John Walters's Blog, page 13

On Rereading Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey

Not long ago I did some research and wrote up a list of books on solitude. I thought that if I could absorb some of the viewpoints of other writers on the subject I might find some clues on how to turn my loneliness into a positive experience. Most of the books I listed, once I found them in the library and perused their contents, turned out to be not as interesting as I had originally hoped. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, though, is a classic. He does not have the literary or moral complexity of Thoreau in Walden; he is considerably rougher and more rugged, but in his own way he celebrates and elevates the condition of aloneness.

The essays in Desert Solitaire mainly concern a few seasons Abbey spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah in the late 1960s shortly before it was redesignated as Arches National Park. When he arrives, he lives alone in a house trailer in a primitive location accessible only by dirt road. He writes: “I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.” But he sees government surveyors planning a paved road as harbingers of doom. He loves the barren desert, the canyonlands, and the as-yet only partially dammed Colorado River, and he wishes that developers would just stay away and keep it as it is. However, he realizes that the incursions of progress are inevitable, and he documents the stark beauties of the wilderness before they are irreparably trodden underfoot by tourists and industries.

In one long essay, he and a companion take a long, leisurely ride in rubber rafts down the Colorado River before it is forever changed by the Glen Canyon Dam and the creation of Lake Powell. He laments the soon-coming loss of the beautiful landscapes they encounter, which will soon be covered with mud and water.

Abbey has a deep abiding love for the environment in which he lives. To increase his sensitivity to it, when taking walks at night he uses his flashlight as seldom as possible so that he will not be limited by its circle of light, and he turns on the generator that furnishes electricity only when absolutely necessary because its noise disturbs the desert’s profound silence. He admits that he has occasional bouts of loneliness, but to combat it he moves out of the house trailer, instead constructing a cot and an open air tent nearby. When he sleeps under the stars, he feels more of a part of the universe around him and his loneliness dissipates.

He argues that the predators and vermin in the desert are as essential as any other life forms; he sees a symbiotic whole in the desert biome where many of us would discern only irritations and dangers. This is one of the values of his vision for me. When I read Abbey’s descriptions I realize that there is great beauty in unexpected places in the wide world and that I should not jump to conclusions before I understand in depth the realities of a place. And, in truth, it can take a lifetime to truly explore only a tiny fraction of our wonderful world. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines in the movie The Last Samurai. Ken Watanabe as the Warlord Katsumoto is speaking with Tom Cruise as Captain Nathan Algren in his garden; as he admires his blossoming trees he says, “A man could search all his life for the perfect blossom, and it would not be a wasted life.” At the end, of course, as he is dying, he looks up at a tree full of blossoms and says, “They are all perfect.” This is the message that Abbey gives about the desert land he loves: it is perfect just as it is, and he wishes that it could forever remain that way.

On Rereading The Best of the Nebulas Edited by Ben Bova; Part Four

John Varley’s novella “The Persistence of Vision” is a deeply troubling story; at least it troubles me. The narrator is an unemployed middle-aged man who, in the late 1980s, decides to hit the road rather than endure poverty in the strife-ridden cities. He hitchhikes from Chicago to New Mexico and then begins to wander on foot from commune to commune, sampling the variegated lifestyles as he goes. He is walking through arid desert when he comes upon a most unusual walled-in commune where all of the adult residents are blind and deaf. Only their children can see and hear. Despite their apparent handicaps, they have created an alternative lifestyle that works for them. It is comprised of simple labor, living off the land, and communicating through touch. This communication works on multiple levels from simple signing to far subtler means of expression, including group sex. The lonely traveler stays with these people for several years and attempts to become a part of the community. Ultimately he decides he can never be one of them and leaves, only to eventually become suicidally desperate on the outside and make a decision to return. Most of this long story reads like a piece of sociological literary fiction; only in the last few pages is the science fiction/fantasy element revealed. I will not disclose that gem so that you can discover it for yourselves, but the story’s internal logic makes the speculative element inevitable. I mentioned that it troubled me for two reasons. One is that the story insinuates that the condition of being blind and deaf is in many ways superior to having access to all the senses. I don’t doubt that under the right circumstances blind and deaf people can lead rich, full lives; in fact, the commune is informally called Keller in honor of Helen Keller, who proved this. However, despite the intensity of sharing the members indulge in, which provides great satisfaction to them, they are vulnerable to human predators and cut off from a significant portion of the universe. I was also troubled by the main relationship in the story, which is also a sexual relationship, between the narrator and a teenage girl. When they meet and begin to be intimate, the narrator is forty-seven and the girl is only thirteen, a mere child. This story was published in the late seventies; I don’t know if this aspect of it would be so readily accepted nowadays. These matters aside, it is a very well-written and thought-provoking tale.

