Lost Connection

Every so often I read an article or a book that seems to capture the current moment and does so in a way that crystallises how I see the world.  I suppose this reflects my increasing confidence:  I am reading something that reassures me others see the world in the way I do.  It is always encouraging to read something that reaffirms what you felt was obvious but about which you weren’t quite certain.  However, such articles can also be seductive:  a good piece can be very persuasive, and shape how you think, drawing on anecdotes, perspectives and ways of seeing that make sense, leading to the conclusion that’s the way things are – and I knew it!

This is particularly the case when I read an article about how the world is different now.  It is especially tempting to be reminded about how things were when you were a child, moments and situations you recall as you look back fondly at events and people in your childhood, adolescence and even young adulthood.  On reflection, you conclude everything was simpler then, technology less intrusive, interactions more innocent.  Even though you recall there were some challenging moments in the past, overall you are prone to remember what was good, fun, interesting:  I suspect this is a form of defence mechanism, one that tends to push terrible events into the background, or take some of the sting out of them.  I don’t mean to imply that disasters are obliterated, but I believe we have the capacity to reduce their salience, at least some of the time.  Perhaps there were moments when your life was hard and discouraging, but on reflection the world seemed a nicer, happier place when you were young

I was reminded of this recently when I read a very compelling article by Rebecca Solnit.  She is an outstanding novelist, but she is also a stimulating essayist.  In late January she published an article in The Guardian, a deeply felt critique of capitalism today, and its focus on what she describes (based on a comment from a friend) as ‘the tyranny of the quantifiable’.  She described her views as an elegy to “deep immersion in the moment, of engaging with the world in an embodied and sensual way, whether it’s dancing or dog-walking, cake-decorating or dirt-biking.”  Her evident concern was that today “we are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing.”  She observes that this has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now it is also the tempting promise of technology.  “It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves.”  As she saw it, the issue today is that we are encouraged to describe and value only that which our modern version of capitalism allows, and even encourages, while other aspects of our lives are overlooked or diminished.

As I read it, I had no doubt that what Solnit was offering a pointed and devastating critique.  In her essay she notes how Silicon Valley is concentrated on the quantifiable. “For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend.  This ends up meaning that we can minimise our presence in the world and maximise time spent working and online, which also means maximising alienation and isolation. This has involved a reordering of society right down to our retail landscapes … To embrace the tyranny of the quantifiable is to dismiss the subtle value of these daily acts out in the world and the ways they generate and maintain networks of relationships.  So we have withdrawn, while being constantly told this is good, and it has turned out to be bad in a thousand small ways, weakening public life and local institutions, isolating us.”

There’s worse.  Having convinced many people to avoid going out and have unmediated contact with other people, Solnit reports “Silicon Valley is now telling us we do not want to do our own thinking, creating or communicating with other humans.”  She quotes the sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle, who has followed the evolution of computer technologies since the 1970s.  Solnit reports that Turkle writes about her desire to raise an empathic child. “I knew that without the ability to spend quiet time alone, that would be impossible. But that was where screens began to get us into trouble. Our capacity for solitude is undermined as soon as we introduce a screen.”

Some of her examples seem almost unbelievably bizarre.   “You’ll never think alone again,” said one advertisement for an AI product called Cluely.  The ad seemed confused about what thinking is and oblivious to why we might want to do it ourselves. These companies often suggest that things we have always done are too hard to do.”   Her commentary on Cluely describes the way this startup marketed its AI assistant “with an advert featuring a young man wearing smart glasses, similar to those that first appeared as Google Glass in 2014 … Glasses of this type, which have internet access and tiny screens, operate on the premise that as you move through your day you need constant help, outsourcing basic decisions, checking facts, being reminded of appointments, in essence being babysat by your headgear.”

She continues “In the Cluely advert, the young man (who’s one of the product’s creators) gets a steady stream of prompts for talking to a young woman on their first date. So much of what tech offers is solutions to non-problems, or to problems that need to be solved through other means. Why is the young man incapable or afraid of talking without coaching? Is he really talking to his date or is he relaying instructions? How would she feel if she knew she were talking to an algorithm via her distracted date’s phone? With continued use, he may become even less capable of doing what we’ve all done for ever: converse, which is an act of collaborative improvisation.”

“We must presume that the point of a date is to establish a personal connection, but in this interaction it’s reframed as something like a business opportunity. The young man wants to impress the girl, but it’s hard not to conclude that if she is impressed, it won’t be with him, but with his dialogue coach!  Ned Resnikoff writes in his newsletter, chiming in with Turkle: “Cluely’s explicit promise is to abolish solitude – and, in effect, to abolish thought. All dialogue with one’s self is to be replaced by queries put to a large language model.”

Critiquing much of what we might choose to be the result of ingenious marketing can allow us to miss the deeper issues that Solnit addresses.  As she explains “The tyranny of the quantifiable tramples over the question of what it is we get from doing the work, why we might want to do it, how writing – which is mostly thinking – can be part of developing a self, a worldview, a set of ethics, a greater capacity to understand and use language.”

She also offers some scary examples.  She reports that someone had told her that she was “having a chatbot write her husband a poem for their anniversary, which made me wonder if the husband desired a polished product or an expression from the heart. In Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, the big-nosed title character ghostwrites love letters for his friend to the Roxanne both of them love. She comes to realise it’s the author of the letters she really loves. What happens when you realise the true love who touched your heart isn’t even human? Accepting it as your AI lover seems to be one answer.”

“One argument for AI companions is that they are always there for you: when you want them on, off when you want them off, with no needs of their own.  Yet behind this lies a capitalist argument that we’re here to get as much as possible and give as little as possible, to meet our own needs and dodge those of others.  In the real world, you get something from giving – at the very least, you get a sense of being someone with something to give, which is one measure of your own wealth, generosity and power.  We were designed to give; the gifts were meant to circulate. Love is too often discussed as a sort of good you want to stockpile, harvest, collect, even extract, but to be loved without loving is a sad accomplishment, a miser’s hoarding of someone else’s wealth. The work of loving is also the work of forging a self and a life. … and of confronting the unpredictable, the vulnerable or risky, the intimate, the embodied”.

