Quotes #5: Voss, Patrick White, 1957

Voss is a brilliant novel, of the utmost insight into human nature and character-building. Here are some highlights:

The terrible simplicity of people who have not yet been hurt.

I would welcome dangers. One must not expect to avoid suffering.

To explore the depths of one's own repulsive nature is more than irresistible - it is necessary.

Few people of attainment take easily to a plan of self-improvement. Some discover very early their perfection cannot endure the insult. Others find their intellectual pleasure lies in the theory, not the practice.

Places yet unvisited can become an obsession, promising final peace, all goodness.

As if to rot were avoidable. By moving. But it was not. We rot by living.

Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind.

I suggest you wring it [hope] out for yourself, which, in the end, is all that is possible for any man.

The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.

Mediocrity is not a final and irrevocable state; rather it is a creative source of endless variety and subtlety.

Calibrating life

When things turn to shit, we tell ourselves life could be worse.

I've lost my job, but I've got my health. I've lost my leg, but I've got my life. They lost their life, but they lived it well.

It helps a lot of the time. In If This is a Man, Primo Levi wrote this of his time in Auschwitz:

Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy [...]

It's a good way of stopping yourself from smothering on the stench.

But what about when life gives you roses? If something good happened and a friend told you it could've been better, you'd slap them.

Unfortunately, life is always telling us it could be better, via advertising, and social media, and media of any kind, and generally having eyes and ears...

Plus, the reason you'd slap the friend is because they'd be right, and they'd have killed your buzz.

That blog post you wrote? It was good! It wasn't a novel...

When are our friends - and, more importantly, our own minds - right to tell us things could be better?

Philip Larkin is best known for his poetry, but he was also a critic. In Further Requirements, he said this about criticism:

It is no use remonstrating with a reviewer for speaking of the latest Poetry Book Club choice in terms that leave no adjectives for, say, Hardy, Tennyson, and Pope. If he tries to keep the same critical standard for the lot he will find himself unable to say, not only anything favourable, but anything at all about the month's poetry, simply because critical perspective means that if the classics are in focus then ephemera are not even visible, and vice versa.

Is the same true of life?

I think it is for things that aren't personal achievements. This morning's sunrise might not be as spectacular as that one in 1998 with Barbara on Machu Pichu, but it still looks pretty damn epic, so shut the fuck up about Peru.

This Friday night in Dalston might not be as thrilling as a first night at Glastonbury, but I've still got chills up my spine...

It's tricky when things get personal, though.

When I write what I think is a good blog post, should I remind myself that it wasn't a novel? It would kill my buzz, but maybe all those small buzzes from all those small blog posts give me just enough satisfaction to stop me from ever writing that novel, and maybe the buzz from the novel would be a whole other world of buzz I'll never experience because I blog?

When I write a good article at work, should I remind myself that I haven't exposed any corruption or impeached any presidents? Would I be more likely to topple presidents if I was that hard on myself? And if I did eventually take one down, would I be able to feel happy about it, or would I have lost the ability to feel anything positive?

Likewise every achievement that provides small satisfactions or burns off small frustrations. If I didn't have Tinder, would I eventually get frustrated enough to approach people I like in bars, and if I did would I take more of them home? If I didn't run and do weights, would I go to Syria to fight Isis, and if I did would I consider my life more worthwhile when it ended 3 months later than if I'd lived 60 more years in suburbia?

There's danger in letting off steam as well as in bottling it up, I suspect.

In general, I think we have to re-calibrate our expectations every once in a while to make sure the ephemera remain visible. I don't think there's any danger in this: I'm pretty sure nobody has ever blown their mind like a set of overloaded speakers through an unexpected pleasure surge. There is no Stendhal syndrome of the streets.

But for maximising your own potential, I don't know. We can't all be Thomas Hardy, but nor would Hardy have been if he hadn't tried.

Book review: The European Identity, Stephen Green, 2015, Haus Curiosities

You'd expect a Tory peer to be Euroskeptic, but Stephen Green is also a former banker, and the finance industry is highly Europhile. Which is my roundabout way of saying: forget who Stephen Green is, unless you think it lends him authority.

