commodity, but also very vulnerable. It can and has been destroyed. It makes for a tidy narrative, but you really have to wonder whether the story is really that neat, that accurate. But as Pollard and Reid make clear, the importance of Alexandria in the history of ideas cannot be underestimated, "If the Renaissance was the 'rebirth' of learning that led to our modern world, then Alexandria was its modern birthplace…in our minds, we are all children of Alexandria."

Author: Pollard, Justin and Reid, Howard

Date Published: 2006

Length: 352 pp & 11 hr 31 min

electronic print and audio

Narrator: Vance, Simon

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Travels with Charley is a revisit with an old friend. I first read the book in high school--actually, probably the summer after my senior year. And, really, it was the first Steinbeck that I had read--I don't count acting in a cutting from "Of Mice and Men" or racing through "The Pearl" in less than an hour as the final exam in a speed reading course that I took. I also remember desperately wanting a pickup truck with a camper on it so I could travel around the country. It was probably the first travel book that I read, and it made me want to get out and explore. Later would come "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and John Graves' "Goodbye to a River." Then I traded my dreams of a pickup for dreams of a canoe. I didn't get either.

One of the highlights of our visit to the John Steinbeck Museum in Salinas a few years back (which really isn't all that much of a museum) was actually seeing Steinbeck's actual truck, Rocinante, on the floor. It seemed smaller in person, especially compared to some of the mondo cab over campers that now ply our national highways. And that brings up the question of how much time Steinbeck actually spent in Rocinante.

What called to me and seemed so fresh and inviting over 40 years ago seemed a bit dated this go around. Listening to the book was enjoyable for both Sara and me, but it just didn't have the special qualities that have made reading and listening to Steinbeck's fiction so enjoyable. I'm not sure why. Is it a kind of nostalgic yearning for the past (even the past of the Joad family) over a more contemporary time? Or does it have to do more with characterization? Do the characters come up too fast and are gone too quickly to be developed in the detail to make them come alive? There are a number of poignant scenes in the book, such as when he revisits his old boyhood friend Johnny Garcia in the Monterrey bar, or when he spends the night with a father and son feuding about the future, or meeting the Shakespearean actor who channels John Gielgud, or sharing drinks with the Canadian migrant workers picking apples. The memories that stuck most with me over the past 40 years, besides Rocinante, are Charley getting sick, and Steinbeck's tossing the racist hitchhiker out of the truck. I had not remembered much of "the cheerleaders" in New Orleans, but its clear that that scene and the lead up to it almost serve as the climax of the book. Charley stole the show for me this time around, as I'm sure he did 40 years ago, with his "pfffft" commentary on Steinbeck's thoughts, his areas of exploration around the different campsites, his going apeshit over the bears in Yellowstone, etc. etc.

So, did Steinbeck find America? Probably not. There is, of course, the whole brouhaha of how much of the book is a reliable recollection of his trip. Did he really just sit in the camper and make most of it up, as his son avers? Did he really spend a lot more time sleeping in hotels with his wife than he lets on? Does any of it really matter?

Then there's the whole realization that I'm older than Steinbeck was when he went on the trip. Shit! Steinbeck felt himself to be dying and wanted to get out and see the country and the people one more time. And it turned out to be his last work. And to realize that maybe he really didn't have the energy or the focus to pull the book together like he wanted. Part of the comedy of the book is his not having decent urban survival skills when he hits the big cities. Or setting out to search for America but finding himself getting bored and driving straight through to exhaustion. "Ah, the hell with it," I hear him saying, sometimes, and wanting to shut it down. Is that where I'm headed, too?