The next short story, “The Grotto of the Dancing Dear” by Clifford D. Simak, has two main characters: an archeologist named Boyd and a Basque laborer named Luis. After completing a study of prehistoric cave paintings, Boyd goes in for one last look and discovers a hidden grotto festooned with images of cavorting animals. An expert dates artifacts that Boyd finds in the grotto at twenty-two thousand years old, and a fingerprint in a pigment identifies Luis as the grotto’s painter. In other words, Luis has been alive for over twenty-two thousand years. When Boyd confronts him, Luis explains that he wanted Boyd to find the grotto so someone else would be aware that he exists, thus to a small degree at least mitigating his intense loneliness. I have read this excellent story several times before, but only this time did I realize that it bears a striking resemblance to some of Jorge Luis Borges’s tales. (And now, after writing this, I wonder if Simak gave his character the name Luis as a sort of homage.) “The Grotto of the Dancing Dear” is quiet, intense, and unforgettable.

The novelette “Sandkings” by George R.R. Martin is a very well-written horror story clad in science fictional garb. The amoral ultra-wealthy protagonist is fond of exotic and preferably alien pets. Searching for something truly unique, he comes across a shop that sells life forms known as sandkings, which are tiny carnivorous aliens with hive minds like those of ants. After having a habitat for sandkings installed in his living room, things go from bad to worse, and worse, and worse. One problem I have with this story is that there are no good guys. There are only the extremely evil protagonist, his victims, and the ravenous sandkings. It’s the same problem I have with TV shows such as Yellowstone, Succession, and similar others. Bad guys and their victims; nobody good or even likeable. Still, because Martin crafts his tale with care and surrounds it with a science fictional setting, and also because it is short, I find “Sandkings” an absorbing and entertaining albeit frightening story.

And so we come to the final entry in the book, the short story Jeffty Is Five” by Harlan Ellison. It is a deceptively simple tale about a boy who remains the same age while all his friends grow up. He seems suspended in time because not only does his appearance remain stagnant, but he can also somehow access the radio programs, comics, and toys of the era in which the aging narrator was also five years old. In his forward Ellison writes: “It is a story filled with love and pain and remembrance and the responsibility of being a true friend.” It’s a heartfelt journey into nostalgia in which the joys of the past are balanced by how much it hurts to look back.

I seldom go into such depth reviewing a collection of stories, but it should be obvious by now that these are no ordinary stories. They are special. They are wonderful. They are timeless. Unfortunately, copies of this collection are scarce, so if you come across one be sure to grab it. You won’t be disappointed.

On Rereading The Best of the Nebulas Edited by Ben Bova; Part Three

The novelette “Slow Sculpture” by Theodore Sturgeon has two characters: a woman with breast cancer and a disillusioned genius. They meet in a field where the man is conducting an experiment, and when she informs him of her plight he offers to cure her. It turns out that he is wealthy because he invented a device that could help save the environment from the ravages of fossil fuels, but big business bought the device and buried it. Since then he invented not only a cure for cancer but also other marvelous devices, but humankind’s greed and cruelty prevent him from sharing them. He cures the woman’s cancer, and in turn she helps to cure his cynicism and despair. This is a very powerful, heartfelt, and deeply emotional story.

The novella “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” by James Tiptree, Jr. is undeniably impressive. It is also cynical, devastating, bleak, and deeply depressing. A three-man team in a scientific probe gets hit with a solar flare while attempting to circumnavigate the sun. Historically, they are never heard from again, but in fact somehow the accident propels them hundreds of years into the future where a spacecraft from Earth with an all-female crew picks them up. The men learn that long ago a plague decimated the entire male population. Since reproduction in the usual way is impossible, the remaining women learned to create clones of themselves so that humankind could survive. Although there are only a few million humans left, all women, they have gradually developed interplanetary travel. There are no hierarchies, which Tiptree affirms is a male preoccupation; there are also no wars, and everyone gets along just fine. The denouement is that men are redundant and even downright dangerous; the women who rescued them kill the men rather than risk bringing them back to tarnish the surviving population. This is a simplistic summary of a complex story. Tiptree brilliantly characterizes the three men as condescending, domineering, and misogynistic in varying degrees, in contrast to the simple friendliness, helpfulness, and emotional intelligence displayed by the women. The conclusion, as presented within the parameters of the tale, seems all but inevitable, which makes it all the more tragic.

