Paul Vitols's Blog, page 24

sketching the Holy Land of 2,000 years ago

I keep developing my working methods as I go. The idea is to be creative and pragmatic: I want to find methods that work and use them.

One of my tools is a folder in Word called Sketchbook. This contains prose “sketches” of locations connected with my story. Lately I’ve been working on chapters that take place in Jericho. Part of my library of aids in realizing the ancient world is a set—or more than one set—of CD-ROMs of images of the Holy Land, prepared by a photographer and biblical-site enthusiast named Todd Bolen. One of the sets I’ve acquired from him is called “Historic Views of the Holy Land: The 1900s”, an archive of photographs taken in and around Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The images are sorted by region. As Bolen notes, one of the strengths of these images is that the Holy Land in 1900 still looked in many ways similar to the way it did in the time of Jesus.

So I look through the photos and find some that I think might help me visualize and describe the location, in this case, Jericho. Here’s the prose sketch I made of the image labeled “Jericho, modern city from south”:

There are drystone walls, and parts of the rectangular houses are stone. Roofs are flat, sloping, undulating, lying like carpets on the long boxes of the buildings. They seem to be lath-and-mud. One or two are piled with dirt, thickened humps, maybe to keep them cooler. The nearby house has a built-up patio, concave and naturally shaped, shaded with a tangled lattice of bare branches held aloft on unstraight, forked poles. Across the lane in front is what might be a pen, also built of these bare branches enclosing a rectangular space. The houses lie aligned in rows with lanes between them; each has a black rectangular doorway, some double-wide like the nearby house; and here and there is a square black window. Bushes, or maybe straw, lie piled on the tops of the nearest rock walls, which fence in a yard. A woman in black, a man in white, and two little girls sitting on the ground facing each other.

And here is one I did earlier, from a different set, the “Pictorial Library of Bible Lands”, featuring color photos of the current-day Holy Land:

The sky is pale blue, and settles down to a dusty haze over the distant ground. There’s a blue-green stripe where the Jordan must be, and closer by, desiccated rocky-gravel hills, rough as the broken edges of porcelain. The color varies from a kind of rubbed olive to the whitish-tawny of teeth. The wide stretches of ground left unirrigated are desert the color of lion’s pelt. The watered parts are bars and patches of deep green. Closer by, where the air is clear, down below the summit of Cypros, are trees with black leaves, and cube stone buildings tinged with rose. But mainly this is parched ground, with the dry mountains of Transjordan barely suggested in the gray haze to the east.

To me it makes sense for a literary artist to make studies and sketches just as a visual artist does, to discover things and work things out before adding them to the large work.

Ten Philosophical Mistakes by Mortimer J. Adler

Ten Philosophical Mistakes by Mortimer J. Adler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short, authoritative text surveys some of the major gaps and problems in modern thought.

I bought a used copy of this book in 2010, as part of my first gush of excitement over learning about the Britannica Great Books series and Adler’s role in bringing it to fruition. I bought several of Adler’s books and downloaded a number of his papers and interviews. As I continue to work my way through them, I remain convinced that he was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.

But are thinkers important? What difference does it make? One person thinks one thing, someone else thinks something else; so what?

At a number of places in this book, Adler states why it makes a difference. For example, in chapter 10 on “Human Existence”, about whether a human being is a single thing or a congeries of parts, he notes, “Without the kind of identifiable identity that belongs to the individual thing as a subject of change, human beings, having obviously mutable existence, could not be held morally responsible for their acts.” This is an important practical consequence of holding one view or another here.

The mission of the book is simple: to show how, with 10 major ideas, such as “Knowledge and Opinion”, “Moral Values”, and “Happiness and Contentment”, the opinions of modern philosophy are incorrect.

In the case of Knowledge and Opinion, Adler takes aim at the knots into which philosophy has tied itself over the question of whether and how we know what we know—if we do indeed know it. He identifies the key authors of the philosophical mistakes here as David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hume, in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), determined that the only knowledge that can properly be so called is that arrived at through mathematics, logic, and certain empirical sciences. Philosophy, theology, and other non-numeric fields “can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” Kant, deeply affected by Hume’s work but finding his result repugnant, responded by developing an elaborate idealistic philosophy of his own that was intended to rehabilitate these junked fields of knowledge.