So, if I look at "Travels with Charley" too closely, I say, OK, it's not great literature. It's not "A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack" for the Cold War generation, and it's probably not as good as "Goodbye to a River," written about the same time. But it is John Steinbeck, and it has the powers of description, of metaphoric language, of story telling, that sets him apart. No, it's not anywhere near his best work, but it is still so incomparably well written to make it a good time.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1962

Length: 7 hr 58 min

Narrator: Sinise, Gary

The Science of Leonard: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig/Phaedrus wanted to explore philosophy before it bifurcated into the primary subjective/objective ways of looking at things. He called this state of thought "Quality," and looked to the pre-Socratics for its historical antecedents. Fritjof Capra suggests, I think, that really Leonard Da Vinci is the prime example of the man what represents Quality in all senses of the word, including Pirsig's metaphysical Quality, the first and foremost example of l'oumo universale, the man who "can do all things if he will." Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man says that "God made men at the close of creation, to know the laws of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire its greatness. He bound him to no fixed place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no iron necessity, but gave him freedom to will and to love." If anybody exemplifies Pico's vision of man, it is Leonardo, who, if Capra is to be credited, really represents the apotheosis of what it means to be a human in the fullest sense of the word. Leonardo came at at time when it was possible to loosen the fetters of old thinking and learn to see and to think for himself, coming up with observations that would not be repeated for sometimes hundreds of years.

"Five hundred years before the scientific method was recognized and formally described by philosophers and scientists, Leonardo Da Vinci singlehandedly developed and practiced its characteristics." Leonardo combined detailed skills of observation with his exceptional drawing abilities to puzzle out many phenomena before science developed the language to see and deal with them. He was at that unique vortex in time before the different branches of knowledge went in their various directions, requiring more and more specialized knowledge, and so he could hold a more holistic view of the world. He combined those close observations with a deep awareness "of the fundamental interconnectedness of all phenomena and of the interdependence and mutual generation of all parts of an organic whole." (This sounds suspiciously like co-dependent origination to me.)

In addition to discovering the scientific method and anticipating many of the advanced principles of mathematics, such as calculus or topology, or establishing a neurological theory of visual perception, or by anticipating some of the modern findings of cognitive science, Leonardo was the first "deep ecologist" who intuitively understood the gaia hypothesis and saw the "underlying conception of the living world as being fundamentally interconnected, highly complex, creative, and embued with cognitive intelligence." Leonardo was a deeply spiritual person in whom a sense of "all life is holy" reigned supreme.

Leonardo's a fascinating character, obviously, and Capra presents a fairly unique way of approaching him through the notebooks, where Leo uses his drawings to express what would words or the mathematics of his time could not. Perhaps there was something in his visual perception and conception of the world that allowed him to see the unity in things, as Capra asserts. But ultimately, I'm not convinced. For me, Capra was not able to express in words what Leonardo saw. Perhaps Capra is a bit too enthusiastic in his presentation, maybe a little journalistic? In any case, I didn't feel the depth of knowledge to be ultimately satisfying. Perhaps in making connections between seeming disparate ideas--Leonardo and modern science, Buddhism and modern physics (in the Tao of Science) there are really too many points, too many dissimilarities at the end of the day, that get glossed over. The book succeeds in piquing my interest in Leonardo and perhaps as seeing him more of a precursor to modern thought than I would have supposed, but ultimately the book doesn't convince me, doesn't make those connections with the depth and authority needed to make the argument. I bought the book last year for the high school library, and that's about the right level for this book. Somehow, I expected more from Capra.

Author: Capra, Fritjof

Date Published: 2007

Length: 352 pp

electronic print

Human

Why do we act, think, and feel the way that we do? That's what Michael  Gazzaniga sets out to explain in "Human," using the latest research in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. But it's one thing to look at the evolution of structures in our brains, or at antecedents of our behavior in ape behavior, or even at the activation of neurons during different aspects of our consciousness, but Gazzaniga wants to elucidate what it is that makes human beings unique and to do so without any reference to ego or soul or psyche or supernatural agency. And its kinda interesting that he kind of ends on a concept of "left brain interpreter" that sounds suspiciously like it could be any of those.

Gazzaniga comes with some major bona fides as the head of a cognitive science institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he has done some major research on the cognition of people with split brains. The roster of people he has worked with is something of a who's who of neuroscience, people like Joseph LeDoux and Daniel Dennett. He cites the big guns in the field, so much of the important reseach going on in cognition and neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

So why is it that I'm being talked down to with this book? It's like Gazzaniga decided to write a book on neuroscience for a popular audience and felt like he had to adopt a popular voice and make a number of cutesy asides in order to reach his audience. This was a book that I enjoyed a lot more in retrospect when I was able to look over my highlights and see past that voice. It does have a lot of good information that I was able to pull together better through reflection than on first reading.

