Paul Vitols's Blog, page 21

prose sketch: post-picnic in Confederation Park

Thu. 17 Oct 2013 ca. 1:00 p.m. Confederation Park, Burnaby

We’ve just had our lunch at this concrete picnic table: turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce and lettuce, and sharing a can of Sanpellegrino orange pop.

It’s a sprawling park, mostly empty of people on this fine day. Only a few trees dot the wide spaces devoted to play: a playground before us with brightly colored plastic components, a dormant water-park, a basketball court. Off to our left, a lacrosse box; beyond this immediate set of things, a soccer pitch ringed by a terracotta running track, around which a handful of separate people plod like zombies. But there are further playgrounds too, further pitches: a baseball field, more soccer spaces, and vacant swaths of lawn. I suppose it was a munificent setting-aside of public space in 1967 for citizens thought of as aspiring to fitness and healthy socializing. Now, just after lunch break during the school term, there is a sense of rural vastness and depopulation.

A power tool grinds somewhat off to the right—a hedge trimmer? A hammer smacks there as well—and a crow caws, flying by. Other than that, a thrum of traffic, out of sight beyond the trees. The plane-trees, maples, chestnuts are turning, yellow suffusing their foamy green. Leaves float gracefully down. There is the delicious, acrid, smoky smell of autumn. In a month these trees will be bare, and cold rain will fall from a sullen overcast. Now there is the memory of summer: but with a chill in the shadows, and the desert quality of a place from which people have already retreated indoors for the year.

The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli: it’s a jungle out there

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short textbook on how to rule a state is still the playbook for politics.

Looking in my Webster’s, I see the following definition of Machiavellianism:

the political theory of Machiavelli; especially: the view that politics is amoral and that any means however unscrupulous can justifiably be used in achieving political power

Until I’d read his book, this was all I knew of Machiavelli. His name is used only as a label for cunning, underhanded pragmatism, for the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It’s a sneer-word that we throw at those who have achieved their aims unfairly.

It’s true that Machiavelli does not sugar-coat his advice; he intended his work to be used by a real prince (he hoped it would be adopted by the Medicis), who would keep the manual in his council-chamber and not merely add it to the other volumes of his publicly visible library. It uses the plain, unvarnished language of the trusted cabinet adviser speaking in private, off the record. Statecraft is the most pragmatic of businesses; and this is a pragmatic book.

The core of Machiavelli’s message is this: if you wish to rule, then you must base your actions on the way people really are, and not on the way you wish they were. If you want to bring out the best in people, provide them with a secure, prosperous, well-governed state. It just so happens that to do this, the prince is obliged to engage in behavior that, in polite society, is condemned as immoral. He will need to dissemble, to deceive, to break faith, and to take preventive action against his enemies. If he fails to do these things properly, then he will soon be replaced by someone who does not so fail.

I sense that Machiavelli’s bad reputation comes from a belief that his counsel was aimed at creating tyrants: evil, unjust rulers. But I think this is incorrect, for Machiavelli saw that happy subjects should be one of the prince’s prime concerns; indeed, chapter 19 of his book is entitled, “That One should avoid being despised and hated.” The hated prince makes life a lot harder for himself, and shortens his own career.

Nonetheless, Machiavelli, examining the question of whether it is better for a prince to be loved or to be feared, says that, since it is difficult to be both—which would be best—the preferable alternative is to be feared. Why? Because, in general, men

are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children when the need is far distant: but when it approaches they turn against you. . . . Men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.

There you have it: the baseness of men. What do you think? Are men base? Are we driven purely by self-interest? Will we leave others in the lurch when we think that it will benefit us to do so?

The answer, I would say, is yes. Very few of us are purely virtuous. Most of us are driven by vice at least part of the time, and some of us are driven by it all of the time. As a copywriter I was taught that everyone listens to radio station WII-FM: What’s In It For Me? This is natural, normal, and usually harmless to others. Sometimes it’s not harmless. But the point for Machiavelli is that this behavior can be relied on—and that’s what’s useful for the prince to know.

In chapter 15, “Concerning Things for which Men, and especially Princes, are praised or blamed,” the author observes that successful princes have been perceived as both generous and rapacious, as cruel and compassionate, as affable and haughty, and that it doesn’t seem to make much difference to their success which of any of these they are. To be sure, it’s best to be perceived as virtuous whenever possible, but in fact the prince’s actions must above all be effective, and whether they are praised as virtuous or blamed as vicious is an altogether secondary consideration. For a prince the only real vice is failure.

Nonetheless, I noted that in Machiavelli’s list of virtues and vices there was an important omission: the virtue of justice and the vice of injustice. Why didn’t he include these in his list?

Justice is one of the Great Ideas; its fundamental nature remains a matter of controversy. Is it just to liquidate your enemies for the sake of maintaining peace and order in your state? Different people would answer that question differently. My own thought is that people usually will put up with a lot of pain and difficulty if they think that it’s just. I suspect that much of our selfishness arises from our fear or conviction that the world is not a just place, so there’s no alternative to grabbing what you can. This would seem to imply that a prince, by establishing a just state, might encourage people not to act according to what is base in themselves. And indeed Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, argues that justice is the only possible foundation for a viable state. It would be interesting to hear Machiavelli meet this argument head-on.

But I get the feeling that he may have regarded this topic as a luxury for the pragmatic prince. For princes, as Machiavelli acknowledges, are not necessarily men of great vision or ability. Their project is not to set up an ideal state, but rather, merely, to survive. Like any working stiff, they’re just trying to get through their day. The measure of their success is the longevity of their state and of their rule.

For theorists such as Socrates were just that—theorists. Socrates had never run a state in his life. Machiavelli, on the other hand, had had long experience as a magistrate and ambassador. When the Medicis came to power in Florence in 1512 he was imprisoned and tortured, gaining release only when there was a change of pope. He knew the ropes; he’d been on them. His manual, accordingly, is written with hard-won authority.

One of my main takeaways from this book is that statecraft is a distinct and complex art. Machiavelli makes it clear that a prince, if he is to succeed in ruling, has little free time and no true friends; many tasks and projects will occupy his attention, and all of his relationships are instrumental. That’s the job.

The writing itself is admirably pithy, readable, and to the point. In my edition the actual text of his work runs only 37 pages. If I were a prince I would keep it near me and refer to it often. For us non-princes, it still gives excellent insight into the thinking and plotting that lie behind the public blandishments of our rulers.

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Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An erudite adventure story whose progress is slowed by digressions on the art and science of whaling.

