Bullet now or cancer later
May 3, 2008
I commend to you a little book I am reading now: The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis, a series of essays based on talks given by Lewis during the 1940s. One of the essays is “Learning in Wartime,” a talk to Oxford students who were uncomfortable because they were in school while their contemporaries were risking death in the early days of World War II. Lewis talks about several ‘enemies’ that may keep the students from doing their best at their studies.
The third enemy is fear. War threatens us with death and pain. No man — and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane — need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or that — machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all.
In 1952 I was a college student with a draft deferment, and I was quite aware of my contemporaries serving in Korea while I was drilling with the ROTC. I can’t say that it caused me much, if any, mental anguish. I wonder what I would have thought if I had read these words. In those days I assumed I was immortal and didn’t think much about death, like most 21-year-olds.
It’s now 55 years later, and I know I am not immortal in the temporal sense, and I’ve long since lost my reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all. But I am moved by C.S. Lewis’s words and his way of thinking.
Dave, not fearful at all, at all.
The Powers That Be
December 4, 2007
Written by David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Brightest, Ho, and others, The Powers That Be is another 740-pager that somehow found its way onto Mt. Toberead. I don’t know why friends keep giving me these big blockbuster books and expect me to read them. Maybe I really do.
How about a little contest? If you can tell me the names of each person above, I will award you 15 minutes of virtual, eternal fame. There’s fame for you, to quote Jack Aubrey.
Back to the book. According to the dust cover blurb (and also a clue to the names),
[TPTB] is the inside history of four of America’s greatest media institutions: Time Incorporated, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and CBS. All are rich in money and resources, all hugely powerful, and all the creation of a few inspired men and women whose individual obsessions and dreams they still to an icredible degree embody.
[Name giveaways]
We see these people and the men of political and financial power with whom they dealt as we have never seen them before - caught up in ambition or rage or triumph, making decisions or evading them, revealing themselves memorably in ways large and small.
A little hype here, but I daresay that anyone who has read any of Halberstam’s books (and I had not), will agree that here is one author that may live up to his puffery.
If personality is the essence of power, The Powers That Be is the most vivid and immediate account we have yet of power at work in modern-day America.
The events portrayed spanned the presidencies of FDR to tricky-Dicky, that is to say, during my adult lifetime. Of course I remember the events of Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ’s belly scar, and Nixon’s dramatic resignation from the presidency. That being so, reading this book makes me feel like a real hick, to say nothing of real stupid. I had not a clue what was really going on, and now I know the reason why. I was being professionally and thoroughly duped, and it doesn’t make me feel very proud.
I ask myself, “What about today and George Bush? (Larry, there’s your opening.) Fox News will never be the same to me.
If you haven’t guessed, I liked the book. If you are about to go into hibernation for the winter and have good, strong forearms and don’t mind going prematurely blind, this is the book for you.
Dave, squinting and blinking.
Witness
October 14, 2007
Reading project #2 for the summer just past was WITNESS by Whittaker Chambers, 50th Anniversary Edition. I had some dim recollection of hearing about the microfilms hidden in a pumpkin and the Alger Hiss spy trials in the 1940s, but, after all, a 9-year-old can only be expected to remember so much. So I opened the 800 page paperback with anticipation. I was on a roll after finishing Victor Hugo’s 1500-word classic, Les Misérables.
In a forward, William F. Buckley Jr. had this to say about Whittaker Chambers.
I first met Whittaker Chambers in 1954. An almost total silence had closed in on him. Two years earlier he had published Witness. When the preface of Witness appeared as a feature in the Saturday Evening Post, that issue of the magazine sold a startling half million extra copies on the newsstand. The book came out with a great flurry. The bitterness of the Alger Hiss trial had not subsided. For some of the reviewers, Hiss’s innocence had once been a fixed national conviction, then blind faith; and now, after the publication of that overwhelming book, rank superstition.
In a second forward, Robert D. Novak stated,
The death of Alger Hiss at the age of ninety-two on November 15, 1996, provoked bizarre responses from people who should have known better.