Gazzaniga begins by looking at evolutionary antecedents for different stuctures in the brain, making a number of comparisons with ape brain and behavior. He presents evidence that the brain is continuing to evolve, with major growth spurts occurring as recently as 40,000 years ago coinciding with the development of speech and culture or even 6,000 years ago with the rise of urbanization and agriculture. (So where would that leave a climatolgical explanation of the domestication of emmer or eincorn wheat as advanced by someone like Jared Diamond?)  Perhaps as importantly as growth, however, has been a number of structural changes such as hemispheric differentiation, allowing more specialization and automation of certain brain functions, or the growth of particular areas of the pre-frontal cortex, especially those involved with memory, planning, abstract thinking, and cognitive flexibility.

Part of the "relentless progression of increasing relative brain size during the evolution of hominids," came about as "an adaptation to the complexities of social living." Groups became larger and more complex, and the cognitive demand for living in these groups "drove brain size expansion." I think that this gets at the heart of a lot of what Gazzaniga has to say: "what the human brain does best, what it seems built to do: think socially." Our ability to live in large, complex groups really depends on what seems to be a uniquely human characteristic, the "Theory of Mind," or our ability to accurately predict another person's moods, intentions, states of mind. Theory of Mind now seems pretty dependent on the existence of "mirror neurons" in our brain that are specifically attuned to others, especially allowing us to mimic them, perhaps the root of language and learning. 

Language facilitates social reciprocity with larger numbers of individuals (it's a whole lot easier and more efficient to talk with people than spend an inordinate amount of time picking lice from their fur), increasing the odds of survival, but also introducing the ability to lie and cheat. Protecting the validity of social reciprocity underlies what Gazzaniga and others (like Jonathan Haidt) call "universal moral modules," built on feelings of guilt or shame to prevent our own cheating, or on rage and anger to deter cheating in others. Patricia Churchland calls this "constraint satisfaction" in her new book, and it leads to a whole discussion about how much of our morality is biological and how much is rule-based, how much of our moral thinking is based on the kinship based hunter-gather groups that dominates so much of the human past, and how germane that past is to living in large multi-ethic urban environments.

For if we are left with biological constraint satisfaction for basing our morality, we also have to deal with the fact that we are hardwired for nonreflective beliefs and a bias toward negativity in our preconscious apprehension of new things and novel stimuli. First off, we have a "hot" emotional system that responds quickly and automatically to fear, anger, rage, and disgust. It operates directly through the amygdala, bypassing the "cooler," more reflective circuit operating primarily in the hippocampus and frontal lobes. But even then, most of the information that reaches consciousness has already been processed, classified, stored as a memory, and compared to other memories  prior to its emergence into our awareness. Most of our beliefs about the world have already been formed before we even know that they exist. "Nonreflective beliefs are the default mode of our thinking." Not only that, but they control most of our reflective thinking, since "the better  a reflective belief merges with a nonreflective belief, the more plausible it seems, the more intuitive and easier to learn or accept." We look for these plausible explanations, then, even if our information isn't all that accurate, making any approach to analytical, non-intuitive thinking extremely difficult, and in Gazzaniga's eyes, extremely rare. I guess that Nietzsche was right all along. We continually seek bad reasons for confirming what we already know.

If Gazzaniga seems to confirm Nietzsche on the one hand, he perhaps confirms Kant on the other. For what sounds kind of like "a priori" thinking to me comes from the idea that a major part of our nonreflective belief system is built on the concept of essentialism: we are hardwired to believe that things have inherent properties and characteristics, "a thing perceivable to the senses can have an embodied unobservable essence that is real," a quality that develops in our thinking by about the age of four or five. We also seem to attribute consciousness to animate objects investing them with "theory of mind" much like our own. We naturally assume that they have agency and purpose. Gazzaniga is saying that while we endow our pets with personalities, it just ain't necessarily so. We do the same with nature, a trait that Richard Dawkins calls  our HADD, Hyperactive Agent Detection Device: "we hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent." (Dawkins, The God Delusion) We are Idealists and Cartesians before we are even aware of it.