In Adler’s view, the work of both these thinkers was founded on mistakes early in their chain of reasoning. He says of Kant that he “had no awareness of the distinction between empirical concepts and theoretical constructs”—that is, between concepts derived from sense-experience and concepts that are purely abstract and not capable of being manifested to the senses in any way. Adler notes that many constructs of modern physics fall into the latter category, such as quarks, mesons, and black holes. Not distinguishing between these kinds of concepts, Adler says, led Kant to turn his back on reality and formulate a view of the world that was purely mental. But in reality, according to Adler, reality exists.

As implied by the book’s title, these issues are not matters of opinion; modern thinkers—and some ancient ones—made definite mistakes that led to erroneous conclusions. Adler is setting out to correct these mistakes and lead the reader to the correct conclusion in each case.

Is he right to think this? Here I’m not sure. This book, published when the author was 82, is a mature work by a diligent thinker who was deeply versed in the source texts and the whole tradition of thought. He does not suffer from the deficit of which he accuses other modern thinkers—including such heavyweights as Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, and John Locke—namely, of not having thoroughly read the classic philosophical works, particularly those of Aristotle. In many cases, he says, Aristotle has the answer to these modern problems; it’s just that modern thinkers aren’t aware of it. And that lack of awareness has caused them to wander fruitlessly down many a long cul-de-sac. But can Adler really be so certain?

I wouldn’t dare contradict a man of Adler’s superior learning and depth of acquaintance with the material, but I do have my doubts. My own observation is that every philosopher is tempted at some point to overplay his hand and treat his conclusions as rock-solid. And the better the philosopher, the greater this temptation is likely to be. We now treat Aristotle’s celestial mechanics as a historical curiosity, but he felt it was quite solid because several independent lines of observation and reasoning all led to the same conclusions. And Aristotle was perhaps the greatest thinker in Western history.

My own more modest philosophical training has been in the context of Buddhism. I’m no expert there, but I do know that Buddhist thinkers have been closely examining the question of the nature of our identity and our existence for thousands of years, and I feel sure that their view of Adler’s take on “Human Existence” would be that while it is astute and well argued, it is only peeling the skin off the onion. He’s not in a position to be offering a final conclusion.

Likewise with the question of reality. Adler is critical and dismissive of idealism as a philosophy; he is a realist. But in Buddhism the nature of reality is not a simple question. It has depths that can really only be discovered in one’s experience, via meditation. There are ways in which our everyday experience is dreamlike, and yet we don’t regard dreams as real.

Be all that as it may. Adler may be offering his little book as a set of answers to these thorny philosophical problems, but its real value is merely in drawing our attention to them and discussing them. He lays out issues and he gets you thinking, and he does it with simple, vigorous, nontechnical prose. But I’m sure he doesn’t want us to take his word for any of these assertions. If we have questions and doubts about what he’s saying, then good—we’re thinking. I’m sure nothing would have pleased Adler more.

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prose sketch: just before the haircut

Tue. 5 Mar 2013 3:10 p.m. Eternal Salon

My back is to the street, but I see the flight of cars past the storefront in the wall-sized mirror behind the glass shelves opposite me. There is a grating purr of blow-dryers and the chatter of Asian women’s accented English. Short, black-haired women—including my own stylist, Kathy.

freebies

It’s Read an E-Book Week until 9 March, and Smashwords, my distributor, is offering a promotion on many books, including my own Truth of the Python, which is available for free until then. To download a free copy, just go to the Smashwords page and buy the book, entering the coupon code DC89S. The whole thing is then yours to keep for free.

a python is conceived, part 2

When I finished my last post about the birth of Truth of the Python, I made it seem that I had a definite sense of direction in my desire to seek spiritual truth, but it wasn’t really that way. I did have an urge toward or a sense of the divine, and a conviction that nothing in life, including my writing, would have any meaning for me apart from my relationship with the divine.