I first read this book in 1980. Conscious of reading a classic, and not wanting to miss any more than I had to, I read it slowly, checking each page against Harold Beaver’s extensive notes on the text; and, following this painstaking method, I enjoyed the book hugely. The unhurried pace of the story, combined with its feeling of symbolic depth, made it ideal for reflective savoring along the way, even as the story itself was as straight-up a yarn of manly derring-do as you could ask for. Just as the samurai sword gained its renown by combining in itself the antithetical qualities of hardness and flexibility, so Moby Dick fascinates the reader by combining the romance of nautical adventure with a sense of metaphysical depth.

This second reading I undertook as part of my progress through the Britannica Great Books of the Western World set, and, staying true to the philosophy of that set, I read the novel without looking at any of the accompanying material in the text (apart from reading the 2-page biography of Melville in the Britannica volume). The Great Books are published without commentary, so that the reader can engage directly with the work itself, and form his own impressions uncolored by the scholarship and opinions of experts. And, reading the novel with this less laborious approach, I again enjoyed it.

However, I found that I enjoyed it less than the first time. This will no doubt be partly because I missed the wealth of background and association provided by Harold Beaver, but it was also because I found myself less tolerant of the interruptions in the flow of the story. For the narrator, an experienced seaman but novice whaler named Ishmael, breaks off his narrative at many points to expound upon aspects of whales and the whale fishery. Indeed, there is something obsessive in his fascination with the industry of which he is no longer a part, and as I type these words I realize that his obsession is no doubt a reflection of the obsession of his old skipper, Captain Ahab.

Captain Ahab, the true protagonist of the story, is one of the most famous literary characters ever created. And like all the great characters, he embodies a particular passion. For, just as Homer’s Achilles embodies resentment and Othello embodies jealousy and Ebenezer Scrooge embodies avarice and Scarlett O’Hara embodies envy, Captain Ahab embodies vengefulness. For the captain of the Pequod lost his leg to the Great White Whale named Moby Dick (a name usually spelled without hyphen throughout the book) on a previous voyage, and, in a fishery where the loss of body parts is commonplace, he is not able to let this go; he takes it personally. He holds Moby Dick accountable, and he intends to settle the score.

Ahab’s presence casts a pall of brooding mystery over the ship long before the man himself appears. For he remains hidden in his cabin while the Pequod gets under way, not emerging until they are long out of sight of land. He walks on a peg that is itself made of whalebone, anchoring it in specially drilled holes in the deck so that he can stand steady watch. And soon it becomes clear that, with Ahab in charge, the Pequod is engaged in no ordinary whaling venture; for Ahab no longer cares about whales; he cares about one whale, and he swears his entire crew to this same quest: to find and kill Moby Dick.

Not all the crew agrees with this obsessive mission. The first mate, Starbuck (and yes his name is the source of the name of the famous coffee chain), sane and rational, wants none of it. The friction between these men generates sparks in the course of the voyage.

The story is a true romance, an adventure as exotic as can be in just about every way. For not only does the Pequod set out for the most remote and unknown places on planet Earth, the whale fishery itself is a strange and daunting one in the nautical world, and the crew of the Pequod are an assemblage of some of the most diverse progeny of Noah. For the three harpooners who first set out with the ship are Queequeg the Maori, a freed black slave, and an American Indian—all powerful, imposing, fearless, dark-skinned men. (A fourth, secret, harpooner emerges along with Ahab: a Parsee from India.) Ahab’s monomania notwithstanding, they do engage in plenty of whaling along the way as they hunt for Moby Dick, and the reader is treated to many stunning spectacles, all made credible by the fact that Melville himself had been a whaler and had seen it all first-hand. Ishmael’s first time out in a dinghy to chase a pod of whales proves traumatic, and, having survived, he is able to gain peace of mind only by writing his last will and testament.

The story of Moby Dick is simple, but riveting and brilliant. But, too often I felt, Melville puts his story on pause while he spends a chapter or two or three discussing the details of cetology and the whaling industry. These things are interesting, but I was reminded of reading Tolstoy’s theoretical digressions in War and Peace: they get in the way of the story. On my first reading in 1980, I was not bothered by this because I was taking a leisurely approach to the work as a whole. But this time I became impatient with it.

One interesting point is the perspective brought by the change in time. For whaling is now essentially a banned industry in international waters, and we now know that whales of all kinds are highly intelligent mammals. The whales being chased by the men of the Pequod were still mostly a mystery to the men; Ishmael, studying all the available evidence, decides that the whale is indeed a fish, and not anything else. But he also sees that whales have feelings and intentions. I felt great sadness as the whales were hunted and killed, and I was incredulous that the men were so surprised and even resentful when whales turned on them in anger.

It’s a powerful novel, and deserves its place on the list of Great Books. It is shot through with symbol and myth. Who or what is Moby Dick, exactly? The sea monster Leviathan was present at Creation, apparently, and plays an important role in the Book of Job, which Northrop Frye regarded as the epitome of the narrative of the Bible. Right now I’m reading Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which image he uses to depict the great beast of the commonwealth, made up of individuals. The meanings and echoes are many. There is an intelligent power of Otherness out there, it seems to be saying. Maybe it’s malevolent, or maybe it’s just mirroring our own malevolence to us, for no whale after all ever came on land to stick us with harpoons; that was our idea.

In short, this book got me thinking, and I take that to be only a good thing. I will no doubt read it again, but I expect it will be with commentaries switched on.

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A Dictionary of Angels by Gustav Davidson

A Dictionary of Angels Including the Fallen Angels by Gustav Davidson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This dictionary attempts to list all the angels named in authoritative sources, along with what is known of their functions and relationships.

I got this book in December 1983, probably as a Christmas present (sorry, can’t remember from whom). I had started to acquire reference books, and I had certainly turned toward an interest in spiritual things, so this book would have been a natural addition to my library. But since my main interest was not in Christianity or Judaism, and I did not particularly believe in angels myself, I never gave it more than the odd glance over the years.

Things have changed. For one thing, my current literary opus in progress is about a world in which angels figured much more prominently in people’s imagination; and for this reason alone I have now read the book cover to cover. But another reason is that my view about the existence of angels has swung from skepticism to a definite inclination toward belief. Indeed, the only reason I don’t simply declare my belief in angels is due to lingering uncertainty as to what exactly that term points to. But if I simply stick with the definition that appears in my Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary—”a spiritual being superior to man in power and intelligence”—then I can simply come out and say: I believe.