One of the major essences that we buy into is the idea of ourselves, that which I feel makes me, me and you feel makes you, you (Spinoza called  it the conatus.) We each of us believe first of all in our own essences, which Gazzaniga says comes from specific processes in the brain. But then he gets a bit vague about these processes. When we take in information and store it as a memory, we first try to make sense of it. We fit it in with what we already know and use this knowledge to construct scenarios and give meaning to things and events. Gazzaniga says that we have a "left hemispheric interpreter" that forms hypotheses about all sensory inputs and processes going on, continually constructing meaning and narrative: "the left hemispheric interpreter constructs theories to assimilate perceived information into a comprehensible whole," even if the information turns out to be faulty and the theory demonstrably false. That's just  a part of who we are. And one of these theories is the sense of self: "I submit that it is the left-brain interpreter that is coming up with the theory, the narrative, and the self-image, taking the information from various inputs, from the “neuronal workspace,” and from the knowledge structures, and gluing it together, thus creating the self, the autobiography, out of the chaos of input."

But this left brain interpreter is a theoretical construct on Gazzaniga's part. There is no specific part of the brain, other than left hemisphere, where it might reside. It seems to be an "emergent property" that comes from "distributed processes throughout the brain." So, really, you could call it ego, or psyche, or soul, or whatever, and it would have as much validity as "left brain interpreter."

So, yes, Gazzaniga's book has a lot of good information, so much more than I've touched on here. But I guess I'm still left with a number of questions about its significance. Do I not have any say in the way that I think and the way that I feel? If I've already made up my mind before I make up my mind, then where does that leave the ideas of free will and responsibility? I feel like I've made a lot of important decisions, both good and bad, that have determined the directions my life has taken, and done so after a lot of careful thought and deliberation, at least sometimes. I guess that I need at least the illusion that I have some control over my life. It might be one of those demonstrably false theories developed by my left brain interpreter, but it does give me a reason to keep on keepin' on.

Author: Gazzaniga, Michael S.

Date Published: 2008

Length: 464 pp

electronic print

Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors

Is Rick Perry the next Ferdinand II? I mean, Ferdinand was taken up, in at least his later years, with a messianic vision of himself as the "Bat" who would defeat the antichrist, drive the Moors out of Grenanda, and then free Jerusalem from the Muslims, heralding the second coming. Rick Perry, as I understand it, wants to recapture the "seven mountains" of culture, including the government, also in preparation for the second coming.

So what becomes of heretics like me? Ferdinand's response was to reinvigorate the inquisition (its roots run back really to Theodosius I, and it had been used sporadically until the Albigensian crusade, but Reston makes a case that the "old" inquisition had been sporadic and occasional whereas the "new" Spanish inquisition was systematic and habitual) and use it to spread terror, enforcing thought control. Under the instigation and direction of Torquemada, who became the first Grand Inquisitor (is it he in Ivan's parable?), Ferdinand saw the inquisition as unifying the Spanish kingdom, bringing the recalcitrant and sometimes rebellious nobility under his control, and increasing the revenue available to fight his war against the Moors through confiscation of property. How many "heretics" were burned in Torquemada's auto de fes? How many people turned in their neighbors under torture or the threat of torture? How many of them confessed to acts they never committed? Do Rick and his brethren have that in mind for me?

It's hard to say how much Ferdinand's zeal was driven by his belief or how much of it was a cynical politician's use of religion to bring about his political ends (hmmm…so just how is that different from Perry?) While Reston does suggest that Ferdinand came to believe his ordained role as the trigger man for the apocalypse, he also notes that Machiavelli used Ferdinand as his model of the Prince in creating the "first modern political state." After joining the kingdoms of Aragon and Castille and then defeating the Portugese, Ferdinand and Isabella brought about centralized authority and taxation with the help of a national police force manned by a religious brotherhood, the Hermandad: "the effect was to centralize power and spread fear throughout the land."