Fritz Leiber’s short story “Catch that Zeppelin!” is lighter fare. It posits an alternate reality in which World War I ended with the Allies marching on and crushing Berlin, and the League of Nations becoming a dominant international force to ensure world peace. As a result, Germany became a global superpower, and zeppelins and electric vehicles were developed, which mitigated the pollution of gas-burning vehicles. The narrator, while walking in New York, stumbles into this altered reality, and by the end of the story it disappears, leaving the narrator disconcerted and confused. The alternate vision he is caught up in, though, offers an interesting juxtaposition by which to perceive our present world.

“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” by Vonda N. McIntyre is an exceptional story in a book full of exceptional stories. For one thing, it is incredibly original in a field that deals with originalities. In the introduction to the story, Ben Bova says that he met McIntyre when she had just graduated from the University of Washington, and she was wildly excited about writing hard science fiction based on biology instead of the physical sciences. In “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,” she succeeded beyond anything that was thought possible at the time. The story concerns a woman named Snake, a healer who has come to a remote desert village to treat a boy with a deadly tumor. Her assistants are three snakes: a tiny snake that gives soothing dreams named Grass, a rattlesnake named Sand, and a cobra named Mist. To heal the boy, Snake administers a drug to a small desert creature, which the cobra then eats and then afterwards bites the sick boy, injecting venom that has turned into a healing potion by the drug. This is a startlingly original idea even in science fiction, a literature of ideas. What makes this story truly exceptional, though, is its depth of emotion and heartfelt characterization. As I read it this time after so long, tears filled my eyes as I remembered what a special person Vonda was. Her death from cancer in 2019 was a great loss to literature. I first met her in 1973 when I attended the Clarion West science fiction workshop, which she founded in Seattle with the assistance of Robin Scott Wilson. After the workshop, I met up with her and other Clarion West graduates on a houseboat on Lake Union, where we would get together to critique each other’s work. I took off for the far reaches of the world and lived overseas for thirty-five years before returning to the United States. I became reacquainted with Vonda at a science fiction convention called Potlatch in 2014. This turned out to be one of the last Potlatches, but I met her frequently at Clarion West parties and other events. She was always exceptionally kind, thoughtful, and generous with encouragement about my writing career. I bring up all of this background because it all indirectly relates to the story in question. Vonda was open, honest, kind, and generous in life, and these emotions bleed into her fiction as well. “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” is a beautiful and unforgettable story.

(To be continued.)

On Rereading The Best of the Nebulas Edited by Ben Bova; Part Two

And now we come to the novelette “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber, which first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions. It is ostensibly a classic deal-with-the-devil fantasy, albeit unusually rich in descriptive detail and stylistic depth. However, Leiber takes the traditional form several steps further by setting the tale in a future world in which spaceships can be glimpsed in the heavens and the outer planets have been explored and colonized. This background exists on the periphery like an ornate picture frame. It adds a layer of nuance to the story of Joe Slattermill, who works underground in mines by day and at night escapes a slovenly domestic scene to go into the town of Ironmine and “roll the bones,” or gamble with dice. He comes across a joint called “The Boneyard,” which may or may not actually exist, and gets into a high stakes game with the Big Gambler, a skeleton in a black suit. The story is great fun and builds up to a terrific ending.

The longest story in the book by far is “Dragonrider” by Anne McCaffrey. It originally appeared in Analog magazine, and together with her novella “Weyr Search,” which won a Hugo Award, became Dragonflight, the first of the long and popular Dragonriders of Pern series. Despite the many volumes that followed, “Dragonrider” stands well on its own. This reading rekindled the fascination I felt when I first discovered the world of the Dragonriders through this novella. McCaffrey’s Pern, in which dragons and their riders, telepathically united, must face world-threatening alien spores called threads that descend when their planet is aligned with another nearby planet, is rich with complex characters and intricate world-building. It is dragon fire that destroys the alien menace, but Pern has been without a thread infestation for hundreds of years, causing landowners to doubt the value of maintaining the dragons on alert. When the threads arrive, the Dragonriders must move quickly to avert disaster. This novella is gripping, suspenseful, and well-written.