It is very tempting to keep on quoting Solnit.  She is describing what people of my age see the world becoming.  I can’t help it:  I must quote her once more: “The capitalist agenda of maximising getting and minimising giving has some application in commerce but impoverishes life.  We are social animals who need to be with other humans, whether it’s at a carnival or funeral or the ordinary times in between. There is a sense of belonging that goes deeper than words when we are with people who care about us, and even more so when we are in alignment, whether it’s two people falling into step on a walk or a dozen dancing together or a congregation praying or 10,000 marching together.”

However, it was around this point that I stopped.  As I see it, the capitalist agenda is concerned with investing in products and services that clever people can persuade others they want.  Sometimes those products or services meet legitimate needs and interests; sometimes they create needs or desires that are trivial, inauthentic, or positively misleading.  However, hasn’t that always been the case?  Businessmen, politicians, priests and writers, aren’t they are all trying to sell us their vision?  They were doing that centuries ago, and they will be seeking to do so centuries into the future.  Helping us to see things ‘the right way’.  That’s an old story, and the capitalist system has only managed to organise the process a little more effectively.

Perhaps that isn’t the core of the issue.  Solnit is particularly exercised about AI and AI assistants.  She suggests that in order to assist you, these artificial intelligence systems offer what she describes as ‘agreeable sycophancy’.  There are real horror stories, of course, as users fall for financially crazy schemes, develop paranoia, begin to distrust family and friends, and even plunge them into suicidal despair, “with the helpful chatbot offering advice on how to kill yourself.”  Agreed, but that is nothing new.  The elderly, the young, confused teenagers and thwarted adults, they have all been susceptible to smart strangers or ‘helpful’ family members.  As much as that is true today, so it has been true over the centuries, as both the fiction and non-fiction of the past make clear.  We are gullible, and AI is merely another way to tap into our gullibility.

Solnit points out the danger of flatterers; that we need kind people in our lives who will tell us the truth when we’ve veered off course. She suggests that chatbots cannot do this, apparently because the only information they have about us is what we have supplied.  Really, is that the case?  I suspect it is the opposite, as con men have learnt over the years:  listen to the mark and then play back what they have told you, adding in the twist, the offer, the redemption.  She suggests it is the very rich who already suffer from sycophancy, from living in echo chambers, but this is a problem for all of us.  There are no end of friends and colleagues who will happily concur with our points of view, and then helpfully agree with the actions we propose.

Solnit quotes from Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, who told a Rolling Stone reporter “Part of what keeps us sane is other people’s perspectives, which are often in tension with ours …When you say something questionable, others will challenge you, ask questions, defy you. It can be annoying, but it keeps us tied to reality, and it is the basis of a healthy democratic citizenry.”

Solnit sees the solution to these woes in connection.  She encourages us to distinguish between “the things real friends can do and AI cannot: bake you a cake or drive you home, hold your hand or live through a crisis or a celebration with you. And because of that difference people need to have real friends.  More than that, people need real communities and social support systems.  The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes. Stealing ourselves back, alas, is not as easy as walking out the door. We need somewhere to go and, more importantly, someone to go to who likewise desires to connect.”

The more I read, the more I was frustrated.   Solnit isn’t describing something that has suddenly arisen because of those chatbots and AI systems she described.  It has always been like this.  We are a confusing mixture of dependency and exploitation.  We depend on others, on our families, friends, workmates and even those we meet in shops, workplaces, playing fields and galleries.  At the same time, we cherish what we have as individuals, what we have acquired, what we have obtained from others for ourselves.  We sometimes are willing to pay the costs for borrowing or appropriation, but we also like to get what we can for as little cost as possible.

Much of human history, or that part of it which we can discover, is about people seeking to exploit others, balanced against those occasional, truly inspirational accounts where the dominating motive was giving rather than taking.  In the bookcase in our apartment, there is a wonderful collection of history books: Bloch on Feudal Society, Tuchman on The March of Folly, books on the rise and fall of the Medici, the decline and fall of Byzantium, and on the exploits of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane, on the world of the Pharaohs and the wars of the 20th Century.  They depict the rise and fall of human aspirations, as great leaders tried to do something more than simply rule and exploit, but in every example it is also the case they illustrate how greed, selfishness and opportunity have thwarted noble aspirations.  As I see it, Solnit is describing more of the same:  like any others she seeks a world that never existed, where people lived in harmony, greed was banished, and cooperation and collaboration shaped experience.

We tend to resist the prophet in our time.  Solnit is a prophet, in her fiction and in this essay.  She concludes “We are told that machines will become like us, but in many ways they demand we become more like them.  To let that happen is to lose something immeasurably valuable.  That immeasurability is what makes this struggle difficult, but what cannot be measured can be described or at least evoked and valued. It cannot be boiled down to simple metrics such as efficiency and profitability.  Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives.  Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.”

Is this essay call for action, or a voice in the wilderness?  We are inspired by writers who address major issues, and who dissect human nature and the political and economic systems we have devised.  We do need hope, to believe that things can be better, that we are more than animals with strangely larger brains than the rest.  As I read he essay I’m sure you know I wanted to believe that we will respond to her appeal, and humanity will shift its direction.  However, I suspect you also know that I doubted it.

History shows that our bad habits remain, despite emotional and inspirational pleas to change.  As any parent concerned about their aspirations for their child knows, no matter how they work hard to instill the values and behaviours that will make their child a better person and contribute to a better society, it’s not that simple.  Yes, that is what many parents want to achieve, but the outcomes can often seem rather discouraging:  practice falls short of hopeful aspirations, and that this is often the situation we like to believe is the result of the malign influence of others.  However, quite simply it may be because this is the way things are.

Are you resolved?

Here we are at the beginning of the year, the time when convention suggests we should begin again by wiping the slate clean and setting a new agenda.  This is justification for that strange annual activity: the proposal and implementation of New Year’s resolutions. The idea of using the start of the year as a time to make an explicit commitment to a series of future actions is an old one.  It can be dated back by at least 4,000 years to the time of the ancient Babylonians, who made promises to their gods during the Akitu festival (starting in March) to return borrowed items and pay debts for good favour.