When I read The Way of Zen by Alan Watts while traveling in 1979, I felt sure that the Zen Buddhists did indeed have a path to the full realization of ultimate truth—what the Buddhists call enlightenment. But how could I, in Vancouver, follow that path, even if I got up the decisiveness and the nerve? Could I just pack my bags and head to a Buddhist monastery in Japan? What would happen?

In about 1980 I came across a book that told me: The Empty Mirror by Janwillem van de Wetering, a Dutch writer of, I think, crime novels. For he had done that very thing: inspired by Zen, he had packed a bag, traveled to Kyoto, Japan, and simply shown up on the porch of a Zen monastery there. I remember the response he got after waiting around and eventually being met by someone who could speak English: “The abbot wants to know why you wish to leave your luggage in our hall”—or words to that effect. With difficulty he managed to explain his purpose, and, again with difficulty, to be accepted as a postulant.

Yahoo! A dream come true! Not exactly. Life as a Zen novice was hard. It was doubly, triply hard because van de Wetering spoke no Japanese, and he was unable to sit in the lotus posture required by their tradition. The locals, used to sitting on the floor cross-legged, had little difficulty with this, but for van de Wetering the meditation sessions became ordeals. He took to begging off sick so he could escape the pain.

One boon for van de Wetering was the presence of an American at the monastery, an ex-soldier who had become a senior student. This student helped him a lot in the time that he was there, but van de Wetering still had to face the punishing zazen sessions and the weekly interview with the abbot to try to answer his koan.

He never did solve his koan—at least, not while he was at the monastery. Some months later, maybe a year or more, he left again, feeling perhaps no closer to enlightenment, but no doubt with plenty of respect for Zen as a discipline.

What about me? Did I think I could do any better than Janwillem van de Wetering? Did I have his initiative and perseverance$151;his guts? Could I solve a Japanese koan in any finite time? I didn’t seem likely to me. It didn’t seem likely at all.

But if that really were the only avenue to capital-T Truth, could I simply give up like that? Didn’t I owe it to myself to try? Shouldn’t I at least fail after trying, instead of conceding defeat beforehand?

These thoughts contributed to the shadow of unhappiness that lay over my life at that time. Perhaps only very few people ever found a thread that could lead them to enlightenment; the great majority would never find it. Indeed, the great majority would never want it and never miss it. But I was not one of those. I was conscious of my want. Perhaps I was living in a time of mass spiritual starvation, when food could be found only by the fortunate few, while the rest simply starved. And I was to be one of those.

Or maybe, just possibly, there were other answers. Might there not be nourishing food for the spirit in places other than a monastery in Kyoto? Soon I was to glimpse that maybe, indeed, there was such a thing.

To be continued. . . .

a python is (almost) conceived

On 6 May 2011 I made a final post to my old blog, Genesis of a Historical Novel, entitled “a python is born”, announcing the e-publication of my novel Truth of the Python. But I want to explore how that novel came to be. If that post was about its birth, I suppose I’d like to trace its conception and gestation.

I get lots of ideas for creative projects, and always have done. A shortage of ideas has never been my problem. (This is what I tell people who try to get me to write their stories when they find out I’m a writer.) My problem has been rather which ideas to commit to—which ones to invest my time and energy in, and bring to a conclusion. There have been few of these in my life, and many abandoned projects lie at the roadside of my past. It’s all connected to that basic problem: what to write about?

When I was still at UBC—a short single-term career in 1979—I had an idea for an epic sci-fi work. I’m not sure exactly when I conceived it, but it was probably in the summer of 1979, just before that single term. Because of its large scale (the only way I think of anything, it seems), I imagined it would be a trilogy, the first volume of which I gave the title More Things to Come, intended, among other things, as an allusion to the 1933 future-fiction epic The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells (of which I’d only seen the movie on TV).

The story was to be complex and satirical, but part of the premise was that a small army of female robots, which I called gynoids, under the power of a single artificially intelligent computer, would, using their synthetic wiles, take over part or all of the U.S. land-based nuclear missile system, and from there hold the world hostage. My hero was a young, neurotic mathematical genius who had developed the intellectual property that had enabled the computer to become (apparently) sentient, and he would find himself drawn into a vortex of strange events and groups that all had a stake in the situation, its outcome, and its meaning.

