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

The Dying Animal

This was probably my least favorite Roth so far, but even so, it had more than its share of poignancy and insight. More than any of his other books so far, Eros vs. Thanantos seemed to drive the action and the thinking of the book.

David is certainly led by his' his dick, and in many instances, he is morally despicable. I really cringed when he lied about going to Consuelo's party but even more so when he lied to Carolyn about the tampon in his bathroom. This was right after he wanted to watch Consuelo menstruate after she confessed that one of her younger lovers had done so years ago. David was so eaten with jealousy that he licked the blood running down her leg. He's such a predator, making no bones about it, especially in his paean to Janie and the revolution of morals in the 60's and his own hedonistic existence. Yet also, I think, he's looking back to the circumstances of his life with very self-conscious irony. He becomes ensnared in his own traps when he is consumed with Consuelo, especially after she breaks it off with him.

George Hearn's death was one of the great scenes that I've read in the past few years, made even more poignant with the ironic coda from George's wife. Then Roth stands the book on its head with the revelation that Consuelo has reconnected with David after 8 years and is about to have radical mastectomy, with the explicit comparison between her possible death from cancer at age 32 vs. George's pending death from old age at age 70--counting life from how much time is left vs. how much time has passed. Then what to make of the ending where David's monologue is really revealed as a dialog, implying that David will give up himself if he goes to Consuelo when she needs him. He has come off as a prick all along, but then the other voice suddenly implores him to stay. Why is that?

Author: Roth, Phillip

Date Published: 2006

Length: 4hr 9min

Narrator: Stechschulte, Tom

The Shape of Ancient Thought

An awful lot of information to digest, but three large thoughts endure: First, the diffusion of ideas from the ancient near eastern cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt to both India and Ionia. McEvilley suggests that the Ionian/Greek preoccupation with monism, leading to the Ionian enlightenment, came by way of India and the Upanishads. 

Second, dialectical thought develops in India only after contact with Greek culture and the establishment of Hellenistic centers in northwest India. So Nargarjuna's thought is really a fusion of Buddhism with Greek ideas.

And third, the ethics of imperturbability develops in both cultures as a response to pain and suffering--through cynicism and stoicism in the west and through Buddhism/Yogism in the east. Indifference to pleasure/pain, good/evil, etc. is the only way to survive and get by. And the way to achieve imperturbability is through mindfulness.

Author: McEvilley, Thomas

Date Published: 2001

Length: 816pp

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