One of the strangest stories in a book full of strange stories is “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” by James Tiptree, Jr. It is told from the perspective of a six-legged alien beast roaming a bizarrely different world. After its mother drives it away, it comes upon a tiny bright creature it takes as its mate, which it nurtures and protects until… I don’t want to give away the ending. What makes this story unique and unforgettable is the beast’s emotional, poetic monologue as it explores its world and tries to figure out what the ultimate plan of existence is.

Another highly stylized story told in first person is “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” by Samuel R. Delaney. The protagonist is a solar system-roaming thief who returns to Earth to sell some items he has acquired. With a detective from a special government department in pursuit, he attends a high society gathering at the top of an exclusive residential tower in New York, where four of the elite celebrities known as Singers are in attendance. The story’s title comes from a method used by nefarious characters throughout the solar system to communicate with each other: every month the name of a semi-precious stone becomes the new password of the underworld, but only if you know how to use it correctly. Like the previous tale, this story’s strength is in its idiosyncratic style; its main character is inherently complex and duplicitous, and this is reflected in the tone of the narration.

As I reread the novella “A Boy and His Dog” by Harlan Ellison, I felt that it had become somewhat dated. At the time that it first appeared it was cutting edge, but since its first publication in 1969 there have been many tawdry imitators in print and in video games. It is told in first person by the protagonist Vic, as he wanders with his dog Blood through a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape. Vic’s narration is loaded with expletives, and his primary aim in life, apart from survival, is to “get laid.” Since Blood is telepathic, he is able to assist Vic in finding women, although there is a paucity of them on the surface amidst the devastated landscape. Most of them live in underground shelters with “decent folks.” However, the men in these underground enclaves have become sterile, and so a young woman named Quilla June has been sent to the surface to lure a man down for breeding purposes. When I first read this story back in the early seventies I was deeply impressed. At that time no other science fiction writer had dared to be so blatantly explicit. It could not have been published in the science fiction digests of the sixties. The novella inspired a 1975 film of the same name, which won the 1976 Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation. Personally, though, I have always found the novella more succinct and powerful.

After the frantic activity and expletive-filled narration of “A Boy and His Dog,” the next two stories take a comparatively quiet, thoughtful, and subdued approach. The short story “The Day Before the Revolution” by Ursula K. Le Guin concerns an old woman who was a revolutionary in her youth and even spent fifteen years in prison for her beliefs. She is now an icon that the young look up to and adulate, but after a recent stroke she struggles with mere survival. Not much happens in this story; it is a character study. The anthology’s editor, Ben Bova, writes in the introduction that this is a prequel to Le Guin’s acclaimed novel The Dispossessed, which won a Nebula in the same year as “The Day Before the Revolution.” Without this back story, however, there is little to distinguish it from a contemporary literary story. By that I mean that there are no overt science fictional elements that make it recognizable as genre fiction. What it does have, of course, is Le Guin’s elegant prose and ability to give her characters depth and bring them to life. I personally could empathize with the portrait of old age and the feeling that most of life’s struggles are in the past instead of in the future.

(To be continued.)

On Rereading The Best of the Nebulas Edited by Ben Bova; Part One

Having a strong urge to get back to my literary roots, I picked up the weighty tome The Best of the Nebulas and began to read. As Bova, the editor, explains in the introduction, these stories were selected by members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association was then known) from the stories that had won the organization’s Nebula Awards from 1965 through 1985. In other words, these stories were considered the best of the best. And wonderful stories they are, too – every one of them. I wondered, in fact, as I have wondered in the past, why there has not been a follow-up volume in the decades since this one.

Be that as it may, the stories in this anthology are representative of some of my earliest encounters with so-called new wave science fiction writers; Harlan Ellison has three stories herein, and Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delaney have two each. I remember searching for science fiction at the local library in Seattle shortly after resolving to become a writer (during my one year of college in California) and coming across a shelf with several Nebula Awards volumes. I devoured them, of course, and craved more, eagerly pouncing upon each new edition as it came out.