Given the importance of making promises to the gods, we can see this approach was one which almost inevitably was going run into trouble, the kind of trouble that comes from making future promises given humanity’s persistent failing to keep them.  Despite the evidence being against them, this hopeful practice has continued as a aspiration and a target for many groups since then, evolving through a series of similar activities, including the Roman tradition of honouring Janus (the god of beginnings) right through to the time set aside for Wesleyan Christian covenant renewal services and finally continuing right up to today’s largely secular focus on establishing future targets for the coming year largely comprising self-improvement plans on a variety of topics including health, finance, and personal habits.

Well, that’s what we are advised is the case when we read the relevant article in Wikipedia which adds the somewhat salutary observation that people still continue to make New Year’s resolutions despite overwhelming evidence that success rates have and remain rather low.

Apparently, it has always been the case that these personal commitments seldom last longer than the end of January and very few resolutions are sustained to the end of the year.  I couldn’t find much about the success rate for promises made by Babylonians or Romans, but John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, recognised more success in sustaining future plans could be achieved by making these resolutions public.  He developed the institution of “Covenant Renewal Services” on New Year’s Eve/Day, involving Bible readings and hymns, influencing later watch night services. That was one way to increase commitment as there is a lot of evidence that embarrassment has a better chance of working than private commitment.   However, the level of achievement for covenant renewals hasn’t been revealed, so the success of that particular approach isn’t known.

Today the commitment to New Year resolutions has become victim to it having been made into yet another ‘business’. In the 21^st Century there are a plethora of schemes and systems to be discovered (and paid for) to ensure commitments made at the beginning of the year are recorded and monitored, even though in recent decades the focus is increasingly secular, having shifted from religious vows to individual targets concerned with personal self-improvement goals like tasks and recurrent practices related to health, career, and relationships.  It is claimed around 40-45% of people today make resolutions, but only about 8% succeed, in examinations on the success of focusing on goals like weight loss, finances, and exercises.  Those figures come from various studies reported in a variety of popular magazines including Psychology Today and Forbes.

Those figures seem rather hopeful, however.  If resolutions are personal, there is little to encourage adherence. Those Babylonians understood the importance of public commitment when they tied their future plans and commitments into the celebrations in honour of the new year, although it should be noted that for them the year began not in January but in mid-March, when the crops were planted.  During a massive 12-day religious festival known as Akitu, the Babylonians crowned a new king or reaffirmed their loyalty to the reigning king. This was the time when they also made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed. If the Babylonians kept to their word, they believed their (pagan) gods would bestow favour on them for the coming year. If not, they would fall out of the gods’ favour—a place no one wanted to be.

There is another perspective on this, one which is less about the importance of offering a goal to be achieved as evidence of commitment – and to impress a leader.  To some degree New Year’s resolutions can be seen as one part of our attempts to lead a good life.  However, a good life is concerned with a great deal more than annual promises. The idea of aspiring to live a good life has as long a history as committing to some resolutions for the coming year, but trying to live a good life is concerned with a process that is far more demanding than developing and failing to sustain annual resolutions.

I have written on the task of leading a good life over the course of many years in articles, books and talks. However, they have only been exegeses and elaborations on the thoughts of great philosophers, and especially the Ancient Greeks. Among these, Plato remains supreme.  Some 2,500 years ago he explained his view was that the good life involved achieving inner harmony by aligning your soul (your reason, spirit, and your desires or ‘appetite’) with the demands of virtuous living, using “reason to understand the importance of the virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, and at the same time mastering your desires”  Plato explained that following this path would result in leading you toward true happiness (eudaimonia) rather than focussing on the short term, pursuing fleeting physical pleasures.

Plato was advocating an approach that required self-knowledge, moral reflection, and living virtuously, with reason guiding actions towards truth, not just external rewards or sensory gratification.  As he explained it, living a good life is one in which ‘Reason governs, while allowing your Spirit to support you, and your Appetites to be satisfied appropriately, creating a life of inner balance between these three practices’.

Plato went much further and argued that Virtue is based on Knowledge, and that understanding the ‘form’ of “the Good” comes through reason which leads to wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, which are essential for well-being.  However, while Plato’s perspective rested on a carefully articulated philosophical framework, he noted that this approach wasn’t just about a complex set of ideas about ideas, but that it also requires Self-Mastery by overcoming and controlling impulses and desires to act in accordance with reason.

Plato was really demanding. True happiness he suggested comes from within, not pursuing extrinsic rewards like wealth, power or fame.  For me, one of his most telling concerns was with meaning and purpose, with the intention and the feeling you are making real progress, and you are working toward goals aligned with your values.  Nor is this just about nurturing relationships, but it also requires a commitment to personal growth through continuous learning, exploring new ideas, and developing resilience.

There is a problem in all this in the 21^st century which is that in our ‘modern’ world we are easily distracted and eminently distractable. Web sites, television programmes and other broadcasters work hard to grab our attention. The clamour of the news, the allure of the new and the babble of the world around us all conspire to pull us away from a commitment to upsurge a good life. Why not just enjoy what is happening around us?

2025 was a demanding year for many people.  Given that, it might be sensible to recognise the best thing they – and we – can do is to abandon ineffective striving, and settle for some modest goals, but not for anything more than that. If we follow that approach, then perhaps it is a good idea to have a few New Year Resolutions after all.  They are unlikely to prove onerous, especially as they will almost always be forgotten by the middle of the year:  lead a good life by some voluntary work;  make some donations to worthy causes. Sadly, that is the easy and inadequate approach we tend to adopt.

To do more than that is to take our lives and our responsibilities seriously. One determined and persistent guide is Peter Singer.  He makes it clear that doing good is essential and demanding work. In an interview with Graham Reilly in the Sydney Morning Herald back in 2015, he explained his views on living a good life which he explained is “trickier and yet simpler than you might think”. In his book The Most Good You Can Do, he suggests we haven’t really thought properly about how we can do the most good it is possible to do in this life.  He calls his approach “effective altruism”. How do you live your life in the most ethical way to make the world a better place and in a way that benefits the greatest possible number of people, most of whom you don’t know?