The major inspiration for this work was Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which I had read the previous fall while traveling in Europe. It made an enormous impression on me, and as I read I often thought, “Man, this is what I wanted to write!” Ah, if only it were that easy. Did I even understand Gravity’s Rainbow? Probably not very well. But no matter: it was the word-by-word reading experience that I really loved—the jarring and shocking mix of satire, science, politics, and intensely evocative description, and all around world-changing geopolitical events. I knew I couldn’t write just like Pynchon, but I did have talent, plus desire.

I read, I planned, I made notes, I drafted chapters. I used large sheets of chart-paper to make interconnected diagrams like flowcharts. I faced problem after problem, and I solved quite a few of them. I went traveling in 1981–82 to visit locations I planned to use in London, Switzerland, Jerusalem, and Kenya. But 1982 melted into 1983, and ’83 into ’84, and I was still far from finishing my first volume. I became filled with doubts and felt my motivation flag.

The question nagged at me: was this story saying what I wanted to say? Was this what I wanted to be talking about as a writer?

On an earlier trip to Europe in 1978 with my friend Tim, I had had my spirit awakened. It happened near the end of our trip, in February 1979, when we were in Rome. At an English bookstore there I came across a Pelican paperback called The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. (I’d been primed by reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance shortly before.) I started reading this book as we rolled out of Rome, and I found myself electrified. I became convinced that there is such a thing as profound spiritual truth, and that it was not possible for a human life to be fulfilled without gaining a relationship to it.

At this point the thought was only a seed, a feeling. Indeed, it may have been the spark that actually kindled my More Things to Come project which was created shortly thereafter, and which had a significant spiritual dimension of its own. But as time went on I found I wanted to relate with that aspect of it in a more heartfelt way.

A big problem confronted me: what did I know about spirituality or ultimate truth? Precious little. And therefore, I thought, I had precious little to say to my fellow humans. But the talent and desire were still there, burning, seeking expression. What to do?

It was a problem that was to bother me for some time, and would keep me as, in some ways, more of a reader than a writer in the coming years. But the practical part of me thought: well, I’d better learn more about this spiritual truth stuff. So that’s what I did.

To be continued. . . .

The Illegitimacy of Jesus by Jane Schaberg

The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, Expanded Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Jane Schaberg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This evenhanded work of New Testament scholarship is needlessly freighted with discussions of where it fits in the world of feminist literature.

I was alerted to the existence of this book by a mention of it in an obituary for Jane Schaberg in Biblical Archaeology Review magazine. Its main title, The Illegitimacy of Jesus, I found magnetic, especially in its relevance to my own fictional work in progress. So I suppressed my instinctive aversion to anything that labels itself as feminist and ordered myself a copy.

I’m glad I did. For I discovered, in the first place, that the author’s working definition of feminism is

as Hilda Smith defines it: “the view of women as a distinct sociological group for which there are established patterns of behavior, special legal and legislative restrictions, and customarily defined roles,” which are based on neither rational criteria nor physiological dictates.

And the portion of the definition that lies within the quotation marks is not feminism as I understand the term, but a perfectly reasonable and neutral angle of research that could just as well be taken by any nonfeminist. As for the part that lies outside the quotation marks, it’s not clear whether it is a paraphrase of Hilda Smith, or Schaberg’s own addition, but in any case it doesn’t seem to have affected the content of the book, beyond a few instances of the word androcentric and needless reminders that the culture of ancient Judea was patriarchal. For although the author sets out to preach to the feminist choir, the argument of her book does not in any way depend on the reader’s prior commitment to feminist ideology.

The argument, in a nutshell, is that a careful reading of both the gospels and other ancient literature does not support the doctrine of Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus. It does, on the other hand, support a contention that existed in ancient times: that Jesus was a child illegitimately conceived—�that is, conceived through either the rape or seduction of Mary during the time of her betrothal to Joseph. Schaberg shows how both Matthew and Luke, the two evangelists who treat the topic of Jesus’ birth, in their different ways, fudge the question of Jesus’ paternity. Rather, they agree that Joseph was not the biological father, and that the Holy Spirit sanctified the conception and assured Mary and her child of God’s approval and protection.