And what are the best tools at hand for a politician to accomplish the building of a unified state? A common enemy and a convenient scapegoat will generally do the trick. The common enemy was the Kingdom of Grenada, the last stronghold of Al Andalus in Europe. The "Reconquista" had been a major goal of almost every king in Europe since Charles the Hammer finally stopped the Islamic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 732. And the inquisition played on popular bigotry by targeting mainly the Conversos--Jews who had forcibly converted to Christianity in earlier pogroms--for being insincere in their conversions or for having lapsed back into Jewish practices. That Ferdinand could latch onto the Converso's property to help fund his wars was a real bonus.

This led to the "other 1492," the expulsion of Jews from Spain. But what counted now wasn't religion but blood, "limpieza de sangre," purity of blood. Which, of course, is a total farce. The people of Spain were a mixed blood lot from the earliest of times: paleolithic hunter gatherers with a mixture of Anatolian pastoral and agricultural peoples, overlain with major migrations/invasions from Celts, Phoenicians, Carthagenians, Romans, Alans, Suebi, Vandals, Visigoths, Arabs and Berbers--to cite only the most obvious and numerous--except for the Jews, of course, who migrated here early and interbred with most of the different people. Reston points out that Ferdinand, Isabella, and Torquemada all had Converso heredity in their own backgrounds, as did the majority of the Spanish nobility.

Persecution of the Jews had gone back to at least Hellenic times, with Greeks and Jews killing each other in the streets of Alexandria, and Jews were slaughtered by the thousands during the Crusades. Spain experienced a major outbreak of antisemetic zealotry in 1391, leading to forced mass conversions of Jews to Christianity (a widespread practice in Spain since Visigothic rule), but with the centralized authority of the state joined with the revitalization of the Inquisition, wholesale skepticism and eventual denial of converso sincerity held public opinion, especially with incitement from the pulpit. All Jews were forced to convert or to leave Spain in 1492. Those who converted and remained behind then made up the overwhelming majority of the cases tried by the Inquisition panels.

But that's just one strand running through the book. The defeat of Grenada, with its own cast of characters, including the last emir, Boabdil the Unfortunate, who was clearly unsuited for the task of ruling Grenada or fighting the Spanish, and who essentially sold out his people and his kingdom for a comfortable retirement. Add in Columbus, who comes strutting on the stage with his grandiloquent plans of finding a shorter route to the palace of the Great Khan, but unable to find anyone to take him seriously until after the Moors are defeated, eventually limps off disgraced and disillusioned, but not until whole tribes began to go extinct. The book covers a true "hinge of history" when Ferdinand and Isabella take their small feudal kingdoms and turn them into the Spanish empire.

Reston tells this story by drawing on multiple personalities, including not only Ferdinand and Isabella, Torquemada and Columbus, and also Boabdil the Unfortunte, but so many others, including King Joao II of Portugal, Enrique the Impotent--Isabella's brother, Muley Hassan--who contended with Boabdil, his nephew, for control of Grennda, Abraham Senior and Don Abravano--Jews who worked as advisors to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella but nonetheless suffered the fate of their fellow Jews, and Rodrigo Borgia--who later became Pope Alexander VI, infamous in his own right but even more famous as the father of Cesare and Lucretia Borgia. It really is quite a formidable cast of characters, and I find so little to admire in any of them.

Perhaps that is a major weakness of this book, then, that in trying to tell a good story, Reston overplays his details and maybe plays a bit loose with the facts. He certainly bends the tale in a modern, secular direction. He has often been accused of the novelization of history--sometimes an almost breathless "in media res" approach to history, surmising what his characters thought and how they reacted to one another--you can almost sense the animal magnetism of Isabella for Columbus or feel the scornful rage of Torquemada for Ferdinand and Isabella when he thought the expulsion ediict was being compromised. I guess the most egregious example, though, is Boabdil's mother, Ayxs, whose contempt Reston imagines as driving Boabdil into a disastrous battle with Ferdinand, and then who heaped further scorn on him for being such a wimp, or something to that effect.