As an example of his approach, Singer aims to get more people to change their ideas about world poverty and what we as individuals can do to alleviate it through his proposal for pursuing effective altruism.  He describes his approach as a growing philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason, rather than emotion, to working out the most effective ways to improve the world. This is not about donations that give you a “warm glow”. This means living less selfishly, living more modestly and embracing a culture of giving to people less fortunate than you are.

“I think a lot of people do have a sense that they want to make the world a better place. And then you have to think about how I am going to do that. Not only how can I make it better but how can I do as much good as I can with the resources that I have.”. Singer says being a bystander is not an option. “It’s not an ethical option anyway. If we don’t do this, we are doing something wrong. We have an obligation to act.”

In his book, Singer writes of the ways people become effective altruists. He writes of those who deliberately choose to pursue careers that are highly paid, so that they can give more money away and help the most people they can over their lifetime.

In the chapter aptly titled ‘Giving part of yourself’, Singer discusses those effective altruists who donate one of their kidneys to save a stranger.

In his article, Graham Reilly wondered if this might be going a bit far? He responds to Singer by asking if an approach like this wasn’t putting your own life at risk? Singer ‘s response is telling.  He notes that it’s been calculated that there’s just a one in 4000 chance that a person will die as a result of giving away one kidney. But even at those odds he says he is not prepared to do it himself, although he admits it would be the right thing to do. I tell him I also prefer my kidneys to remain as a pair.

“I would do it if my daughter needed it and I think many people would,” Singer says. “But to give it to a stranger, nup. I don’t know if I can really defend that decision except to say I don’t like going into hospital and having operations. But that’s not a good reason.”

It is an important, yet challenging reservation.  Here, Singer makes a further distinction between what he advocates as a reasonable approach to helping people in need and what he is prepared to do himself.  “I see morality as not a black and white thing that either you do what’s right or you’re to be condemned for being a terrible person. I see it more like being on a grey scale and virtually everybody is on that scale.

He firmly believes everybody can and should be on this scale. The rich give more, the less rich, less. You can do a lot of good without earning a lot. You could use public transport instead of owning a car, stop buying stuff you don’t really need, stop measuring your success as a person by how big your house is. “The most solid base of self-esteem is to live an ethical life, that is a life in which one contributes to the greatest possible extent to making the world a better place.”

Crucially, he says, effective altruism needs to use the heart and the head and to be well-directed to be successful.  “Many people who give to help poor people in poor countries sponsor individual children, a practice that indicates the need to focus on a particular individual who they can get to know in some way. But it is not as likely to benefit as many people.”

Singer is a powerful advocate for the importance of living a good life and sets a standard most fail to achieve.  As he explores in his book, The Most Good You Can Do, (published by Text Publishing in 2015), there are many ways in which we can lead a good ethical life and pursue important and demanding resolutions.  It might be a good New Year’s resolution to read his book (and some of the others he has written) as a way to encourage a fuller examination of the life we lead and the value we create for others.

Obviously, not all of us have the determination to match Peter’s standard and adopt his specific approach.  At times, it is hard not to think he sets an impossible standard, but at least his comments are provocative and can help his readers rethink and reconsider, even if in only small ways.  That doesn’t mean we should abandon making a commitment to leading a good life.

At the beginning of this year, I have been thinking about doing good. As it happens, I have an excellent opportunity to explore this further. The theme for Canberra’s Philosopher’s Cafe in 2026 is identity. In the two groups that meet over the year, we take part in a series of interesting discussions but ones without real consequences, sometimes examining issues that could have real implications for the way we live, even suggesting possible resolutions.  However, our focus is on ideas, philosophical topics to consider as the year progresses.  They are rewarding, sometimes even provocative, but we could do more.

Given this, could the two groups in 2026 ask ‘How can we, individually or together, take our examination of the philosophy of identity further, to be more than academic, but instead to help each one of us develop insights and practices that will have a real impact on our lives?’  Should we do more than this?   Perhaps we could shape our discussions to include adopting Plato’s approach where “Reason governs, while allowing your Spirit to support you, and your Appetites to be satisfied appropriately, creating a life of inner balance between these three practices”.

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Brick by Brick

It must be a strange sight for a young child, to be confronted by a pile of plastic bricks, with no instructions as to what to do.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, many small children find the big and brightly coloured blocks fun to play with, and pile on top of one another.  Then they begin to fit them together and eventually find there are ways to connect wheels to their creations.  Moving toys!  Around 6 or seven years of age, they find there is another, smaller set of blocks, still interlocking and still using primary colours (although some other shades are included).  Soon, they discover they are being given bigger boxes, and each contains an assembly of component blocks with which they are able to build much larger structures, ranging from houses and commercial stores through to racing cars and familiar places, a diverse range including models to build of such places as the Eiffel Tower, Neuschwanstein Castle, and the Antarctic exploration vessel Endurance.  Of course, not all children as they grew up abandon their hobby and continue to use their Lego collection to become AFOLs, Adult Fans of Lego, thereby remaining as lifetime Lego builders (LLBs?).!

Lego first appeared in 1932, and at that time it comprised wooden toys made in the workshop of a carpenter from Billund, in Denmark.  By 1934 the founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, had named his company ‘Lego’, a name which was based on the Danish phrase leg godt (meaning ‘Play Well’).  Several years later Lego began producing plastic toys, and by 1949 it commenced a new product line, an early version of the now familiar interlocking bricks, and called them “Automatic Binding Bricks”.  They were initially manufactured from cellulose acetate, offering an enhancement of traditional stackable wooden blocks of the time.  The company adopted Christiansen’s motto, “only the best is good enough”, a comment still reinforced by the company today.  The motto was to serve as a way to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value in which he believed very strongly.   By 1951, plastic toys accounted for half of the company’s output, even though many had initially believed  plastic would never be able to replace traditional wooden toys.