Matthew in particular appears to show awareness of the law of Deut 22:23�–27, regarding the rape of a betrothed woman. The man who was guilty of violating another man’s bride-to-be was to be executed in any case, but the woman only if the act occurred in a city and she did not cry out for help, which would imply her complicity. If the act occurred in the country, where there was no one to hear her cry out, she was to be spared. Schaberg spends some time weighing the implications of this law and how its application may have evolved by the time of Jesus’ conception.

The author examines the works of Matthew and Luke in some detail, and the works of other authors, including Mark and John, in much less detail. She looks at the Jewish tradition that Jesus was actually fathered by a man named Panthera or ben Stada, and offers her own cautious and tentative conclusion.

This does not go beyond the basic assertion that the evidence seems to support the fact that Mary conceived Jesus in the normal biological way during the time of her betrothal to Joseph, but with a man other than Joseph. Whether this happened via rape, “seduction,” or some other way, she is not in a position to say. She does not offer a positive scenario for what happened, for that would be mere conjecture�—it would be fiction.

Schaberg covers the material thoroughly without churning through excessive detail. The actual argument of the book occupies only 140 of its 318 pages. The rest of it, apart from 75 pages of end-notes, consists of pieces by Schaberg and a few others about how her work fits in various controversies within feminism and Christianity. These might possibly interest you if you’re a feminist or a Christian; I skipped them.

The book would be a lot better if all that polemical gunk were trimmed away. The heart of it shows that Schaberg’s interest was really in scholarship, straight up, and for this reader, anyway, she makes her case. I already believed that Jesus had been “illegitimately” conceived, but now I have a resource that places that notion within the context of specific, relevant, ancient sources that deal with it. This book shows why the simplest explanation here, as so often, is the best.

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Beyond the Shadows by Guy Wyndham-Jones and Tim Addey

Beyond the Shadows: The Metaphysics of the Platonic Tradition: Writings on the One and the Gods: The Universe of Being by Guy Wyndham-Jones

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This sourcebook and primer gives a good and deep, if sometimes difficult, overview of Platonic metaphysics in one small volume.

And why would you want to read about Platonic metaphysics?

Speaking for myself, my own recent path to it has been via the study of literary theory. As a writer who wants to create his best work, I am seeking to develop my own understanding of what makes literature, especially imaginative literature, tick. In my travels I came across an intriguing book, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts by Peter Struck, which traces the rise and development of the literary symbol as a tool in the poet’s kit. According to Struck, the literary symbol came to be seen as a way for poets to express the inexpressible, to place talismans, as it were, of ineffable divine truth in their works. Eventually, with the rise of the Romantic movement, the symbol would become the master device of the impassioned, nonrationalistic poet.

But back in the ancient world, the symbol became one of the main ideas that distinguished the literary criticism that stemmed from the writing of Aristotle, with its emphasis on clarity of expression, and that which stemmed from the writing of Plato, with its interest in understanding our relationship with the divine. And while Plato himself denigrated poetry as being derivative of nature and therefore of low worth, his successors saw things differently, and eventually came to regard poetry as among the things that can put us in closest contact with the divine.

The later Platonists, including Iamblichus and Plotinus, and culminating with Proclus in the 5th century AD, combed through the works of Plato, systematizing, connecting, and extrapolating to develop a sophisticated and robust map of reality. This system is usually referred to now as Neoplatonism, implying that these later thinkers morphed Plato’s metaphysics into a different system of their own, but the authors of Beyond the Shadows insist that Neoplatonism is a misnomer, and that these later philosophers were staying true to a tradition that was already fully developed at the time of Plato in the 4th century BC. Tim Addey observes, in his primer “The Universe of Being”, that the philosophical tradition of which Plato was a part was mainly an oral one, and that therefore the “Platonic” philosophers had access to a body of teachings much larger than what was ever recorded in writing. They were not developing or changing Plato’s ideas so much as making them more explicit and organized.