…It is remarkable that, nearly a half-century after Hiss’s conviction, well-informed and presumably prudent people could still harbor any doubts that Hiss, as a senior State Department official, had in fact been a secret agent of the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence. Yet Mr. [Peter] Jennings and Mr. [Anthony] Lake represent many others who cannot fully accept the reality that Alger Hiss was lying and Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth.
Chambers 
Hiss
So what did I think? Well, author Chambers could have used a good editor and proof reader, but that aside it is a captivating autobiography. Chambers was a more-or-less practicing Quaker who was naive enough to testify without a lawyer at his side, believing that words of truth made their own witness. Hiss, on the other hand, was surrounded by advisors, legal and otherwise, and talked way too much. He was a name-dropper, saying that any man (himself) thought highly of by all the movers and shakers in Washingtom just must be telling the truth. Not, as it turned out. Here’s a story where the good guy came out on top.
Two more reflections that may or may not whet your interest: Chambers opened his story in “Forward In The Form Of A Letter To My Children.”
[The Hiss Case] was more than human tragedy. Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial … . Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith, and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.
My next comment is that the most riveting parts of the book are nothing but barely edited transcripts of congressional investigations.
Mr. Hiss: (Said this…)
Mr. Nixon: (Said this..)
Hard to believe, perhaps, but the knowledge that these were not words put in the mouth of a protagonist by an imaginative author has impact. He really said that!
Recommended reading, nonetheless. It’s a fascinating part of our history when Soviet Communists had much influence in Washington, and we did not want to believe it until an unexciting Quaker sacrificed himself on the altar of truth.
Dave, glad to be part of the American Experiment.
Les Mis
August 28, 2007
My current reading experience, with which I am completely captivated, is Victor Hugo’s classic: Les Misérables, the unabridged edition, no less. I haven’t quite finished it yet (on page 980 of 1,463), but I am very impressed with his vocabulary and originality of thought and phrase. Victor Hugo is a cut above all; above Patrick O’Brian, Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoyevosky, or any other author I’ve read (so far).
Let’s see if I can give you the flavor of Hugo’s prose. The context is an innocent girl and her unknown lover from a distance. They both have fallen in love with an idea of the other. They have never met nor exchanged a word.
This is from p. 932, “A Heart Beneath A Stone“:
The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being into God, this is love.
Love is the salutation of the angel to the stars.
How sad the soul when it is sad from love!
What a void is the absence of being who alone fills the world! Oh! How true that the beloved becomes God! One would understand that God might be jealous if the Father of all had not clearly made creation for the soul, and the soul for love!
One glimpse of a smile under a white crepe hat with lilac veil is enough for the soul to enter the palace of dreams.
God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a human being is to make her transparent.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
I suspect that passages like the above trigger vastly different emotions or images for different readers. Some of my reactions are that the theology is a tad confused but right on target for one who hardly ever thinks about God or his/her relationship to Him.
Another thought is that a modern popular author would deal with the same theme with a lot of gratuitous physical sex.
Another thought is that the passage deserves deeper thought than most moderns are prepared to give it. Most of our lives are filled with noise and cruft that effectively stifles much serious thought.
Can you, dear reader (if you in fact exist) be reached by this passage? I would love to see your comment below.
Dave, off the deep end and not holding his breath.
P.S. Another little quote:
Thoughtful minds make little use of this expression: the happy and the unhappy. In this world, clearly the vestibule of another, no one is happy.
The true divisionof humanity is this: the luminous and the dark.
Let’s hear it for the comma
August 1, 2007
Commas are disappearing, according to this article. I was taught that a comma was a little pause in the flow of a sentence to let the reader catch his breath or scratch an itch. Our fast-paced lives need more than a few commas, it seems to me.