Lego was first sold in Denmark in 1957, and the company expanded its sales across Europe towards the end of the 1950s, before expanding outside the European continent from the 1960s.  It was Christiansen’s son, Godtfred, who saw the immense potential in Lego bricks in becoming a system for creative play.  However, the bricks still had problems:  their locking ability was rather limited, nor were they particularly versatile.  In 1958, a new modern brick design was developed; using ABS for manufacturing, which allowed the company to make use of an attractively coloured manufacturing material five years later.   ABS, Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, is a durable, tough plastic which Lego has used since 1963 for most of its bricks.   Duplo, an alternative for younger children based on larger bricks was introduced in 1969 becoming a range of blocks whose lengths measure twice the width, height, and depth of standard Lego blocks and are aimed towards younger children.

Lego pieces of all varieties constitute a universal system. Despite variations in the design and the purposes of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces.  Bricks from 1958 still interlock with those made today, and sets for younger children are compatible with those made for teenagers.  As an aside, it turns out that six bricks with 2 × 4 studs can be combined in 915,103,765 ways.  This ‘simple’ system makes massive manufacturing demands:  when two pieces are engaged, they must fit firmly yet be easily disassembled.

Despite various mis-steps and challenges, overall the company grew and grew.  On 7 June 1968, Legoland Park opened in Billund, featuring elaborate miniature towns built entirely from Lego bricks. The three-acre (12,000 m²) theme park attracted 625,000 visitors in its first year alone. Over the next two decades, the theme park grew to more than eight times its original size and eventually attracted close to a million visitors annually. Sales of Lego sets also reached more than eighteen million units in 1968.  This pattern of growth was increased in the following year, 1969, when the Duplo system came into shops.

Designed to be used by younger children, Duplo bricks are much larger than Lego bricks, safer for young children (preventing them from eating them!), and the two systems are compatible: Lego bricks can be fitted neatly onto Duplo bricks.  Indeed, the name Duplo comes from the Latin word duplus, which translates literally as double, meaning that a Duplo brick is exactly twice the dimension of a Lego building brick (2× height by 2× width by 2× depth) so that a Duplo brick is eight times the volume of the Lego brick alternative.

Despite overall growth, like any business Lego has had its ups and downs over the years.  However, The Guardian reported that by August of this year Lego had recorded sales of £4bn and sales rose by 12%.   Their Chief Executive suggested this recent surge in growth could be the result of parents’ desire to keep children – and themselves – away from smartphones, helped by strong sales of its Botanicals and Formula One grand prix-themed sets.

CEO Christiansen said:

“We see ourselves as competing for children’s time. The most important thing is to provide relevant and exciting experiences” and has seen the company signing deals to produce toys linked to the Bluey and Pokémon cartoon series and launching the She Built That campaign to encourage girls to use Lego creatively. The company has seen success with its Botanicals range of plant-inspired building sets for adults, especially for Valentine’s Day and Easter.

Lego is clearly a global business.  Recently, sales have begun to grow in China, after a tough start to 2024, and the company expects worldwide sales to continue to rise by about 9% in the second half of the current year given the existence of “strong consumer demand”.  The company now has six factories in operation, in Denmark, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Mexico, China, Vietnam, with a further addition planned to open soon in Virginia, USA.  It uses an international business model, with several facilities focusing on molding and others on decoration and packaging.  The production process involves injecting molten plastic into molds to create bricks, with rigorous quality control checks to identify defects and ensure colour accuracy. The company has to aim for high precision; with the result their approach ensures bricks made today continue to fit with those made back in 1958.  The manufacturing process starts with plastic granules heated and injected under high pressure into molds to form bricks.  Today, Lego recycles almost all its plastic waste from manufacturing, with non-reusable plastic sold to other industries. 

The group has benefitted from its strategy of having manufacturing facilities as close to markets as possible, and also adopting a lean production approach whereby it seeks to produce only what is needed and simultaneously keeping stocks tight.  Lego has talked about taking steps such as making  some of its toy tyres from a material derived from recycled fishing nets, ropes and engine oil. The company is also introducing e-methanol, a material made from mixing renewable energy and CO₂ from biowaste, to create rigid Lego elements such as wheel axles and minifigure hands.

Actually, it is much more than that.    According to an article in Sustainability, it seems ‘Lego is Building Towards a More Sustainable Future’ (in a report by James Darley, 7 September 2024), as Lego expands its supply chain, smart choices and thinking are helping the Danish toy company meet its sustainability targets and achieve growth.  Surprisingly in a toy industry grappling with market downturns, Lego has not only maintained its position at the top of the tree but has also posted record-breaking results for the first half of 2024.  However, Darley reports the Danish toymaker’s success goes beyond profit margins. It is commitment to sustainability, particularly within its supply chain, which is setting new standards for the industry and providing a blueprint for responsible manufacturing.

James Darley writes that a key to this approach is using sustainable materials as the foundation for operational changes.  Recently Lego has made major increases in the proportion of sustainable materials it uses in its bricks. During the first half of 2024, the company reported that 30% of all the resin it purchased was certified under the mass balance principle, translating to an estimated 22% of material sourced from renewable and recycled sources.  This is a substantial improvement from 2023, when only 18% was certified mass balance, equating to 12% sustainable sources for the full year. Sources suggest that if it  continues to make similar year-on-year progress, it could reach the point where its products could be 100% sustainable within the next two decades.

Carsten Rasmussen, COO at the LEGO Group, says:

“We continue to invest in expanding our global supply chain network, maintain a strong focus on harvesting productivity and have made significant progress on our sustainability ambitions by increasing the amount of sustainable raw material used in our products.”

The company has set ambitious targets for the coming years, aiming to purchase more than half of its raw materials from sustainable sources, seeking to reduce its use of virgin fossil materials.  At the same time, a key initiative in this area is the launch of a Supplier Sustainability Programme, which mandates that suppliers set emission reduction targets by 2026 and further targets by 2028. Lego has even linked annual carbon emissions reductions to employee bonuses, creating strong incentives for its sustainability team.  While Lego seeks to focus on expanding its supply chain, they locate production and distribution facilities close to major markets.  Recent developments include opening factories in Vietnam and Virginia.