Indeed, my own belief in angels seems to be greater than Gustav Davidson’s. In his intriguingly personal and fervent introduction, he has this to say about it:

A professed belief in angels would, inevitably, involve me in a belief in the supernatural, and that was the golden snare I did not wish to be caught in. Without committing myself religiously I could conceive of the possibility of there being, in dimensions and worlds other than our own, powers and intelligences outside our present apprehension, and in this sense angels are not to be ruled out as a part of reality—always remembering that we create what we believe. Indeed, I am prepared to say that if enough of us believe in angels, then angels exist.

This profession of belief—if that’s what it is—is surprisingly tepid, considering the passions he experienced in the researching and compiling of his dictionary (a 15-year task, according to The Wall Street Journal). He says he “was literally bedeviled by angels. They stalked and leaguered me, by night and day.” He goes on to say:

I remember one occasion—it was winter and getting dark—returning from a neighboring farm. I had cut across an unfamiliar field. Suddenly a nightmarish shape loomed up in front of me, barring my progress. After a paralyzing moment I managed to fight my way past the phantom. The next morning I could not be sure (no more than Jacob was, when he wrestled with his dark antagonist at Peniel) whether I had encountered a ghost, an angel, a demon, or God. There were other such moments and other such encounters, when I passed from terror to trance, from intimations of realms unguessed at to the uneasy conviction that, beyond the reach of our senses, beyond the arch of all our experience sacred and profane, there was only—to use an expression of Paul’s in 1 Timothy 4—”fable and endless genealogy.”

So Davidson’s project was a kind of obsessive quest, one that led him down many dark and traumatic byways. Starting with the Bible, which, while mentioning angels many times, names only two or three, he worked his way out, writing to theologians and expanding the range of sources he was prepared to investigate to include the pseudepigrapha, such as the books of Enoch, which led him on to “related hierological sources and texts: apocalyptic, cabalistic, Talmudic, gnostic, patristic, Merkabah (Jewish mystic), and ultimately to the grimoires, those black magic manuals.”

Where angels occurred in lists and hierarchies, he recorded and collated these. Often what seemed to be one and the same angel appears under one or more different names (in the case of the angel Metatron, under dozens or maybe hundreds of names). These Davidson carefully noted and kept track of.

The result of all these labors is this dictionary, and it’s a wonderful thing. It consists of a long alphabetical list, followed by 33 short appendixes and an extensive bibliography. The appendixes contain things like various lists of angels (the angel rulers of the seven heavens, the angelic governors of the twelve signs of the zodiac, the angels of the hours of the day and night), but also delightful things like the angelic script and “A Spell to Guarantee the Possession of the Loved One.”

By and large, not much is known about most angels, and so most entries are short—a couple of lines. But many entries are longer. Here’s a fairly typical one:

Crocell (Crokel, Procel, Pucel, Pocel)—once of the order of potestates (i.e., powers),now a great duke in Hell commanding 48 legions of infernal spirits. Crocell confided to Solomon that he expects to return to his former throne (in Heaven). Meantime he teaches geometry and the liberal arts.

Sounds appealingly human: a guy who’s made mistakes and now is getting by with a teaching job in hell.

Or how about this one:

Nilaihah (or Nith-haiah)—Ambelain lists Nilaihah as a poet-angel of the order of dominations. He is invoked by pronouncing any of the divine names along with the 1st verse of Psalm 9. He is in charge of occult sciences, delivers prophecies in rhyme, and exercises influence over wise men who love peace and solitude.

I’d like to think that I have a relationship with the angel Nilaihah—and maybe I do.

There is much, much else in here (there must be 4,000 entries in this book), including a few references to fictional angels in famous (or not so famous) literary works. Here and there the author points ironically to contradictions and absurdities in the various accounts, but he serves them all up as they are, mostly without overt editorial comment.

Even though I have evolved from a nonbeliever to a believer in angels, I’m not sure of the status of the various entities named in this dictionary. Are these actually existing beings? Do they really have these mostly Hebraic names? That’s a tough question; we’re dealing with a supernatural topic, and words, relatively natural things, turn back. Where did the writers of the various source texts get their information?

Maybe we’ll never know. But a great deal hangs on the question of the existence of angels: a universe with them is a much, much different place than a universe without them. In any case, what has been thought and written about angels as individuals has been brought together in this book by Gustav Davidson. It’s a treasure-trove of angelic lore, and a most appropriate addition to a decent reference library.

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The Republic by Plato

The Republic by Plato

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This early effort to deal with the deepest problems of civilized man sets the agenda for all subsequent discussion.

Knowing this to be one of the most important literary works in Western civilization, I got myself a copy of the Penguin Classics paperback in 1979 or 1980. I remember reading it while on evening lunch-break while working as a janitor at Vancouver General Hospital. I was surprised at how easy it was to read, and also by how wide-ranging its discussion was. For I was expecting it to be a work purely about politics, but what I got was, in addition to a work on politics, a searching examination of the nature of the man, the question of what constitutes happiness, and even on the postmortem fate of the soul. Plato showed how all these questions are interconnected, like the cubelets of a Rubik’s Cube: you can’t sort out any of them without sorting out all of them.

Having read the book, I realized that I would have to read it again someday, and that day came this year, when I took it up as part of my project of reading all of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World. Having primed myself with the rudiments of a liberal education over the past three years, I got a lot more out of it this time. I saw greater depths beneath the beguiling simplicity of the dialogue.

Like all, or almost all, of Plato’s works, The Republic is composed as a dialogue between Plato’s teacher Socrates and several interlocutors, in this case mainly Glaucon and Adeimantus, while they join a party at the house of a certain Polemarchus. In the course of some friendly chat with Polemarchus’s aged father Cephalus, Socrates soon raises a question about the nature of justice: what is it? For Cephalus has been speaking of the changes that come over a man’s mind as he approaches death, how he becomes troubled by things that never used to worry him when he was young. His conscience bothers him. And here wealth is a great source of comfort.

For wealth contributes very greatly to one’s ability to avoid both unintentional cheating or lying and the fear that one has left some sacrifice to God unmade or some debt to man unpaid before one dies.

To this Socrates responds:

But are we really to say that doing right consists simply and solely in truthfulness and returning anything we have borrowed?

And we’re off: an inquiry begins on the nature of justice, and does not end until it has carried us through examinations of psychology, politics, and education, among other things. Socrates is quickly able to show that their everyday, common-sense ideas of what justice is cannot stand up to scrutiny. Its true nature is elusive. But Socrates is convinced that justice, as a personal quality, is an indispensable precondition of happiness: the just man is the happiest of men, and the unjust man is the most miserable.