But the bottom line is, Reston tells a good story. I quite enjoyed the read and got a better understanding of the time and the events. I came to the book wanting a better idea of what drove Spinoza's thinking, as Rebecca Goldstein makes it clear that his Converso background gave him the questions and the concerns culminating in the Ethics and the Tractatus. This book didn't really give me any insight in that direction, but it has lead me onto further inquiry into the history of antisemitism. For the truth is, I just don't get it. You can draw a straight line from Ferdinand (and Isabella, though Reston doesn't really impute any kind of cynicism on her part) and the Spanish Kingdom to Hitler and Nazi Germany, and I continually draw a blank on how such atrocities can happen. All I can hope is that we're not on the cusp of some new catastrophe.

Author: Reston, James

Date Published: 2005

Length: 384

print

Horseman, Pass By

This was McMurtry's first novel, and it feels like it. While it is a good story, it certainly doesn't rate with Last Picture Show or even Leaving Cheyenne. It does have the west Texas bleakness built into it, but it's not the book that you might expect from the buildup surrounding Hud. I first read it years ago and enjoyed more than this time, so it may also have something to do with the narrator. Just a bit too hang-dog, I guess.

Jimmy told me years ago that his uncle Jack and a number of his cronies reminded him of Hud, the same wild ass, amoral characters that seemed to populate West Texas. I guess that mom's cousin Vernon could go in that same mold: good lucking guys driven around by their dicks and general lack of scruples. But Hud wasn't nearly as unscrupulous as I remembered him from my first reading. Even his shooting of Homer makes sense in terms of relieving suffering. And then he's the one that makes Lonnie seem respectable at the church during the funeral.

The book is really about Homer and the way of life that is dying with him, the old cowboy who has worked the ranch for so long. He finally breaks under the pressure of the last catastrophe, in a life filled with catastrophes, and one that was brought on by his buying cattle on the cheap from Mexico. There is something to be said about Hud's negative judgement of Homer. It's just that we see Homer through Lonnie's worshipful eyes. And maybe it's really Lonnie's voice that I don't enjoy so much. McMurtry uses the first person narrator so seldom, and maybe there's a good reason for it.

Author: McMurtry, Larry

Date Published: 1961

Length: 7 hr 34 min

Narrator: McCue, Kevin

Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

I've been waiting to read this book for a long, long time. I bought this copy of Lila shortly after it came out in paperback almost 20 years ago and wanted to jump right into it since I was so transfixed, and transformed, by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I have told a couple of groups now that not only was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance my favorite book of all time, it was also the most important. What's not to love about: "You should remember that it's peace of mind you're after and not just a fixed machine."? And it's a book that I've both reread a couple of times and listened to recently. It's held up well each time. That's kind of what made Lila an intimidating presence on my bookshelf, for what else could it be but a let down. It certainly has garnered that reputation over the years. Many reviewers talk about how much they enjoyed ZAMM and then slam Lila because it is not ZAMM.

And that kinda describes my reaction, too. I enjoyed Lila, to be sure, and found the story of Phaedrus having to deal with her one way or another to be fairly compelling. There's even  a sinister quality with Jamie and Fatso that give a hint of a detective novel. It's one of the few times that Pirsig steps out of Phaedrus' consciousness and into another character, a bit strange in a book prety much devoted to Phaedrus' philosophizing. He does it with Riegel, once, and he does it more effectively with Lila, especially when she is trying to get back to the boat and begins a psychotic episode. Phaedrus' decision to care for her until she cures herself, regardless of how long that takes, gives a depth and a reality to all the sermonizing going on in his head. It also gives an ironic twist to all his thinking since he really is pretty naieve about what's going on with her.

The question that drives the book, of course, is "Does Lila have Quality?" which Riegel asks him the night after he picks Lila up in a bar, and Phaedrus is forced to justify his reasons after he tells Riegel yes. His response then becomes the whole Metaphysics of Quality, from the first moment of insight on a peyote high with Dusenberry to his final pronouncement that Good is a noun.