The first year of the Nebulas, 1965, was a very fine year for short fiction; three stories from that year made the cut. The book starts out with Roger Zelazny’s novelette “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.” It is incomparable as a lean yet poetic action-adventure story set on a fantasy Venus. A team sets out on Venus’s ocean on a huge special fishing rig to try to bring in a gigantic sea creature. The title is from the Book of Job in the Bible. In Chapter 41 God is describing the monstrous leviathan to Job: “Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about.” And: “Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.” The story would already be amazing as a mere adventure, but Zelazny also populates it with well-rounded complex characters and tells it in a unique minimalist style that somehow still allows for intricate world-building.

Following this is Harlan Ellison’s classic tale of civil disobedience in an ultra-efficient, well-organized, intensely scheduled future: “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Tiktokman,” which manages to be humorous and tragic all at the same time.

In the novella “He Who Shapes,” Roger Zelazny is more elaborate and less Hemingwayesque. Several times he allows the protagonist, Render, to digress into lengthy discourses on psychology in the guise of speaking into a microphone preparing for a lecture. The story posits a near future in which elite psychiatrists called Shapers enter the dreams of their patients and manipulate them in ways that will help cure their patients of their psychoses. A woman blind from birth approaches Render and requests that he familiarize her with the sense of sight, but she is strong-willed and Render has difficulty maintaining control. I have read this story several times since first encountering it in the sixties, and I have had more difficulty with it than with my favorite Zelazny tales such as “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” and of course the classic novels This Immortal and Lord of Light. Nevertheless it is a fine story and worthy of its award.

Then follow two stories with sexual themes: “Aye, and Gomorrah…” by Samuel R. Delaney and “Passengers” by Robert Silverberg. In “Aye, and Gomorrah…” it has been discovered that radiation in space can intensely damage the sexual organs; as a result, before candidates can become Spacers they are neutered. This leads to the rise of a class of deviants known as frelks who are sexually attracted to the neutered Spacers. In “Passengers,” disembodied aliens have invaded Earth, and at random moments they possess Earth people and then engage in sexual and other self-destructive practices. Both stories are emblematic of the so-called new wave of stories dealing with significant social issues that were erupting at the time, and both are well-written, succinct, and devastating.

I have mixed feelings about the next story, the novella “Behold the Man” by Michael Moorcock. It is also a new wave story; it never would have been published in the fifties or even the early sixties. In it, a man time-travels from (then) present day England back to Palestine about a year before Jesus was to be crucified. There’s no explanation about how the time machine could not only pinpoint the era so accurately but also somehow get the man from England to the Middle East. Be that as it may, as Moorcock in the introduction states: “I was interested in the social and psychological processes which turn people into demagogues and/or myths. I’ve no religious background and no particular religious or anti-religious axe to grind.” The time traveler finds the family of Jesus but discovers that the adult Jesus has severe birth defects and the mind of a child. He resolves to take Jesus’ place in his ministry and eventually dies on the cross in his stead. As the protagonist gradually shifts from time traveler to prophet, Moorcock disperses here and there quotes from the King James Version of the gospels; however, the Biblical passages are, of course, not comprehensive, and only a select few are chosen that ostensibly confirm Moorcock’s version of the events. Fair enough, but there are enough gaps in the internal logic that make it somewhat difficult for me to suspend disbelief, as one must do when one reads science fiction or fantasy. Still, the story is an audacious and interesting attempt to deal with a complex and difficult subject.

The story “When It Changed” by Joanna Russ was cutting-edge when it first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking anthology Again Dangerous Visions, and it still packs a powerful punch. Many generations ago on a far planet called Whileaway, a plague killed off all the men, leaving the women to survive and create a society for themselves. Now after hundreds of years men from Earth have returned, and instead of appreciating how well the women have adapted and thrived, they are condescending and paternalistic. The women realize that their world will inevitably change. Although the men repeatedly say that sexual equality has been re-established on Earth, the women doubt that this is so, and there is a strong sense of grief at the story’s ending.

(To be continued.)

The Genesis of The Dragon Ticket and Other Stories

The Dragon Ticket and Other Stories is the first of my thirty-five books. Although most of the stories in it take place on the Indian Subcontinent, I was living in Greece when I wrote them. I had lived in South Asia for about ten years, though, and my experiences in those enigmatic lands still filled my thoughts. Several of my first stories published in magazines and anthologies were set in Nepal, Kolkata, Mumbai, Kodaikanal, and Dhaka.