It’s sustainability initiatives are not just good for the planet, they’re also good for business. The company reported revenue growth of 13% and consumer sales growth of 14% in the first half of 2024, significantly outperforming the toy industry. Operating profit grew by 26% and net profit by 16% compared to the same period in 2023.  Niels B Christiansen, the current CEO, emphasises sustainability in the company’s strategy, achieving double-digit growth while significantly increasing sustainable materials in our products.”

Perhaps it is almost superfluous to say it, but the other strength of Lego is design, of course.  The company’s product development cycle is focussed on ensuring adherence to the Lego approach and  style.  Proposals go through a rigorous assessment process before they move to testing and production, ensuring the attractiveness of the kits isn’t compromised .  Their CEO notes “We used our solid financial foundation to further increase spending on strategic initiatives, which will support growth now and in the future to enable us to bring learning through play to even more children.”  He might have added ‘through offering compelling and engaging products to delight our customers’.

Oh, and one more comment.  My partner is a long term AFOL, and I’m a recent convert.  It offers a great range of buildings and vehicles to construct, using an astonishing range of building components.  Our local Lego store is a place we visit frequently, trying to decide which model we ‘ll build next.  Surprised  to learn we’re fans?

Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary 

I’ve broken my usual rule, and copied this extract from an article with the same name from Nautilus, January 18, 2018.  It’s an interview by Kevin Berger edited to fit my usual blog length.  I find Anthony Damasio one of the most helpful thinkers to challenge the materialist view of human beings.

Source: https://nautil.us/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary-236956/

Following Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio may be the neuroscientist whose popular books have done the most to inform readers about the biological machinery in our heads, how it generates thoughts and emotions, creates a self to cling to, and a sense of transcendence to escape by. But since he published Descartes’ Error in 1994, Damasio has been concerned that a central thesis in his books, that brains don’t define us, has been muted by research that states how much they do. To Damasio’s dismay, the view of the human brain as a computer, the command center of the body, has become lodged in popular culture.

In his new book, The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, a professor of neuroscience and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, mounts his boldest argument yet for the role of the brain. … “When I look back on Descartes’ Error, it was completely timid compared to what I’m saying now,” Damasio says. He knows his new book may rile believers in the brain as emperor of all. “I was entirely open with my ideas.  If people don’t like it, they don’t like it. They can criticize it, of course, which is fair, but I want to tell them, because it’s so interesting, this is why you have feelings.”

One thing I like about The Strange Order of Things is it counters the idea that we are just our brains.

Oh, that idea is absolutely wrong.

Not long ago I was watching a PBS series on the brain, in which host and neurologist David Eagleman, referring to our brain, declares, “What we feel, what matters to us, our beliefs and our hopes, everything we are happens in here.”

That’s not the whole story. Of course, we couldn’t have minds with all of their enormous complexity without nervous systems. That goes without saying. But minds are not the result of nervous systems alone. The statement you quote reminds me of Francis Crick, someone whom I admired immensely and was a great friend. Francis was quite opposed to my views on this issue. We would have huge discussions because he was the one who said that everything you are, your thoughts, your feelings, your mental this and that, are nothing but your neurons. This is a big mistake, in my view, because we are mentally and behaviorally far more than our neurons. We cannot have feelings arising from neurons alone. The nervous systems are in constant interaction and cooperation with the rest of the organism. The reason why nervous systems exist in the first place is to assist the rest of the organism. That fact is constantly missed.

The concept of “homeostasis” is critical in your new book. What is homeostasis?

It’s the fundamental property of life that governs everything that living cells do, whether they’re living cells alone, or living cells as part of a tissue or an organ, or a complex system such as ourselves. Most of the time, when people hear the word homeostasis, they think of balance, they think of equilibrium. That is incorrect because if we ever were in “equilibrium,” we would be dead. Thermodynamically, equilibrium means zero thermal differences and death. Equilibrium is the last thing that nature aims for.

What we must have is efficient functioning of a variety of components of an organism. We procure energy so that the organism can be perpetuated, but then we do something very important and almost always missed, which is hoard energy. We need to maintain positive energy balances, something that goes beyond what we need right now because that’s what ensures the future. What’s so beautiful about homeostasis is that it’s not just about sustaining life at the moment, but about having a sort of guarantee that it will continue into the future. Without those positive energy balances, we court death.

What’s a good example of homeostasis?

If you are at the edge of your energy reserves and you’re sick with the flu, you can easily tip over and die. That’s one of the reasons why there’s fat accumulation in our bodies. We need to maintain the possibility of meeting the extra needs that come from stress, in the broad sense of the term. I poetically describe this as a desire for permanence, but it’s not just poetic. I believe it’s reality.

You write homeostasis is maintained in complex creatures like us through a constant interplay of pleasure and pain. Are you giving a biological basis to Freud’s pleasure principle—life is governed by a drive for pleasure and avoidance of pain?

Yes, to a great extent. What’s so interesting is that for most of the existence of life on earth, all organisms have had this effective, automated machinery that operates for the purpose of maintenance and continuation of life. I like to call the organisms that only have that form of regulation, “living automata.” They can fight. They can cooperate. They can segregate. But there’s no evidence that they know that they’re doing so. There’s no evidence of anything we might call a mind. Obviously we have more than automatic regulation. We can control regulation in part, if we wish to. How did that come about?

Very late in the game of life there’s the appearance of nervous systems. Now you have the possibility of mapping the inside and outside world. When you map the inside world, guess what you get? You get feelings. Of necessity, the machinery of life is either in a state of reasonable efficiency or in a state of inefficiency, which is most often the case. Organisms with nervous systems can image these states. And when you start having imagery, you start having minds. Now you begin to have the possibility of responding in a way that you could call “knowledgeable.” That happens when organisms make images. A bad internal state would have been imaged as the first pains, the first malaises, the first sufferings. Now the organism has the possibility of knowingly avoiding whatever caused the pain or prefer a place or a thing or another animal that causes the opposite of that, which is well-being and pleasure.

Why would feelings have evolved?

Feelings triumphed in evolution because they were so helpful to the organisms that first had them. It’s important to understand that nervous systems serve the organism and not the other way around. We do not have brains controlling the entire operation. Brains adjust controls. They are the servants of a living organism. Brains triumphed because they provided something useful: coordination. Once organisms got to the point of being so complex that they had an endocrine system, immune system, circulation, and central metabolism, they needed a device to coordinate all that activity. They needed to have something that would simultaneously act on point A and point Z, across the entire organism, so that the parts would not be working at cross purposes. That’s what nervous systems first achieve: making things run smoothly.

