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| date | 2001-04-03:21:03 |
| Reading |
I've been sick for the last week, more-or-less, but used the opportunity to catch up my reading a bit. I slept most of today and now can't sleep, but my throat is still croaky so I can't call Caro either, so I'll write this 'til my brain shuts down, which may not be all that long. I finished Byron's Don Juan a few days ago, although by the time I was three-quarters of the way through I started thinking, "Byron never finished the book, why should I?" The narrative force of the poem drops of sharply after the first six cantos, starting with the long siege of Ismail in VII and VIII. The purported glory of war is simply not a fit subject for poetry. It sucked when Homer did it and it sucks even more now. There is nothing beautiful or glorious or lyrical about war. The later cantos are increasing Byron blowing hard on matters of concern to him, lecturing the reader, at times amusingly, more often tediously, on the way the world would be if only he ran it. By the last few cantos it's clear that Byron has lost interest, lost the thread, and really doesn't care. All of that said, the first six cantos, which make up close to half the poem, are well worth reading. The language is playful and fun, and who wouldn't love the poet for opening Canto III with:
The forms are art are clearly not safe in Byron's hands. Better lock 'em up. Somewhere along the way I found a copy of Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance which I've avoided for quite a few years, as literary types almost never do justice to science fiction. Although quite beautifully written when not distorted by the author's love of his own vocabulary, the book is fairly tame, almost boringly so, in it's projection of the future. It's interesting that now that it's clear that natural resource depletion is unlikely to kill us all in the next few years, a certain type of mind has to find something else to latch onto as the source of inevitable disaster. The book is the first-person narrative of an archaeologist who finds that H.G. Wells inspired an associate of Niccola Tesla to build a real time machine that can, perhaps, go only forward in time. Optimistically powered by cold fusion, the machine allows the archaeologist, David Lambert, to flee his troubled present into an even more troubled future. But whereas if the book had been written twenty years ago natural resource depletion or nuclear destruction would have been the cause of global disaster, in Wright's book it is some combination of a super-AIDS-like bug, Mad Cow (ok, Creutzfeldt Jakob) Disease and global warming. When I was very young, the next ice age was considered the most likely thing to bring the hubris of human joy to an end. For this, one feels, is what dystopian authors are really on about: how dare we be so happy! People are suffering. People are dying. How can we possibly do anything but hang our heads in shame? The answer, of course, is so simple that only an idiot would fail to see it. The answer is: WE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. I certainly don't have the first clue as to how to end poverty, except that I'm pretty sure it has something to do with free markets, widespread agreement on the forms of government and the rule of law, and popular support for the policies of the people in power. But it's not like I'm have a clue as to how to bring these things about except by doing stuff like writing this journal and other things, trying to explain these ideas to people and generally lending my support to efforts to explore and expand upon and teach these ideas as widely as possible. If there was something that we KNEW would bring about peace on Earth and universal prosperity, and it was in our power to do it, and we didn't, then we might have something to feel guilty over. But there is no such thing: all we can to is nudge the world in the direction we want it to go, and try to see that our own lives are a little better each year. If we do that, in a free world, everyone's lives will get better, because it's not a zero-sum game. In any case, I found Wright's vision of the future pretty tame and not very imaginative. We are not all going to die. Not even most of us. Life is better now for more people than ever before and shows no signs of getting dramatically worse. There are fewer wars, less poverty, no famine outside places that manufacture it as a political good, and more wealth than ever before. I know that a lot of people just hate this, but life is as good as it has ever been, and it just keeps getting better. Imagine Wright had been working 500 years ago. Some horrible new disease had just been imported to Europe from the Americas, and was ravaging the population. Strange lands had been discovered across the far horizon. The first stirrings of new religious ideas were being heard. From this world an angel lifts a human, a scholar of sorts, into our world, 500 years after. What would a 14th century Wright have him see? A dead world, obviously, killed by the hubris of daring to explore beyond the known world, the results of which created social upheaval that spawned tyranny that lead to the end of everything.. The silliness of this vision shows the main failure in Wright's technique: he's written a book about the next decade or so, but purported to set most of it in the far future, giving his modest, deeply conservative beliefs an apparent weight that they don't deserve. For like all dystopians, Wright is profoundly conservative: the future must end in disaster because the future is where change occurs, and change by it's very nature is anathema to the conservative mind. I finished Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars recently as well, and am delighted by it. Not only are the stories of heroism and adventure well-told, the author's humanity and deep love for his fellow-creatures is everywhere evident. And he's a conceptualist:
What more could one ask for? Finally, before I nod off entirely, today I read Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, I confess to not being a big fan of Anglo-Saxon poetry in general. The muscular rhythms, the monotony and simplicity of the double-stressed pairs with the caesura separating them, just don't grab me at all. But. Heaney is a genius, and at least in places he raises the poem to a level of lyrical beauty that I'm sure is all his own. The variations in his rhythm and alliteration make the poem much more interesting the read, full of inner structure and subtleties. I'm still no fan of Anglo-Saxon poetry. But I liked this one a lot. |