His companions think that this contention is ridiculous. What everyone really wants, in order to be happy, is the appearance of justice, to provide cover for their secret enjoyment of injustice. A man who was able to do whatever he pleased, to take whatever and whomever he wanted for his own enjoyment, without having to face any consequences for his actions, would be the envy of everyone and the happiest of men. Socrates’ interlocutors demand that he show them how such a man, perhaps equipped with the ring of Gyges, which turns its wearer invisible at will, would be not happy but miserable.

Socrates accepts the challenge, and the dialogue properly begins. The discussion leads into an examination of the nature of the soul—that thing which is capable of justice and happiness—and Socrates, getting his hearers to agree that states, being made up of people, exhibit the qualities of those people, but on a larger scale, suggests that they examine the different kinds of state in order to study their subject at a larger scale. Socrates then tries to imagine the ideal city-state, the one in which the people are happiest, and it is this part of the inquiry that gives the dialogue its title.

Interestingly, although that title is The Republic, Socrates argues that the highest type of constitution is a monarchy—or anyway it would be, if the monarch were a truly good man. And since a truly good man is one who both knows and practices the virtues, or in other words is a true philosopher, the ideal monarch would be a kind of philosopher-king. The problem for the founder of the ideal state would be how to find and cultivate the people capable of assuming that role. Accordingly, Socrates sets about designing the institutions and procedures that would lead to an ongoing crop of potential philosopher-kings for the state.

The dialogue covers a tremendous amount of ground, and is controversial in just about every aspect. Socrates’ interlocutors concede points to Socrates that the modern reader never would, and so his argument cannot stand as is for a political or educational or personal program. Even at the time the proposals amounted only to a thought experiment, since the obstacles to implementing Socrates’ vision would surely be insurmountable—”politically impossible,” as we would say today.

But that thought experiment has tremendous value, because Socrates, via Plato, puts his finger right on the decisive problems of human existence, which have changed not one whit since the dialogue was composed in the 4th century BC. The founders of the United States of America, crafting a new republic, did their utmost to establish institutions and laws that would make their state as just as it could be made. What would they say about the militaristic regime that it has spawned, about how the public treasury has been ransacked to keep whole the millionaires and billionaires running privileged financial companies? To name just a couple of ways in which the body politic is shot through with vice. Socrates saw clearly that laws and institutions avail nothing if the men wielding them are vicious. That’s the real problem. It was a problem in Athens in 400 BC, and it’s a bigger problem today.

Socrates offered up what he thought could be a solution. The state he proposes is one that we would call totalitarian, and for this reason alone we would reject it, even though Socrates stresses that he is concerned with the happiness not of individuals, but of the citizen body as a whole (an early enunciation of the doctrine of utilitarianism). We can assume that the ideal state, if there can be such a thing, has not yet been envisaged; that’s work for geniuses of the future.

But I’ve only touched on the political aspect of The Republic; there is so much more in it. The dialogue is probably most famous for the analogy of the cave, which concerns the nature of reality. I won’t go into that here, but it does lend further evidence that either Socrates or Plato was the greatest thinker in the West up to that time. And it’s astonishing to think that Plato would then be rivaled in this distinction by his own student Aristotle.

In sum, the ideas in this book all still matter. Here is a clear, penetrating, and passionate investigation of them by one of the greatest minds of history. It is a book that amply repays the effort of reading it.

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Who Owns the Sky? by Peter Barnes

Who Owns the Sky?: Our Common Assets And The Future Of Capitalism by Peter Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A short, vigorous, and persuasive argument for saving Earth from global warming by converting the atmosphere into a legally defined asset.

I came to this book by way of Peter Barnes’s more recent book Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, in which he focuses more directly on the changes to “capitalism” implied by the ideas presented in Who Owns the Sky?. In the later book the author waxes enthusiastic about applying the “trust” concept to all kinds of commonly held resources, both natural and man-made. Those suggestions are intriguing, but the global climatic convulsion now in progress due to our burning of carbon is such an urgent issue that I wanted to read the earlier book as well.

I’m glad I have. In this book, published in 2001, Barnes walks the reader–briskly–through the line of reasoning that leads from the observation that resources that are not owned, such as the sky, are treated by modern capitalism as worthless, to the suggestion that they can be saved by assigning them a positive value. That means turning the resource, in this case the Earth’s atmosphere, into an economic asset. If we can do that, then capitalism, instead of degrading the sky by dumping waste into it, will start to protect it, because capitalists do not seek to destroy assets; they seek to increase them.

The question is how to achieve this. The author sees three possible approaches. One is having the government recognize the resource as a public asset, like the national forests, and take responsibility for assigning a price for its use. Another approach is to privatize the sky, so that one or more corporations acquire it as an asset that they manage. And the third approach uses the “trust” model: here the sky would be established as an asset in a legal trust, which trustees would manage on behalf of the trust’s beneficiaries, who would be, in this case, the American people. Each American, upon birth or naturalization, would acquire one nontransferable share in this trust, and would receive dividends from it for life. Upon the citizen’s death the share would expire too.

But is this practical? Can the sky really be owned? The idea here is not that people take ownership of the physical molecules that constitute the atmosphere. Rather, they’re taking ownership of the relevant and valuable part of the sky: its capacity to hold greenhouse gases. A cap would be set by government on allowable carbon emissions, and the Sky Trust would sell permits to companies that bring fossil fuels into the U.S. economy, of which there are about 2,000. Each permit would represent the right to store one ton of carbon in America’s share of the global atmosphere. Barnes goes on:

Companies at the top of the carbon chain would buy and sell carbon emission permits to suit their needs. On December 31 of each year, they’d have to own enough permits to cover all the emittable carbon they brought into the economy during the preceding year. If they didn’t, they’d be penalized. No emissions monitoring would be required–just financial reporting similar to what the companies already provide.

Thus, it’s a cap-and-trade system, similar to the one the United States set up to limit the sulfur emissions that cause acid rain, but with two important differences. One is that the Sky Trust is conceived as an upstream system, in which those who first bring the carbon to market are the ones requiring permits, rather than a downstream system, as the sulfur system is, in which end-users are the ones required to have permits. This feature would make the Sky Trust feasible to administer, as well as making it more comprehensive.

The other difference is that the Sky Trust would be a legally constituted but nongovernmental body. Independent of government, its trustees would be legally bound to manage the trust solely for the benefit of its present and future beneficiaries. And every American would receive an annual dividend payment from the net revenues of the trust. This would help offset the increase in prices that would necessarily be brought about by the establishment of such a permit system, while those same price increases would also create incentives for people to use less carbon.