Now, in the process of doing that, over millions of years, we have developed nervous systems that do plenty of other things that do not necessarily result in coordination of the organism’s interior, but happen to be very good at coordinating the internal world in relation to the outside world. This is what the higher reaches of our nervous system, namely the cerebral cortex, does. It gives us the possibilities of perceiving, of memorizing, of reasoning over the knowledge that we memorize, of manipulating all of that and even translating it into language. That is all very beautiful, and it is also homeostatic, in the sense that all of it is convenient to maintain life. It if were not, it would just have been discarded by evolution.

How does your thesis square with the hard problem of consciousness, how the physical tissue in our heads produces immaterial sensations?

Some philosophers of mind will say, “Well, we face this gigantic problem. How does consciousness emerge out of these nerve cells?” Well, it doesn’t. You’re not dealing with the brain alone. You have to think in terms of the whole organism. And you have to think in evolutionary terms.

The critical problem of consciousness is subjectivity. You need to have a “subject.” You can call it an I or a self. Not only are you aware right now that you are listening to my words, which are in the panorama of your consciousness, but you are aware of being alive, you realize that you’re there, you’re ticking. We are so distracted by what is going on around us that we forget sometimes that we are, A-R-E in capitals. But actually you are watching what you are, and so you need to have a mechanism in the brain that allows you to fabricate that part of the mind that is the watcher.

You do that with a number of devices that have to do, for example, with mapping the movements of your eyes, the position of your head, and the musculature of your body. This allows you to literally construct images of yourself making images. And you also have a layer of consciousness that is made by your perception of the outside world; and another layer that is made of appreciating the feelings that are being generated inside of you. Once you have this stack of processes, you have a fighting chance of creating consciousness.

Why do you object to comparing the brain to a computer?

In the early days of neuroscience, one of our mentors was Warren McCulloch. He was a gigantic figure of neuroscience, one of the originators of what is today computational neuroscience. When you go back to the ’40s and ’50s, you find this amazing discovery that neurons can be either active or inactive, in a way that can be described mathematically as zeroes and ones. Combine that with Alan Turing and you get this idea that the brain is like a computer and that it produces minds using that same simple method.

That has been a very useful idea. And true enough, it explains a good part of the complex operations, that our brains produce such as language. Those operations require a lot of precision and are being carried out by cerebral cortex, with enormous detail, and probably in a basic computational mode. All the great successes of artificial intelligence used this idea and have been concerned with high-level reasoning. That is why A.I. has been so successful with games such as chess or Go. They use large memories and powerful reasoning. …[It matches] very well with things that are high on the scale of the mental operations and behaviors, such as those we require for our conversation. But they don’t match well with the basic systems that organize life, that regulate, for example, the degree of mental energy and excitation or with how you emote and feel. The reason is that the operations of the nervous system responsible for such regulation relies less on synaptic signaling, the one that can be described in terms of zeroes and ones, and far more on non-synaptic messaging, which lends itself less to a rigid all or none operation.

Perhaps more importantly, computers are machines invented by us, made of durable materials. None of those materials has the vulnerability of the cells in our body, all of which are at risk of defective homeostasis, disease, and death. In fact, computers lack most of the characteristics that are key to a living system. A living system is maintained in operation, against all odds, thanks to a complicated mechanism that can fall apart as a result of minimal amounts of malfunction. We are extremely vulnerable creatures. People often forget that. Which is one of the reasons why our culture, or Western cultures in general, are a bit too calm and complacent about the threats to our lives. I think we are becoming less sensitive to the idea that life is what dictates what we should do or not do with ourselves and with others.

… The importance of feeling is that it makes you critically aware of what you are doing in moral terms. It forces you to look back and realize that what people were doing historically, at the outset, at the moment of invention of a cultural instrument or a cultural practice, was an attempt to reduce the amount of suffering and to maximize the amount of wellbeing not only for the inventor, but for the community around them. One person alone can invent a painting or a musical composition, but it is not meant for that person alone. And you do not invent a moral system or a government system alone or for yourself alone. It requires a society, a community.

You write, “The increasing knowledge of biology from molecules to systems reinforces the humanist project.” How so?

This knowledge gives us a broader picture of who we are and where we are in the history of life on earth. We had modest beginnings, and we have incorporated an incredible amount of living wisdom that comes from as far down as bacteria. There are characteristics of our personal and cultural behavior that can be found in single-cell organisms or in social insects. They clearly do not have the kind of highly developed brains that we have. In some cases, they don’t have any brain at all. But by analyzing this strange order of developments we are confronted with the spectacle of life processes that are complex and rich in spite of their apparent modesty, so complex and rich that they can deliver the high level of behaviors that we normally, quite pretentiously, attribute only to our great human smarts. We should be far more humble. That’s one of my main messages. In general, connecting cultures to the life process makes apparent a link that we have ignored for far too long.

Civility

Stephen Carter is a fascinating thinker and writer, a legal scholar based at Yale, who has written on both legal and social issues.  He studied history at Stanford University, and law at Yale Law School in 1979.  He served as a law clerk, first for Judge Robinson III in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then for US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1980-81.  He was appointed  a Professor of Law at Yale Law School from 1982. However, he is equally – if not more widely – known for his non-fiction books.  His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, was wonderful:  published in 2002 it won numerous awards.  It was followed by several other novels, including two, New England White and Palace Council, which together with the Emperor of Ocean Park, are all set in in a fictional New England town.  He continues to publish both fiction and non-fiction.