The European Identity is a one- or two-sitting read that considers two things: how much Europeans have in common, and what that means for Britain. I suspect it isn't very original, but it is very well written and even more timely, given we British are 6 weeks away from voting on whether we want to remain in the EU.

Green is withering in his assessment of Britain's and even Europe's place in the world, setting out how the vast size of China and India will inevitably see Europe continue to decline. Some may find that unpatriotic; I found it refreshing.

He then provides a fascinating whirlwind summary of the philosophies that he thinks resulted in substantial differences in the characters of the people of the EU's big three: the UK, France and Germany. Brits are pragmatists, he says, the French are idealists, and the Germans are ... well, I didn't quite get that. Fantasists, maybe. But anyway, more importantly, he thinks we have more in common than we have in difference - namely:

"a commitment to rationalism, democracy, individual rights and responsibilities, the rule of law, social compassion..."

True of everyone, you might think, but social compassion and the US? Individual rights and Asia? The rule of law and Russia? Not so much.

If the book has a flaw, it's that it concludes with us exactly where we are today. With a loose alignment of European nations, cooperating where subsidiarity requires it and leaving well alone where national differences are cause for celebration or anyway too entrenched to quash. Which is all well and good, but a) people who aren't currently convinced are not going to read European Identity and b) even if they did, I don't think it would convince them. It's a great read, but it's more thought-provoking and informative than it is comprehensively or combatively convincing.

But then, it only professes to deal with identity: it leaves other books to deal with racism, job security, pressure on services, stifling bureaucracy ... And what it does it does very well.

Book review: On Being Blue, William H Gass, 1975

Towards the end of On Being Blue, Gass talks about the ability of literature to let us see inside another's head. He's clearly enamored of the idea, as OBB reads like the unexpurgated laying down of a stream of consciousness - and not just any consciousness, but rather one caught up in a dream or fever state. It's messy. It's as poetic as it is incoherent. As insightful as it is baffling.

It's like five short essays jumbled together and broken apart like torn leaves in a tossed salad, where for a couple of mouthfuls you're enjoying chicory, and then suddenly you're eating red chard. And then what's with the orange segments? Or like if wave foam momentarily resembled something, and then almost instantly became something else.

Which could be great, if there was substance to the shambles if not method to the madness. But having read 90-odd pages I've gained ... what? The knowledge that sex is difficult to write about? That philosophy can be unsatisfying?

Gass also says "you might expect writers to love their words, although the truth is that writers usually love whatever their words represent", and I didn't get the impression this was a criticism, but with Gass you suspect the opposite is true, and that words - like colours in a painting - are selected based on how they work together to convey not so much meaning but more sensation, like a drop of hot wax on a nipple is all the more intense when it comes after the frigid tracing of an ice cube.

Which would be fine over 90 lines, but it's less appealing over 90 pages.

Book review: Mythologies, Roland Barthes, 1957

Like any self-mythologising French philosopher, Barthes doesn't make life easy for the reader. He's not as nonsensical as Baudrillard, but then I think he preceded him, giving the latter the chance to up the stakes still further.

Anyway, Mythologies is about myth, which is what Barthes calls second- or further-order semiology - when something that's already been used to signify something is then used in another context to signify something else - and what happens to the original thing and what it originally signified, as well as the properties of what those two together then jointly signify at the new level. Clear? It won't be.

But there are some fun examples, like what beads of sweat mythologise in the film Julius Caesar, and what a photo of a writer on holiday mythologises. It's good stuff in places, I just wish it was less deliberately opaque in others.

The Big Ones #1: Wasps

If, as you're meandering along, contemplating the beauty of every living thing and how best you can serve your fellow man today, you happen upon a wasp sitting placidly on some surface, does your position in the social compact mean that you're morally obligated to kill it? Discuss.

Book Review: The German Genius, Peter Watson (2010)

Why do we read and write, you and I? Partly it's because we want to better ourselves. This is what people do - or what the kind of people you and I want to know do, anyway - we learn new instruments and languages, we travel, we try new things. (Or we like to think we do.)