But is such a trust feasible in practice? Yes. Alaska set up a similar trust in 1976 for its citizens to participate in royalties from the extraction of oil in their state. Alaskans have been receiving annual checks for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars. The Sky Trust would simply be a scaling-up of the Alaska Permanent Fund. (Alaskans will then find themselves getting two annual dividend checks. Sweet.)

Speaking for myself, I’m sold. Peter Barnes has persuaded me to abandon my support for green taxes–that is, government-enacted levies on various products and services–in favor of this new trust model. As he describes more fully in Capitalism 3.0, what he’s proposing is the addition of a whole new sector to the economy: the “commons sector”, to stand alongside the private (corporate) and public (government) sectors. I now see green taxes as a stopgap, to be used only until the resource in question can be set up as a commons trust.

Barnes is a good writer. His clear, folksy, humorous style tends to conceal the depth of research and thought that have gone into his work. This is good in that it makes for easy reading and should help his ideas reach the widest possible audience, but I fear that his popular style, lacking gravitas, might give an impression of being lightweight. This is a rare case in which I think the book could have been longer, to flesh out the ideas more and develop the argument more slowly, for there are many new and innovative ideas here, and the reader may need more opportunity to let them sink in.

But if that’s a criticism, it’s not much of one. Peter Barnes is an entrepreneur and he doesn’t like to waste time. The Sky Trust is an idea whose time has come–indeed it’s already overdue. As things stand, we’ve already committed Planet Earth to a massive heating that will take thousands of years to play out, even if we completely cease all carbon emissions before I finish typing this sentence. All life on Earth, including human life, will be scrambling to adapt.

The Sky Trust represents a rational, effective, and just method of reducing our environmental impact, while also preserving and enhancing the prosperity-creating power of capitalism. As ideas go, it’s a winner. Let’s swiftly complete the design phase and move on to implementation.

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Pulp Fiction: cesspool enchantment

The first time I saw the movie Pulp Fiction, probably in the late 1990s, I thought, “Ugh—thank god I don’t have to watch that again.” In programming the 1990s section of my History of Cinema Festival I left Pulp Fiction off the list as a movie I’d already seen and was content not to see again. But as the time for viewing the movies of 1994 drew near, I decided to move it back onto the program, since with its rating of 9.0 out of 10 it is the 4th-highest-rated movie on IMDb. Since my goal is to watch all the best movies ever made, I felt a sense of duty to give it another chance.

Kimmie and I watched it again the night before last, and we both found it much easier to sit through this time. For one thing I was ready for the shocks that the movie dishes up; and for another I think I’ve been desensitized to on-screen violence and vice by watching pay-TV dramas such as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. With my reduced feelings of revulsion, I was able to appreciate Pulp Fiction more.

For why do we watch movies, anyway? We call them entertainment—but what does that mean? It’s supposed to be an agreeable and diverting way of spending time, but what’s agreeable about watching people being murdered, beaten, or sodomized? (Spoiler alert: I may be revealing plot details here, so if you haven’t seen Pulp Fiction and don’t want the experience to be spoiled, come back after you’ve seen it.) True, it’s “only” a movie—but it is a movie that includes those things, graphically portrayed, which portrayal has a repellent and traumatizing effect. Why pay for that? Why choose to watch it?

It puts me in mind of something I’ve been thinking about for the past few months: that all storytelling is fundamentally about virtue and vice. Now Virtue & Vice, taken as a pair, is one of the Great Ideas. This means that its nature is controversial; there is not even any universally accepted definition of virtue or vice. Like all the Great Ideas, they remain a provocative and important-feeling focus of discussion.

In Mortimer J. Adler’s introduction to the chapter on Virtue & Vice in volume 3 of the Britannica Great Books series, he notes that the idea of virtue and vice has changed over time, so that nowadays virtue is considered to mean only sexual chastity, or at least conformity to the prevailing norms of sexual behavior; while vice tends to be limited to referring to indulgence in sensual pleasures. In ancient times these words had much wider meanings, with virtue covering all the positive aspects of character, such as courage, temperance, justice, wisdom, and benevolence. (To these “secular” virtues, religious thinkers added the “theological” virtues of faith, hope, and charity.) Vice then was the corresponding set of negative aspects of character: cowardice, self-indulgence, injustice, folly, and malice. For ancient thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, the consideration of virtue and vice was vitally important, for they believed that the virtues, while good, were not ultimate goods. That is, the virtues were not ends in themselves. Rather, the virtues were means to a further end: happiness. And happiness is an ultimate good, perhaps the only ultimate good for the human being. In those thinkers’ view, if we want to be happy—and all of us necessarily do want to be happy—then we need to cultivate virtue in ourselves. And in order to do that, we should know what the virtues are and how to cultivate them.

I think that Plato and Aristotle are right: virtue is the path to happiness. And I believe that stories help educate us with respect to this truth by demonstrating the shadow-play of virtue and vice in the world, showing us how and why we need to position our own minds, our own souls, with respect to them. This is why we humans find stories so fascinating, and why stories constitute the largest part of our interpersonal communication.

Currently I’m reading Plato’s Republic, and in it Socrates has been describing the different types of personality that correspond to the different types of state, as well as ranking them in terms of the happiness they enjoy in life. In his view, the highest virtue and the highest happiness are enjoyed by the authentic king and the kingly personality. This type, because he understands his own nature, controls its worst elements and cultivates its best, and thus realizes the greatest pleasure in life.

At the bottom of the scale are the tyrant and the tyrannical personality. Treacherous and concerned only with sensuous pleasures and worldly power, the tyrant has no true friends; and since he cannot buy or control men of virtue, he must destroy them or exile them, and surround himself instead with vicious people. He spends his time flattering those he fears, and stripping the assets of those in his power. His life, in Socrates’ judgment, is the most miserable one possible for a man.

Back to Pulp Fiction. On this viewing I saw the story as a study in the tyrannical man. The master tyrant of the story is the gangster Marsellus (played by Ving Rhames), who orders his hitmen Vince (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) to kill some drug dealers who have betrayed him. He also orders the boxer Butch (Bruce Willis) to throw a fight for him. Marsellus is a near-perfect tyrant: rich, callous, loud-mouthed, feared, and with a beautiful wife (Uma Thurman). Later he falls into the clutches of other tyrannical men when, chasing after Butch who has betrayed him in the boxing scam, they are captured by a predatory pawnbroker who wants to use them for sexual purposes.