Samuelson: Why Dont We Use commas Anymore? - Newsweek Robert Samuelson - MSNBC.com
I have always liked commas, but I seem to be in a shrinking minority. The comma is in retreat, though it is not yet extinct. In text messages and e-mails, commas appear infrequently, and then often by accident (someone hits the wrong key). Even on the printed page, commas are dwindling. Many standard uses from my childhood (after, for example, an introductory prepositional phrase) have become optional or, worse, have been ditched.If all this involved only grammar, I might let it lie. But the comma’s sad fate is, I think, a metaphor for something larger: how we deal with the frantic, can’t-wait-a-minute nature of modern life. The comma is, after all, a small sign that flashes PAUSE. It tells the reader to slow down, think a bit, and then move on. We don’t have time for that. No pauses allowed. In this sense, the comma’s fading popularity is also social commentary.
I like the idea of the comma as metaphhor. I need more commas in my life these days. The problem is, I usually don’t know where to put them. Will you tell me where to put my commas, politely?
Dave, who probably should look for more important things to worry about.
The future of books
March 24, 2007
I don’t have time to digest this interesting article in the Online Economist, so I’ll just link to it here for you to read (and comment, I hope).
The future of books | Not bound by anything | Economist.com
IN SECRET locations and using secret methods, human beings are scanning lots and lots of books for Google, the world’s largest web-search company. That humans are involved is beyond doubt (fingers are visible in the corners of many pages on books.google.com) although this is uncharacteristic of Google, which has a fetish for purist technology.
… As books go digital, new questions, both philosophical and commercial, arise. How, physically, will people read books in future? Will technology “unbind” books, as it has unbundled other media, such as music albums? Will reading habits change as a result? What happens when books are interlinked? And what is a book anyway?
Book-lovers unite! What does this all mean in the bibliophilic world? (Is that a real word?)
Dave, loving his books but loving the digital world as well.
Education a waste?
March 17, 2007
After reading the first page of Bryan Caplan’s book, I just might want to read the rest. I don’t know that I agree with him, but he may be on to something.
EconLog, Page One of My Next Book, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty
Personally, then, I have no reason to lash out at the education system. Quite the contrary. But three decades of experience, combined with two decades of reading and reflection, have convinced me that our educational system is a big waste of time and money. Practically every politician vows to spend more on education, and as an insider, I can’t helping asking “Why? Do you want us to waste even more?”
Here is a professor of Economics, a “professional student,” who is happy with his lot, but …you’ll just have to read the rest of the first page of his new book.
Dave, thinking that maybe only greed kept him from such a life.
The taking of the Java
February 20, 2007
It was in late December, 1812, at the beginning of The American War. The the almost new frigate, USS Constitution, took and burned the English frigate HMS Java off the coast of San Salvador. How do I know all this stuff? Why, from reading the sea novels of Patrick O’Brian, of course. Any gate, I ran across this image while lurking in The Gunroom, the POB mail list, and since the person who originally stole the image is probably several thefts removed by now, I will share it with you.
This may be as good a time as any to record that I am reading away on my umpteenth pass through the POB canon, presently delighting in the blooming of Brideen on her first voyage in the Ringle, a topsail schooner of the Baltimore Clipper type, a model of which is languishing on my workbench. This is in The Commodore, Volume seventeen of the canon. This is perhaps the best of the twenty books in the series, for what that may be worth.
Dave, which he is not getting sea-sick, at all.
Fire and ice
January 18, 2007
My reading on this icy morning turned up this delightful verse:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in Ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire,
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
— Robert Frost, Fire and Ice
Dave, resonating.
Pride of Baltimore
October 19, 2006
More than two years ago I started construction of Pride of Baltimore II, a 1/64 scale model of a fast sailing schooner of the type known as a Baltimore Clipper. The original Pride ruled the waves from 1805 to 1815, the precursor of the Clipper ship era of the 1850s.
An authentic replica of the original Pride was launched in 1977 and sailed on May 1, 1977, from Baltimore. On May 14, 1986, the Pride of Baltimore was lost at sea along with four crew members. A best-selling book, Pride of the Seaby Tom Waldron tells the story of the Pride’s last voyage and survival at sea.
The keel was laid for Pride II in May of 1987, and she put to sea in 1989.
Here is my version with the hull partly painted.
Dave, an armchair sailor not too worried about seasickness.