So what is Platonism? It is a philosophical theory that holds that all of reality is one interconnected thing, ordered in grades of being in ascending levels of perfection and wholeness. At the summit of all these grades, and indeed beyond the summit, is the inexpressible and inconceivable first principle, the origin of everything, which the Platonists simply call The One. They call it The One even though it is no more “one” than it is anything else, being beyond all characterization. But all things that can be known and characterized proceed from The One, and, eventually, revert back to it. An alternative name for The One was The Good, which is what Plato himself usually called it. This name emphasizes that the first principle is the source not only of all being but of all goodness. All of reality is suffused with goodness in the same way that it is suffused with being, but in, as it were, ever weaker concentrations as it is unfolded farther from The One.

This philosophy is powerful, deep, and, to me, inspiring. All the Platonic thinkers, and the authors of this book, insist that the ideas cannot be grasped adequately on our first acquaintance with them; they must be studied and contemplated to be understood. The Platonic thinkers observe that everyone who comes to understand these ideas is spontaneously drawn to them; deep down, we all want them to be true. The apparent evils of life and the world are merely passing blemishes on an abiding reality whose fundamental basis is goodness.

The book is composed of two parts: section 1, “Writings of the Platonic Philosophers on The One and the Gods”, which consists of a short introduction by Guy Wyndham-Jones and a selection of short extracts from the writings of Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, and Plato’s famous translator Thomas Taylor; and section 2, “The Universe of Being” by Tim Addey, an overview of Platonic metaphysics. I read section 2 first, then moved on to the sourcebook of section 1; and I would recommend that approach.

The authors have a strong command of the material, and do a good job of explaining it in an understandable way, even though their writing is not always as strong as one might wish. The book contains plenty of comma faults and other copyediting flaws, suggesting that the publisher, The Prometheus Trust, has more expertise in Platonic philosophy than in book editing. The book itself was hard for me, in Canada, to get hold of. Efforts to buy it direct from the publisher in the U.K. and from Amazon.co.uk were aborted when the sellers would not ship to me. It required digging on the publisher’s website to discover that I had to buy a copy from their North American distributor.

Yes, getting this book was a quest�—one I’m glad I persevered with. The subject matter may seem obscure, even irrelevant; but I don’t see it that way. We all live in a place we call reality; is its nature and structure really a matter of no interest or concern to us? Have we been blessed with minds able to consider these ideas, only to use them solely to chase fleeting physical and emotional pleasures?

According to the Platonists, our human intelligence can all be referred to as a single thing because it is a manifestation of the idea of intelligence or intellect, which in turn is a manifestation of still higher ideas that all trace their origin to The One. We are sentient because sentience is part of the overall perfection of reality, pervading the whole universe. Why wouldn’t we want to put ourselves in the best relationship with these realities?

It’s a question worth asking. And this book gives the serious, interested reader an excellent introduction to this profound view of the world.

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some remarks on my colleague: William Shakespeare

A couple of days ago I finished reading Shakespeare—that is, all of his collected works: 37 plays, 154 sonnets. In doing so I also checked off volumes 26 and 27 of Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World (for the record: I’m not reading the set in order). I think reading projects (or viewing projects, like my History of Cinema Festival, still in progress) are an excellent thing, for they turn “someday” plans into “today” activities. And thus they get done.

So now, having read Shakespeare through once, what can I say about him?

In some ways, not much. For although I’m a good reader, my comprehension of what I was reading was far from perfect. Sometimes I barely understood what was going on, but I just kept soldiering on rather than stopping to figure it out. I full comprehension was my aim, I might still be somewhere back in, who knows, The Third Part of King Henry VI. Indeed, I found that just keeping on reading helped my understanding in some ways, because more clarity seems to come from just letting the words wash over you.

But I don’t want to exaggerate the difficulty of understanding the Bard, because, for the most part, it’s not out of reach. I read, on average, an act a day, and thereby kept my interest fresh.

Looking at Shakespeare as a colleague, as a fellow dramatist and storyteller, I perceive him to have strengths and weaknesses. Among his weaknesses, in my opinion, are his handling of exposition and plotting. These are important weaknesses, for they are central to storytelling. Often important exposition—the communication of relevant factual information to the reader—is presented in the form of factual dialogue between incidental characters. Scenes in which characters describe, say, recent events to each other, are nowadays seen as dramatically weak, unless they have some other dramatic purpose as well. True, some of these things may be hard to depict on stage—large battles and such—but no one is forcing the author to write about these things, either.