The other characters are all similarly tyrannical in nature, but weaker in power. Instead of doing anything beneficial for society, they steal and kill people; instead of enjoying life, they take drugs. They are parasites, prospering at others’ expense until they are killed. Their lives are indeed miserable—but not in their own eyes, only in the eyes of those who are less vicious than they are, such as most audience members.

There are moments of virtue in the story. Indeed, he’s not really a tyrant; for one thing, he treats his girlfriend (Maria de Medeiros) with kindness and respect, even when she seriously inconveniences him and causes his life to be endangered. But the central act of virtue occurs when Butch, having fought his way free of the pawnbroker and his perverted associates, hangs for a long moment in the doorway of the store, deciding whether to go back to help Marsellus, who is still trapped within, being tortured. He does go back—an act of courage and benevolence.

These acts of virtue make Butch what Robert McKee calls the center of good in the story: the character with whom the audience can identify. When he returns to his apartment to recover his father’s heirloom watch, we’re relieved that he’s able to turn the tables on Vince, who is lying in wait for him, and blow Vince away with his own silenced machine-gun. How different the story would feel if it had been the other way around, and Vince did kill Butch as planned. (Vince’s being dispatched for this job might reveal treachery on Marsellus’s part, who promised Butch that they were all square with each other after Butch saved his life. But it’s possible too that Vince was dispatched long before, and has simply not been called off the job.) Then the story would have been dark indeed.

Pulp Fiction has been hailed as a postmodern masterpiece, a powerful expression of ironic knowingness and pop-culture pastiche, but to me all those things are superficial and do not touch what is important about the work. I’m suggesting that the story—any story—is fundamentally about its portrayal of virtue and vice. This is what makes it the kind of story it is, and what the audience relates with most immediately. Pulp Fiction depicts an especially large and deep cesspool of viciousness, but I believe its great success was due not so much to its stylishness as to the fact that in that cesspool, a lone, fragile lotus of virtue was still trying to grow.

If Plato and Aristotle are right, and the virtues are ordered to happiness as causes to an effect, then the great and universal popularity of stories is easily explained. Stories show us the dark and light sides of our character, and the consequences flowing from actions motivated by each side. Stories—good ones—are trying to help us be happy.

How good is Pulp Fiction? I think it’s pretty good. Being hip and cool is all very well, but if that’s all a movie is, then it’s destined to become a mere period piece. Pulp Fiction is more than that, but I think the filmmakers would have to have taken stronger hold of the virtue-and-vice content of their story in order to make it something great. When Butch hangs in that doorway, he has to decide whether to plunge back into the cesspool from which he’s on the brink of escape. To me that’s the moment that counts, but I don’t think the filmmakers realized it. They were enchanted with their cesspool.

Herod’s Judaea by Samuel Rocca

Herod’s Judaea by Samuel Rocca

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This fabulously expensive book gives a wide-ranging, well-researched survey of the kingdom of Herod the Great.

Even though this book appeared to be exactly what I wanted and needed for research into my own historical work in progress, I hesitated to buy it for a year or more because of its price. As of today, the book is offered on the website of its publisher, Mohr Siebeck of Tübingen, Germany, for €129; on bookfinder.com the lowest price for a new copy is Cdn$163.48 (and for a used copy? $175.20!). I believe in free markets and I believe that every product and service in a free market should be priced so as to maximize profit to the seller. The exorbitant prices being asked for this book tell me that the market in this case is not a free one, for even an eager buyer, like me, is deterred by the price. There must be some captive market for it, such as academic students, although it’s hard to imagine there are enough of these to justify the practice.

So it’s a mystery. But here I lodge my protest at being gouged. Before too long, I think that the e-book revolution will put an end to such practices. It can’t be soon enough. However, I don’t factor price into my rating of a book, so the publisher has escaped my wrath on that score; and presumably pricing has nothing to do with the author.

I probably would never have rolled the dice on Herod’s Judaea if I had not already read another work by Samuel Rocca: The Army of Herod the Great, part of Osprey Publishing’s Men-at-Arms series. I had been well pleased with that, so I felt confident enough to give this more expensive volume a try. And for my purposes, Samuel Rocca delivered the goods.

As I recall, the book began as Mr. Rocca’s PhD thesis. Perhaps for that reason, it begins with a 17-page discussion of the purpose of the research and its methodology. I believe all of that should have been cut from the book, since the content and the arguments used become manifest as one reads.

But then Rocca gets down to business, examining the reign of Herod the Great in 8 chapters:

Herod the king: royalty and the ideology of power
The court of King Herod
The army of King Herod
The administration and economy of the Herodian kingdom
The ruling bodies of Herodian Judaea
The cults of the Herodian kingdom
The Herodian city
Herod’s burial

His mission is not to discuss Herod’s biography or character, but only his reign and its effects on the country. And the result is a revisionist view of King Herod: one that sees him as a bringer of peace and stability to a land that had known little of these, as a shrewd and competent monarch who managed to maintain formal independence from Rome while enjoying a good relationship with the new emperor Augustus, and as a visionary whose munificence and vast architectural projects turned Judea, in the world’s eyes, from a backward little country into a place of some splendor.

In the author’s view, Herod modeled his kingship mainly on three figures: on Alexander the Great, as the epitome of the charismatic monarch; on Solomon, as the emblem of Judaea’s own past greatness; and on Augustus himself, as a citizen of no royal birth who made himself master of the world’s dominant empire. With these examples in mind, Herod refashioned the state of Judaea and its institutions so as to put an end, for a time, to the internecine strife that had plagued it for so long.

In the course of developing these arguments the book goes into lots of fascinating detail. I loved reading the author’s reconstruction of Herod’s court, based on what is known of the ancient Israelite royal courts and of the surrounding Hellenistic courts. He discusses Herod’s palaces and their staff, and includes architectural plans of these. His discussion of Herod’s army also is well-informed and authoritative—as I expected after reading his book for Osprey Publishing. This section discusses the different kinds of fortifications, again with accompanying architectural diagrams. I learned that Herod very likely had a navy, as did his Hasmonean predecessors, with ships patrolling even the Dead Sea. Interesting.

The author also naturally spends time discussing the administration of the kingdom—its structure of governance and its system of justice, as well as how it was likely taxed. Rocca believes that Jews were not so heavily taxed by Herod as is usually assumed. He thinks that that burden of taxation fell mainly on the richest subjects, and also that Herod had large sources of revenue other than taxation, such as the income of royal estates and tolls on the caravan trade. For this reason, among others, Rocca thinks that ordinary Jews would likely have had a favorable view of their new king.