In Greece I faced numerous challenges in the path to publication. In the days before periodicals accepted electronic submissions, I had to print out stories and send them with a self-addressed envelope to the markets in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. Since I couldn’t buy the relevant stamps in Thessaloniki, I had to find post offices that sold international reply coupons. These were few and far between, and by the time paper submissions became redundant, I had pretty much cleaned out those reply coupons from almost every post office in town.

In the late 2000s I became enthralled with the fledgling trend in self-publishing. I studied blogs such as those of Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith as well as comprehensive layout and publishing guides on sites like Smashwords to figure out how to do it right. During the school year I taught English as a foreign language, but in the summers I was free, and I took the time to learn to properly format my writing for both digital and print editions. However, when it came to the cover I got some help from 2Pollard Design, a graphics arts business owned by relatives. They produced a vibrant, evocative, and colorful picture and design that is perfect for the subject matter of the stories.

I was cautious when selecting which stories should appear in my first collection; by this I mean that I included mostly previously published tales. In fact, seven of the eight stories appeared in magazines first. In my later collections, after I became familiar with self-publishing, I added more original stories to the mix.

The blurb on the back states:

High in the Himalayas a young woman receives an extraordinary gift. Beneath the streets of Calcutta a man discovers a terrifying presence. In a palace full of sybaritic pleasures a demigod incurs terrible retribution. On a far desert planet teeming with venomous creatures a woman searches for ultimate truth.

In these and other strange and wondrous tales John Walters explores the ramifications of human/alien encounter.

As I explain, though, in the book’s afterword:

The stories are not really about human-alien encounters but about the human condition. Science fiction and fantasy for me have always been literary devices to use to unashamedly produce metaphors, parables, fables – whatever the imagination can conceive. When it comes down to it, there may or may not be aliens out there, but right now it’s all about us, folks.

What a thrill it was to hold it for the first time – a thrill that repeats, of course, with each new publication, but there’s nothing quite like that first book.

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Book Review: Tolstoy by A. N. Wilson; Part Two: The Spiritual Seeker

After writing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy went through profound spiritual changes. He did not abandon literature, but the tone of his writings changed, reflecting his inner metamorphosis. Scorning the Orthodox church, he adopted a personal faith that included extreme pacifism, renunciation of material possessions, and Christian anarchism based on his interpretation of the New Testament (which he learned to read in the original Greek). His fervent moral stand stirred up controversy in Russia and around the world. Eventually the Orthodox Church, which was integrally linked to the official Russian autocracy, excommunicated him, but this caused Tolstoy’s popularity in his homeland to increase, not decline.

Internationally, Tolstoy’s views, which he expressed in numerous works such as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, profoundly influenced Mahatma Gandhi and other political activists. Both Tolstoy and Gandhi drew inspiration from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” As Wilson points out, “By the time his distinctive creed was formed, Tolstoy made no bones about believing that Christ advocated a consistent anarchism, a policy of civil disobedience.” These ideas would surface later, of course, in Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaigns.

As an aristocrat responsible for a large family, numerous servants, and, as his ideas became popular, a legion of disciples and other hangers-on, Tolstoy had difficulty in putting some of his more extreme convictions into practice. This led to discord in the household and, as mentioned, with the church and the government. In other words, he was imperfect in the application of the principles in which he believed. However, his sincerity is without question.

One of the weaknesses of Wilson’s approach to Tolstoy’s spiritual journey is his almost mocking attitude toward Tolstoy’s convictions. As a biographer, it would have been better for him to have stuck to the facts and let readers draw conclusions for themselves. Wilson’s shortsightedness in this lacks Tolstoy’s own clarity. At one point Wilson posits: “With no fiction to write, he was busy making a fictitious character out of himself,” as if Wilson cannot bring himself to believe that for Tolstoy this was a period of inner growth, not an artistic decline.

Wilson comes closer to reality when he writes: “The gap between Tolstoy’s ideals and his actual behavior has made those who do not want to understand him dub him a hypocrite. But a hypocrite is a man who pretends that such gaps do not exist. In Tolstoy there was no such pretence.” And I might add that at least Tolstoy tried to do the right thing. Most people do not try to follow their consciences, at least not to such extremes. Much later, just a few years before his death, when one of his acolytes was arrested and spent a few months in jail, Tolstoy commented: “How I wish they would put me in jail, into a real stinking one. Evidently I have not yet deserved this honor.” This echoes Thoreau, who describes his experience with jail in “Civil Disobedience,” and presages the future prison forays of Gandhi, King, Mandela, and others.