But why do we do this? The answer may seem self-evident: who doesn't want to be "better", whatever that means? Who doesn't want to be more like the people they admire, and more liked by them? Or maybe you feel you have an inner drive: if you didn't try all these new things, you'd go crazy.

But have you ever stopped to think about the context for this behaviour? Whether people everywhere do it, and always have?

That is the concern of the first half of Peter Watson's The German Genius - or, as I like to think of it: After God, "Aargh, Modernity!". Or, even more facetiously: Why We Blog.

Watson tells us that the drive for self-improvement originated largely in pre-unified Germany, born out of the speculative philosophy of such titans as Kant and Hegel that arose to fill the growing hole left by declining Christianity and its message of "Do this, because I say so".

Why in Germany? Religion in Germany had been more inward anyway, as a result of Luther's protestantism returning religion to the people from the control of the church (see the novel Q, ostensibly but not really written by a former AC Milan footballer named Luther Blissett). Plus, it was the German Wilhelm von Humboldt who essentially invented the modern university, with the idea that scholars should conduct original research, and, owing to the support of Friedrich Wilhelm III, there were far more universities, and much more literacy, in Germany than places like France or Great Britain.

Kant, Hegel et al posited that in the absence of an afterlife or divinity, the purpose of life must be to better oneself, a concept that came to be known as bildung. Also, by bettering oneself, one also bettered those around oneself in one's community.

Thus, the next 100 years or so gave rise to such cultural colossi as Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner, whose music differed from that of Handel and Bach in expressing inner concepts related to the life of man, rather than religious ones, plus Goethe, creator of the Bildungsroman, in which improvement (in the eyes of God or of man) comes only through effort on the part of the individual.

Thanks, Germany!

But then come modernity and alienation, and the second half of Watson's book, which addresses the question of whether German idealism had to lead to authoritarianism.

As Watson makes clear (borrowing on the work of others, as he's quick to point out the whole book heavily does), the idea of evolution did not originate with Darwin. Bildung is itself evolution applied to one's own character, for example. But Darwin accounted for evolution scientifically, realising it comes from overpopulation and struggle to survive and reproduce. Thus (broadly) was born the age of science.

Over the next generation or so, we have the dawn of organic chemistry and the age of cellular and molecular biology, so many of the discoveries coming from German universities and institutes. We mechanise and urbanise. We have mass-production.

Then comes the Franco-Prussian war and German unification.

Scientification continues. Education becomes less humanistic. Alongside this we have Nietzsche, telling us nothing matters anymore.

Then World War I, partly a war of now-struggling German kultur vs British mercantilism and mere civility. We have mechanised, indiscriminate killing on a scale never seen before. Germany and kultur are dealt a terrible blow, although nobody really wins.

Then Weimar and the rise of low-brow culture, followed by Einstein's relativity, Pauli's uncertainty, Godel's revelation that there are things that can never be known, atonalism in music, expressionism in art, cultural pessimism and economic plight.

Then National Socialists, with their incoherent but powerful message that everything had gone wrong and a return to classical culture was needed, and their racism, their belief that others were responsible for the way things were and that these were people who could never be truly cultured, as only true Germans could.

And what came next, which you already know.

And then the aftermath: a slow coming to terms, Heidegger and reassessment, Habermas and what now in the age of ongoing alienation and environmental profligacy.

I haven't done justice to The German Genius there, obviously. It's 365,000 words, and an awful lot of concepts that were entirely new to me. It's a lot to get your head around.

At times it reads like an encyclopaedia, and could perhaps have done with being a bit trimmer. But part of its point is that there is so much more to Germany that the Nazis, despite what British TV schedulers might think, hence there's a lot of chronicling of German achievement even when it's not essential to the narrative.

TGG is monumental in every sense, and probably the most informative and enlightening book I've ever read. I'd read it again, if only it wasn't so big. Bloody overachieving Germans, nicking all the sun-loungers...