Nowadays King Herod is proverbial as a tyrant, but the author believes that this view is not warranted by what history tells us. For example, Herod’s infamous slaughter of the children of Bethlehem is attested nowhere outside the Bible, and it seem unlikely that Josephus, for one, would have remained silent on this. Nonetheless, Herod is known to have had wives and sons executed—although such acts of wrath are common in the annals of monarchs generally. Rocca believes that much of the opprobrium that has fallen on Herod is due to his apparent lapse into madness at the end of his life. (In a footnote, the author says that according to Dr. Jan Hirshmann, Herod died of chronic kidney disease, complicated by a rare condition called Fournier’s genital gangrene!)

In all I found that this book was mostly what I hoped it would be. The actual prose is readable and straightforward, although tending to some wordiness and also occasional repetition of the same information in the main text and in footnotes. The bibliography is large and it’s clear that the author did a great deal of study to prepare his text, and his effort has borne fruit. I learned a lot about Herod and about ancient Judaea—and I’ve been doing some studying of my own.

No, the only thing I can really fault this book on is the price. Grrr.

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Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoğlu

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While perhaps overlong and a bit dry, this book contains insights that go a long way, at least on a political and economic level, toward answering that perennial question, “What’s wrong with the world?”

I became aware of this book by reading an enthusiastic review in The Economist, and immediately set out to buy a copy, since the subject matter is so close to my heart. If, as Plato and Aristotle asserted, human beings live together and form societies in order to enjoy a higher quality of life than they can achieve on their own, then why do so many societies, even after all this time, live in such poverty and under such oppressive political conditions? How is it that these basic aims of society are continually being frustrated and subverted? Or, in other words, as Dennis Miller said on Saturday Night Live when a second Ernest Worrell movie was being released: “What is wrong with mankind?”

The authors don’t address themselves to that question directly, but the subtitle of their book, “the origins of power, prosperity, and poverty”, indicates that their focus is on what matters most to us in the public sphere. When they looked at the phenomenon of how certain societies, which are internally divided by nothing more than a political boundary line, can show such great disparities in wealth and freedom on the different sides of that line, they realized that the most commonly held explanations for poverty and repression cannot hold.

The usual explanations are either geographical, racial, cultural, or intellectual. But Acemoglu and Robinson point to several examples of disparities that cannot be explained in these ways. The cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, are actually just one city that happens to have a national border running through the middle of it; the people on each side are ethnically and culturally much the same, and they live in exactly the same geographical circumstances. But Nogales, Arizona is prosperous, while Nogales, Mexico is poor. The key difference is political, and the most important aspect of that difference is the different character of the political institutions of each society.

The authors divide political and economic institutions into two categories: extractive and inclusive. Extractive institutions are those whereby wealth is produced by a majority and then extracted by an elite minority for its own use. Most of the world lives under such institutions, which can exist under any kind of political regime, whether monarchist, republican, socialist, or communist. The tight grip on political power by an elite is what allows the extractive economic institutions to persist.

By contrast, inclusive institutions are those whereby people have substantial autonomy and a meaningful voice in how political decisions are made. They have secure property rights and considerable freedom in choosing how and where they will exert their efforts. If they produce wealth, they are, for the most part, able to keep it, and so have incentives to innovate and take risks. Only such societies have a record of producing lasting and increasing wealth over the long term.

This is not to say that extractive societies cannot generate wealth over the short term; they can and do. The Soviet Union was one such. Through the middle of the 20th century the rulers of the USSR, by issuing decrees and forcibly allocating people and resources into certain sectors at the expense of others, were able to generate much industrial production. But extractive regimes cannot tolerate the all-important mechanism of “creative destruction”—the overthrow of existing methods and businesses when new techniques are discovered. Such unpredictable change is too threatening to authoritarian government, and there’s not enough in it for them: they’re happy with the way things are. Also, because such rulers appropriate the lion’s share of wealth to themselves, there is minimal incentive on the part of the public to exert themselves to produce more. So by the 1980s the Soviet Union’s growth spurt was finished.

How do inclusive institutions come about? They can arise when societies reach “critical junctures”—events that are upsetting enough to the existing order that there is an opportunity to redraw the social rules to be more inclusive. The authors point to how the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century disrupted feudal institutions, which were extractive, and placed more economic and political power in the hands of the surviving laborers. Many laws were enacted to try to turn back the clock and force workers to labor for their old rates of pay, but these laws were all soon dead letters. Market forces prevailed, and the serfs of Western Europe were freed from their bondage to feudal estates.

Several other critical junctures had to be negotiated before the inclusive institutions of modern Britain could be developed, and it was possible at each step that the process would be arrested. The authors emphasize that the process is contingent and in no way determined. To a great degree it may even boil down to luck.

This reader found the thesis persuasive. I felt that the authors made their case; indeed, for me they over-made it, for I found the book repetitive. There is an old teaching adage that in giving instruction, you should tell people what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them. I felt that the authors carried this too far, that they were reminding me too often that the factors involved in all their case studies were these inclusive and extractive institutions, along with their accompanying terms “creative destruction”, “pluralism”, and “property rights”.

The case studies themselves—the stories of different countries at different periods of history—were interesting, and often illuminating, but I felt sometimes that the authors went into more detail than necessary to make their point, the more so because it was always the same point again and again. For example, I felt there were too many technical details given about the Industrial Revolution. A more broad-strokes approach would have been fine for their purpose. As for their actual prose, I found it to be clear and readable, but also plain and colorless. Their book is a report, and although it’s a very good report, it does not offer reading joys beyond what you can expect from a report.

At the end of the book they raise the important question of how their idea, if true, can be applied. In a short space they show that historical approaches to trying to improve the lot of the world’s poorest people have mainly yielded disappointing results. I was shocked at how much foreign aid leaks away into intermediaries’ pockets before any of it reaches its intended beneficiaries—and this before any kind of criminal misappropriation happens. But the authors acknowledge that there is no simple way of applying their theory to the practice of encouraging economic development. Its main use will be to spotlight what doesn’t work. What is possibly their most promising suggestion consists of a single sentence:

Instead, perhaps structuring foreign aid so that its use and administration bring groups and leaders otherwise excluded from power into the decision-making process and empowering a broad segment of population might be a better prospect.

That’s it. But good idea.