In conclusion, despite its flaws, this book is a thought-provoking read about a man who was not only a literary genius, but also a heroic example for other historical figures who attempted to improve the lives of their fellow humans through pacifism and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Book Review: Tolstoy by A. N. Wilson; Part One: The Writer

This is a complex, opinionated biography of a literary genius. It is at its weakest when Wilson attempts to introduce his personal observations and impressions of Tolstoy’s life and thoughts as if they were the only possible interpretation, and at its strongest when he sticks to facts about Tolstoy and the historical background. The book is broken roughly into two parts: the first deals with Tolstoy’s growth and maturation as a writer, and the second concerns his dedication to spiritual matters in the latter part of his life.

Wilson makes it clear from the outset that Tolstoy was enabled by his circumstances. He was born into a noble family, and it was this that gave him the freedom to pursue the creation of literature in a country in which the vast majority of its population was enslaved to landlords. In fact, when a piece of land was sold, the peasants living on the land were sold along with it. As I read about this sordid arrangement, I wondered how many people might have had the desire and capability of creating art if they had been as free as Tolstoy. I also thought of Rabindranath Tagore, another wealthy member of a privileged minority who went on to become internationally renowned as a writer.

The young Tolstoy is presented as a flawed individual, a typical member of the aristocracy: selfish, profligate, and deeply addicted to gambling, which almost ruined him. At one point it seems he is helpless to prevent himself from destroying his life and the lives of others through card-playing and resultant debt. He drifts about, dabbles in education, and finally enters the military. Ultimately he finds salvation in two things: his writing, and his marriage (at least in the early years).

The narrative sometimes gets a bit muddled when Wilson attempts to analyze Tolstoy’s motives and thought processes while writing particular works. It is also disconcerting when he takes for granted that readers are familiar with obscure Russian and European writers of the era, who he sometimes discusses at length. On the other hand, often Wilson offers genuine insight concerning various phases of Tolstoy’s career, such as this observation of the time after the publication of his first important work, Childhood: “From now onwards, Tolstoy was a writer: that is, a man whose life is defined by what he is or is not writing.” Further on Wilson offers this clarification of the years when the masterpiece War and Peace was in the beginning stages: “Though there were periods of great idleness even during these, the most creative years of his life, such idleness should not be mistaken for literary indifference. A writer is not just at work when he holds a pen in his hand. He needs to allow the work to gestate; and when the work is of the proportions of War and Peace, the gestation will often be long and apparently idle indeed.”

Tolstoy’s marriage helped to stabilize him. He quit gambling and became concerned not only with the education of his own children, but also of the children of the serfs who lived on his land. In addition, his wife became his amanuensis, faithfully copying numerous versions of his works. Still, he was an often unhappy, deeply conflicted individual, and proof that though a person may have been a literary genius, it doesn’t mean that his personal life was enviable. Tolstoy recognized this himself, and after writing Anna Karenina he embarked upon a spiritual journey in which he embraced abnegation and pacifism. We will deal with this aspect of his life in the second part of this review.

Life in a Storage Unit; or, How to Declutter Without Losing Your Sanity

This all began with my desire to do a deep cleaning of the apartment. As I contemplated the task, I began to realize how difficult it was due to the overwhelming presence of – stuff. All kinds of stuff that had accumulated over the years since I moved from Greece back to the United States.

It began with the best of intentions. I needed to create a home for my sons on a severely limited budget. Relatives came to the rescue, first with a vanload of items to help clothe us and furnish our unfurnished house in San Diego, and again with more donated items when we moved from San Diego to Yakima, Washington. We sorely needed the assistance and made use of almost everything we were given. Later, when we finally made the leap to Seattle, my sons came and went as their destinies called them, but when they left they usually left some of their stuff behind. I personally too, as a result of relentless poverty, had a tendency to hang onto things long after their usefulness had passed. After the last son moved out, I downsized from a two-bedroom to a one-bedroom apartment, but due to a lack of time, I had to bring most of the accumulated things with me and somehow cram them into the smaller space. It was a complex jigsaw puzzle of a task, and I supposed that when I had finished I had done the best I could.

But I hadn’t. What I should have done was get rid of as much as I could. Instead, the clutter seemed to grow. Until recently, as I said, when I realized I’d had enough. By this time I had three desks and two dressers, and I only used one of each. I also had six bookshelves bursting with books, DVDs, and games. I had to do something.