And I got lost in there somewhere. One of my annotations says: "pure experience = pure value? what does this mean?" It's the heart of quality--of the Metaphysics of Quality--  in that precognitive moment of awareness before the subject/object dualism of conceptions and things come to the fore, before the intellectual patterns give birth to our awareness of things. Is it the Tao? But then, aren't the Tao and Quality really just abstractions for a physiological process of sensory intake? Or is it more than that? Pirsig brings in religious mysticism and dharma and rta to make metaphors for this preintellectual event that suggests so much more than physiology. It has value, and, he suggests, something almost supernatural or mystical, comparing it to the dharmakaya light. He calls it Dynamic Quality and keeps insisting that it is higher on the evolutionary scale than intellectual or social or biological or material patterns of matter. As a matter of fact, it drives evolution. "Because Quality is morality…They're identical. And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world. That just seems too big of a leap for me to take right now. What to make of a sentence like this: "if one applies the Metaphysics of Quality and sees that a chair is an inorganic static pattern and sees that all static patterns are composed of value, and that value is synonymous with moral, then it all begins to make sense." That's just it. It doesn't all begin to make sense for me. Sometimes I wondered that all of his ratiocinations weren't really just rationalizations for judgements that he had already made.

Then, as in ZAMM, Pirsig uses this value driven system as a means of social criticsm--a paralysis of moral patterns in the modern world that MOQ could set right if given the chance. Plato, of course, said the same thing, that when philosophers are made kings then all would be right with the world. And these philosophers were specially qualified because they knew the Good--and that brings us around to the final sentence of the book: Good is noun. I just don't get it.

Author: Pirsig, Robert

Date Published: 1991

Length: 468 pp

print

Tortilla Flat

I can remember being puzzled by this book the first time I read it years ago. I came to it expecting Cannery Row and was disappointed that it wasn't. I had the same expectation this time around, even though I knew better, and I was disappointed all over again. I kept expecting to like Danny and the Paisanos like Mac and boys, but I just couldn't feel a whole lot for them. They may have intended good, but their lack of perspective, the "moral" shortcomings kept torpedoing those good intentions. They were just fooling themselves.

Maybe part of the problem was trying to listen to the book when I was already tired and driving down to Durango late. The more that I drove, the sleepier that I got, and the more disjointed that the story felt. When I eventually turned the story off, I wasn't sure that I wanted to continue.

But I persisted in listening to the second half of the book, and that made all the difference. No, it still wasn't Cannery Row--very few things are--but the book seemed to pick up with Danny's gift of the vacuum cleaner to Sweets and take on a new comic richness that I found lacking before. The electric vacuum cleaner raised Sweet's status in the community which had no electricity. She ran it over the floor of her house making a humming sound, and that was OK since it turned out that the vacuum cleaner had no motor in it anyway.

That led to the episode where Big Joe Portagee stole the money that the Pirate had been saving to buy a candle for Saint Francis. The money had become a central trust between the boys, and the violation of the trust was met with a vengeance and a brutality that was shocking, but also totally in character for the paisanos. The money was restored, the sacred trust was reestablished, Big Joe Portagee was readmitted into the society, and the Pirate bought the candle. The scenes where the dogs burst into the church to find the Pirate, and then his preaching to them in the woods, were some of the funniest and most touching scenes in the book. That led to the boys going on a crime spree to feed the children of Teresina Cortez, also central to the book. Critics have made a lot of the ironic parallels with Arthurian legends, and these chapters certainly best best represent the comparisons, although, in all honesty, I didn't feel it at the time.

The final scenes, with Danny going berserk and trying to regain his freedom, and then the boys trying to restore Danny's health with a party, leading to the final confrontation with the Beast outside the door, reminded me a lot of Mac and the boys trying to throw a party for Doc. It's as if Danny and the paisanos  morphed into Mac and the boys, with the same wry humor in describing their ways of thinking, justifying their own short term wants with ironic turns of logic and self-deception. Certainly what Doc said about the boys, that they were the true philosophers, applies to the paisanos, but somehow they don't seem quite as agreeable as the boys.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1935

Length: 7 hr 03 min

Narrator: McDonough, John

Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience

It really comes down to this: the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex are constantly in tension when we make decisions, and we really make most of our decisions up to 10 seconds before we are consciously aware of them. The more that the deliberative prefrontal cortex wins out, probably the wiser that we are. Hall sets out to explore the neural circuitry behind certain human propensities--what he calls the eight pillars of wisdom: emotional regulation, knowing what's important, moral reasoning, compassion, humility, altruism, patience, and dealing with uncertainty. First, he looks at different aspects of wisdom--it lies at the intersection of knowledge and choice, but it includes the ability to take in multiple perspectives, to understand a situation clearly, in spite of ambiguity, and it includes the ability to remain positive. It involves expert knowledge, emotional control, social compassion, and insight into human nature.