The Arab Spring was under way just as the authors were completing their manuscript; as I type these words Egypt is in the grip of deadly social unrest as supporters of the ousted president Mohamed Morsi are shot at by the Egyptian army. Egypt is at just the sort of critical juncture that the authors describe in their book, and their observation that the outcome of these junctures is highly contingent seems to be beyond question. I had high hopes for Egypt when Morsi was elected in June 2012; now, with the president deposed and a mounting death toll, things look bleak.

Egypt has not climbed from the tar-pit of extractive institutions, and it might never do so. But I now would not hesitate to say that the Arab Spring was about the popular yearning for inclusive institutions. They may not have been able to articulate it thus, but those people of the Middle East and North Africa wanted—and still want—more secure property rights, more voice in the political decision-making of their societies, and more freedom to live as they choose. Something tells me that Acemoglu and Robinson’s book is being read there, and that these ideas will indeed form the basis of successful movements toward power and prosperity. May it be so.

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Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s long, it’s comic, and it’s fictional, but beyond that, this work defies categorization.

As I recall, the first I ever heard of this book was when it was mentioned in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, a book I bought in June 1980 as part of my passionate youthful desire to learn all I could about Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow. It contains an essay by Edward Mendelson entitled “Gravity’s Encyclopedia”, proposing a category of fiction called “encyclopedic narrative”—works intended to present a near-exhaustive portrait of the world at a certain time. The works that can be thus categorized, according to Mendelson, are few. In the Western tradition, at least, they amount to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Apart from these there are some near misses, including, according to Mendelson, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which he terms a “mock-encyclopedia”. It occurs to me now that this label might put Shandy in an even more rarefied category, one which it likely shares with no other work.

I next encountered it in Wayne Booth’s The Rhethoric Of Fiction, a copy of which I got in June 1981. Booth’s book, devoted to studying how fiction is narrated, spends a fair amount of time with Tristram Shandy, since Sterne’s work seemed to bend, change, or invent so many rules of narration. It’s a book that’s largely about the writing of that same book, which never really gets written, even though you’re reading it.

Curious, I got myself a copy of the Penguin English Library edition in 1982 and read it. I recall that I enjoyed it quite well, but wasn’t able to make much of its strangeness. For to call it a novel is possibly a misnomer; it’s a long discourse that sets out to tell a story, but never really succeeds, because the narrator—Tristram Shandy, whose story it is supposed to be—spends so much time in digressions of one kind or another. He begins his tale not with his birth, but with his conception, reckoning that the course of his unfortunate, misadventurous life can be put down to his father’s distraction while in the act of begetting him. For at the crucial moment, Shandy’s mother asks his father, “have you not forgot to wind up the clock?”—a monthly chore that Mr. Shandy always took care of on the same day as his marital relations, for the sake of convenience. This contretemps, Tristram Shandy believes, set the tone for a life that has not run true.

And the first example he gives of this is an account of the birth resulting from that (mis)conception. The account is far from straightforward, occupying a quarter of the book, or maybe a third, but in the course of it a deliciously rich picture is drawn, or largely implied, of this 18th-century English family. Gradually the people and circumstances come into view, and they are quirky, original, vivid, and funny. The main characters are Tristram’s father Walter, a minor country gentleman with a quick temper and a restless, eccentric intellect, and Walter’s humble, compassionate brother Toby, invalided from the army with an injury to his groin. Also prominent is Corporal Trim, Toby’s fervently loyal manservant, who was also invalided from military service with a knee injury. A halo of other characters surrounds this central trio: Shandy’s mother, Dr. Slop who aids in delivering the boy, the vicar Yorick who is actually thought to descend from the deceased court jester at Elsinore (and who is also thought to represent Sterne himself, who was a cleric), and the widow Wadman who is in love with Uncle Toby. Each of these characters—along with others—forms a vivid impression, even though none of them gets to hold the stage for any sustained length of time, not at one stretch, anyway.

In short, the whole episode is a balls-up from start to finish: the young boy is misbegotten, misborn, and misnamed, all due to various peculiar chains of causation relating to the quirks of the people involved. And all this is narrated with many detours into tangential topics and episodes. When a sermon on conscience falls out of a book on fortifications, where it seemingly has been slipped just to keep it flat, the group has Corporal Trim read it aloud for their entertainment—and the sermon is given in full, with interjections by the hearers. This type of seemingly random inclusion is typical of the novel.

But is it random? No matter how loose, playful, and wayward the book may be, there is the guiding genius of the author who has chosen to place these nuggets in his text. The narrator continually promises to explain things later or to elaborate on certain subjects in future chapters, and sometimes he makes good on these promises, sometimes not. The whole thing is a complex tapestry that is unfinished and has no hope of being finished and never did have any hope of being finished—just like life.

As best as I can make out, the novel has four large sections: Tristram Shandy’s birth, some episodes of his boyhood (just two or three of these), a travelogue of being in France as an adult, and the story of Uncle Toby’s “amours” with the widow Wadman. That’s it. It doesn’t add up to a coherent whole. It’s what the narrator managed to get out.

But I’m conscious here that I’m not doing the book justice. I laughed out loud several times while reading it—something that doesn’t happen often. And Sterne’s characters are among the most vivid and memorable in all of literature. They’re funny because they’re the way people really are. Walter Shandy is continually irritated by the squeaking hinge on the parlor door and continually resolves to fix it—and never does. Sound familiar? Incidentally, that faulty hinge is responsible for crucial information leaking from the parlor to the below-stairs staff, another example of the interconnectedness of everything, both in the book and beyond.

But what struck me more than anything was that Sterne, unlike most comedians, is able to portray love. He sees—and presents—its ridiculous side, but he does not regard love as something that is itself ridiculous. Walter and Toby Shandy have a deep love for each other that they’re not shy about expressing, and the warmth of their hearts radiates from the pages of the book. That warmth can only have come from Sterne’s own heart. Likewise the relationship of Toby and Trim is fundamentally one of love. Trim is devoted to Toby, and Toby repays that devotion with respect, appreciation, and affection. Toby’s “amours” with the widow Wadman are more strictly comic—how could they be otherwise, since Toby acknowledges that he doesn’t “know the right end of a woman from the wrong one”—but even here there is the tender pulse of humanity beating under all.

Many works have been called one-of-a-kind, but if that designation could possibly amount to a category, then I think Tristram Shandy can scarcely be fit even into that, so original is it. Samuel Johnson, holding that “Nothing odd will do long,” said that “Tristram Shandy did not last.” Well, Dr. Johnson, this time you got it wrong. It looks like Shandy’s here for the duration, and we’re all the better for it.

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