I started with the books, and over the course of a few days I gathered three large bags full of volumes I knew I’d never read or refer to again. I managed to sell most of these to a used bookstore, and the others I distributed in the neighborhood little free libraries.

To inspire me, I began reading a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo that one of the boys had left behind on a shelf. I don’t agree with everything the author proposes; for instance, she anthropomorphizes her belongings, takes the perspective of the affluent, and goes to extremes about what should be kept or tossed. Still, I agreed with her that purging and organizing belongings is good for the spirit, and I realized that I would feel better if I attacked the mountainous clutter threatening to overwhelm my small apartment. After the books will come the papers, the clothes, the broken or outdated electronics, and the odds and ends. I’ve even arranged with one of my sons to rent a U-Haul while he’s here for Christmas and get rid of the unneeded furniture. (It turned out that weeks before Christmas one of my brothers came by with his pickup and helped me get rid of the excess furniture.)

What is the goal of all this? For one thing, it will make cleaning the apartment much, much easier. For another, as I clear my living and working spaces, I am confident (or at least hopeful) that my thoughts will become clearer as well.

I’ve never owned much. Even now I own much less than most of my contemporaries. After decades of traveling and living abroad, and also moving from one place to the other in the States, I realize that it is not the quantity of possessions that is important. Some people need or crave more than others. That’s fine by me. The important thing I need to attend to, though, is whether I personally have exceeded my limit. If I have, these extra things will only weigh me down and make me miserable. And so: out with them! I’ve made mistakes, sure; only today I threw out something I afterwards deeply regretted discarding – but I couldn’t get it back. To put it in perspective, though, we’re talking about things. Just stuff. Nothing that can’t be replaced. Or abandoned. Or forgotten.

On Rereading Jurgen by James Branch Cabell (again)

Due to my ongoing need for literary comfort food, I turn once again to the brilliantly written fantasy Jurgen (subtitled in the original, though not in the edition I own, A Comedy of Justice). I think I was still a teen when I first encountered Jurgen, and I have read it several times since. Shortly after its publication in 1919 the author and publisher were prosecuted for obscenity, although no sexual activity is described explicitly. Instead, Cabell makes inferences and liberally uses double entendres to make his points.

The story follows Jurgen on a journey through various fantasy lands to recover his lost wife, who has been abducted by Koshchei the Deathless “who made things as they are.” As he travels, he meets, woos, and sometimes marries a variety of beautiful women, including Guinevere, Helen of Troy, a tree nymph, a vampire in hell, and others. Proclaiming himself “a monstrous clever fellow,” he promotes himself to be a duke, a prince, an emperor, and even a pope as he ascends for a brief time to heaven to meet the God of his grandmother. As he sojourns in each land he conforms to its customs and has many strange and unique adventures. However, despite his heroics and his numerous affairs, he doesn’t find peace, and eventually he recovers his middle-aged wife and goes back to his life as a respectable pawnbroker. During much of the book, a spell has given him his lost youth, yet in the end he relinquishes even this, as he realizes that his youthful body does not match his more mature mind.

When I first read Jurgen, so many years ago, I identified with his youthful incarnation who reveled in new adventures and experiences. As I read it now, though, as an older man, I find myself in sympathy with the middle-aged person who can not quite reconcile his audacity and profligacy with the “respectable” life he has settled into with his wife. He has grown comfortable in his marriage and comes to appreciate his wife’s faithfulness and companionship.

It’s all in great fun, of course; Cabell is not particularly attempting to moralize, but rather to tell a tall tale with a multitude of unexpected twists and turns. The language he uses is a feast for the inner ear, and the outlandish places Jurgen’s destiny takes him are described in intricate and outrageous detail.

If you are looking for deep lessons and social and political relevance, you might have to look elsewhere, but if you want to enjoy a magnificent and humorous fantasy told in exquisite prose, you couldn’t do better than to read Jurgen. For a time, especially after the obscenity trial, Cabell was internationally famous and well-regarded by his literary contemporaries. He is less known now, although still revered by connoisseurs of fine fantasy. Among Cabell’s admirers were writers such as Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Robert Heinlein, Neil Gaiman, and many others. If you’re a fan of humorous fantastic adventures and adroit wordplay, give Jurgen a try. You won’t be disappointed.