As for plotting, I felt that while the plays usually have some sense of building tension and action, often there is a meandering quality, with an abrupt or anticlimactic quality to the ending. The very last play in this set, King Henry VIII, is like this. The play ends with a long celebration of the birth of the king’s daughter Elizabeth to his new queen Anne Bullen (as she is styled by Shakespeare). But the real interest of the play for me is in the machinations of Cardinal Wolsey, and Wolsey is dispensed with by the end of act 3. I was sad to see the Machiavellian cardinal go, and the rest of the play was anticlimax for me.

But Wolsey makes a great segue into Shakespeare’s strengths, and one of these is character. His characters are, in the main, vivid and passionate. Wolsey, callous, scheming, and ambitious, is one of these. Indeed, because of him, for the first 3 acts of Henry VIII I felt I was reading my favorite play of the whole lot. I used to be troubled by the nakedness with which Shakespeare’s characters reveal their feelings and motives, not only in their interactions but more especially in their soliloquies and asides; I thought this seemed melodramatic. Now I feel differently. Now I feel that Shakespeare’s characters simply say and do what we all think and feel, even if only half-consciously. The nakedness of, say, Iago’s perfidy and scheming is just our own perfidiousness made unpleasantly obvious. Have I ever executed a plot as dastardly as that carried out by Iago against Othello? No, I hope not. But I have carried out smaller ones, plots that differ only in degree. I have plotted. There is a piece of my id named Iago, and he has had some chance to express himself in my life.

And I can’t leave the topic of character without mentioning the dimensions that Shakespeare can give his characters. A famous example is that of Polonius in Hamlet, seemingly a pompous lightweight, but who gives his son Laertes famously sage advice upon Laertes’ departure for Paris. Macbeth is another example, who belatedly sees the vanity of his ambition and expresses his insights with unforgettable trenchancy and power. I remember hearing John Gielgud recite the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech on CBC Radio while driving the car, and feeling my eyes smart with tears. Macbeth gets it. He is a bad man, perhaps, but he is even more than that a complex human being. The ruthless king is also a philosopher and a poet.

Ah yes, the poetry. The fact that so many of Shakespeare’s turns of phrase have become cliches tends to blunt the sense of awe at their creation. Just looking at that same speech: “Out, out, brief candle!” Four words. And even now, if I’m honest, I have to tell you that tears come to my eyes again. Technically, among other things, it’s an example of the poetic virtue known as economy: saying a lot with a little. Shakespeare’s power to do this is probably unrivaled. Time and again while reading Shakespeare you come across these famous phrases, and it’s clear why they’re famous. No other poet, howsoever great, has left a legacy anything like it to his language.

So there, in a short space, is my impression of Shakespeare, having read him. I’m glad to have done it. I feel I have now, in some degree, truly joined the culture in which I have lived.

prose sketch: on the Spirit Trail

Sun. 10 Feb 2013 1:00 p.m. Spirit Trail Below Alder Street

Touch: my bones against the hard coated steel of the bench; puffs of refrigerated air gusting up the trail; the faint pressure of the sketchbook on my right thigh.

Taste: slight metallic residue of Crest mouthwash; a desiccated quality from having taken in salt at breakfast.

Smell: a faintly earthy freshness; a sunwarmed composty vegetable-ness.

Sound: traffic on Esplanade: a busy urgent highway roar, now more distant as traffic lights have halted the stream; the tremolo of two seaplanes flying over the harbor; the gleeful piping and warble of birds; two surly caws of a crow.

Sight: nearby: the long, wavering strands of shadow cast by a bare wintry shrub; the newish asphalt of the trail itself, its surface sparkling here and there with tiny crystalline gems like stars in the night sky; the brownish tangle of still-bare bush covering the steep slope down to the street; railcars parked by a great empty yard like a deserted parking lot; beyond: more stopped trains, a red-hulled freighter gliding on the silver-blue water; then the smoky jagged skyline of downtown, and the pale-blue sky, streaked and washed with feathered cloud.