Hall pushes for the adaptive survival value of wisdom for a social grouping, returning again and again to the tension between abstract moral or social dilemmas that affect the smooth functioning of the entire group, and the "more primal… emotional" judgement brought about by kin or special people. He comes back to this point when talking about the "hyperbolic discount curve." We value something (driven by a dopamine reward system that gives us pleasure) and divide that value by how long it takes us to get the reward. The longer we have to wait, the less value do we see. Long range planning and valuation are at a major disadvantage and Hall talks much about the psychology of economics. I think, for him, it really comes down to will power (think William James, but also Kierkegaard?) and the ability of the mind to put off immediate gratification with some idea of the future that is somehow more alluring and more rewarding that the present: "a cognitive act of imagination sometimes verging … on fantasy."

Compassion seems to be intimately tied up with the mysterious mirror neurons that are scattered across the brain and allow us to feel another person's experience. The feelings of disgust and aversion, originating in the dorsal striatum and the insular cortex, drives much of our sense of morality and of fairness, and we get a charge not only from cooperating with others but also from punishing those that we see as unfair or immoral. Once again, it is the more deliberative part of the brain, the PFC, that turns the punishment into action against "social defectors and noncooperators" who threaten the cooperation and the cohesion of a group.

He also gives a chapter to "meta wisdom," where the mind must learn to switch between the automatic "model-based" learning system associated with the emotional brain, and the "model-free" learning system of the neo-cortex, especially the PFC, that is needed when we are confronted with new or unexpected experiences and more deliberation and information is needed: "all our higher cognitive functions, planning, abstract thinking, decision making, and considering the future consequences of actions."  Acetylcholine and norepenephrin may play a part by signaling uncertainty in new situations, allowing the neo-cortex to come into play. It may also point to the role of the ventromedial PFC, which coordinates a lot of emotional processing, as opposed to the dorsolateral PFC, which is involved more in new learning.

 Hall suggests that the development of this meta-wisdom may come with age and adversity, tempering the actions of the old emotional brain of the amygdala/insula with the more deliberative reflections of the neo-cortex as death draws closer and it becomes necessary to extract the most salient emotional and interpersonal details from any situation. "Older adults are more supple in their assessments of problems, and they display greater flexibility, guided in part by their ability to regulate their emotions." So while we may suffer cognitive declines in the motor cortex, the visual cortex, and the physical-sensory part of the cortex, "we make gains in social knowledge and emotional judgement, increasing our problem solving skills."

There's a bit of "so what?" about all of this. Hall asks if there can be a science of wisdom by looking at the tension between the "limbic" system (he doesn't particularly care for this term) and the neo-cortex by looking at which areas of the brain light up during a fMRI. Interpreting fMRI is tricky, to say the least, as made clear by John Medina's article in Psychiatric Times, and we should be skeptical of how this data can be interpreted. The brain is very, very complex, and there is more of a disconnect between the data and the "reverse inferences" (Medina's term) than are really hinted at in the data. Also, there's something about explaining human behavior by taking it down to the molecular level or by showing its survival value to the species or the group that just somehow doesn't compute for me. I appreciate and am fascinated by these looks at the different parts and functions of the brain and how they beget mind, but my experience tells me that free will and conscious choice have played a major role in making me who I am or at least who I feel that I am. At least Hall tries to bring back deliberation and conscious choice into the discussion--the conscious formation of value and willpower (or dare I say it, Will to Power?)--that heroic self-overcoming that marked the greatness--and wisdom--of humans in Nietzsche.

Author: Hall, Stephen S.

Date Published: 2010

Length: 352 pp

electronic print