In 1998 he published a book sometimes referred to as a self-help guide, sometimes as a reference work.  Civility has an intriguing subtitle: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy.  At The Aspen Institute that year, he explained he believed civility was disintegrating because we have forgotten the obligations we owe to each other and are ‘awash instead in a sea of self-indulgence’.  I found his talk, and the book, fascinating:  now some 25 years later, I suspect I see it differently, not just because he wrote from an explicitly Christian perspective, (he claims that agreeing to his approach does not presuppose being Christian, or religious). But he makes it clear that being civil toward strangers, toward opponents, follows from an acknowledgment that every person is as much God’s creature as we are, and we owe it to others, even opponents, to treat them with respect, even awe. But he is saying more than this, that civility is a moral duty.  25 years later I find the Christian tone is less easy to accept.

His overall thesis is that basic good manners have become a casualty of our postmodern culture. He argues that civility is disintegrating because we have forgotten the obligations we owe to each other and are lost instead in a sea of self-indulgence. Neither liberals nor conservatives can help us much, Carter explains, because each political movement, in a different way, exemplifies what has become the principal value of modern America: that what matters most is not the needs or hopes of others, but simply getting what we want. Taking inspiration from the Abolitionist sermons of the nineteenth century, Carter proposes to rebuild our public and private lives around the fundamental rule that we must love our neighbours. He investigates many of the fundamental institutions of society and in the book he illustrates how each one of us must do more to promote the virtue of civility.

Civility is in three sections.  The first part of is devoted to exploring the idea of “The Collapse of the Three-Legged Stool,” a reference to three legs supporting civility, the home, the school and the place of worship:  “If all three institutions work together, mutually reinforcing the moral understandings that the others are teaching, then the children are likely to learn what they should. If any one of them fails—if even one of the legs should break—then the task is much harder, and perhaps impossible. The metaphorical stool topples”(p. 229)

The middle section of the book explores what he calls “Incivility’s Instruments.” Among these are demonizing opponents, not listening to others, fighting words , market language, the technologies of incivility (including the internet), and law. Looking back, American society seems even worse off now some two and a half decades later.  The corrosive effects of America’s national political and economic environments make it harder to keep being civil.  The final part, “Civilizing the Twenty-First Century,” is almost poignant, because it is clear that we have failed to follow his call for action:  instead of increased civility in public life, we have two contending camps each accusing the other of being a mortal threat to society, each seeing itself as the only true defender of democracy.

Throughout the book he notes various ‘duties’ that civility requires us to observe, and it is a tough yet clear agenda.  The first duty is that “Our duty to be civil towards others does not depend on whether we like them or not.” (page 35).  It’s a comment that reminds me of the oft-cited idea of ‘blind justice’. He goes on to propose a second rule, that “Civility requires that we sacrifice for strangers, not just for the people we happen to know’ (page 58).  Just four pages later he adds “Civility has two parts:  generosity, even when it is costly, and trust, even when there is risk”. These comments become more pointed as we read on that “Civility creates not merely a negative duty not to do harm, but an affirmative duty to do good” (page 71).  Now, even more focussed, he adds “Civility requires a commitment to live a common moral life, so we should try to follow the norms of the community if the norms are not actually immoral (page 87).  The next rule, which he admits is a ‘hard one’, is “We must come into the presence of our fellow human beings with a sense of awe and gratitude” (page102).

He remains practical: “Civility assumes that we will disagree: it requires us not to mask our differences, but to resolve them respectfully’ (Page 132).  He adds the obvious corollary: “Civility requires that we listen to others with knowledge of the possibility that they are right and we are wrong.” (page 139).  Finally, in case we missed it, he notes “Civility requires resistance to the dominance of social life by the values of the marketplace.  Thus the basic principles of civility – generosity and trust- should apply as fully in the market and in politics as in every other human endeavour” (page 173).   He’s realistic, too “Civility allows criticism of others, and sometimes even requires it, but the criticism must always be civil” (page 217).  After suggesting legislation be last resort to settle disputes, he adds “Teaching civility, by word and example, is an obligation of the family.  The state must not interfere with the family’s effort to create a coherent moral universe for its children’ (page 230).  It’s getting tricky and he adds “Civility values diversity, disagreement, and the possibility or resistance, and therefore the state must not use education to try to standardise our children” (page 242).

In 2012, Carter was interviewed in the Yale publication Reflections, on the topic of Civil Thoughts on Uncivil Times, fourteen years after the book first appeared. In this extract from the interview, he raises and sometimes reiterates some important points:

REFLECTIONS: Has the moral mood of the nation changed in recent decades?

STEPHEN CARTER:  “The late religious philosopher Henry Nelson Wieman coined the phrase “traffic society” to refer to a culture so steeped in generalized impersonal regulation that people are treated in effect like automobiles rather than human beings. That seems to me the direction in which we’re headed. It isn’t that any particular law or rule is particularly bad (although there are some clunkers out there), but that the sheer weight of rules displaces other goods.  Let me give you an example of what I mean. Fifteen or twenty years ago, a college student in California decided to attend classes naked. When criticized, he insisted that he had the right to do it. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. The point his critics made was that whether or not he had the right, what he was doing was wrong.  Nowadays, this sort of argument is quite difficult to make. Once a claim of right has been asserted, the asserter (often aided by the media) expects all critics to shut up. It is as though the establishment of legality ends questions of morality. A public conversation premised on that vacuous notion isn’t worthy of the name.”

“Edmund Burke, in an early essay, bemoaned the way that lawyers and theologians had divided up the world, so that nobody dared act without consulting both. Few people are very frightened any longer of the theologians. The lawyers of his day have morphed into the bureaucrats of ours; and the bureaucrats scare everybody.  One predictable result of a heavy reliance on rules is a decreased reliance on moral suasion – and as the need for moral suasion declines, so does our ability to engage in moral argument. That is why, for example, critics of the Bush Administration’s adventure in Iraq, or the Obama Administration’s drone war, have found themselves forced to rely on shaky arguments about legality. In both cases, they should have been making arguments about morality. Alas, we no longer do public moral argument particularly well. If we don’t recover the skill, we will cease to be in any recognizable sense a moral people.”

REFLECTIONS: In Civility, you said it was your prayerful hope for America that “we build a society in which we act with, rather than talk about genuine respect for others.” Has civility lost ground since 1999? What conditions are needed for it to flourish?

CARTER:  “In the book you mention, I define “civility” as the sum of the many sacrifices that we make for the sake of living our common life. Thus civility isn’t only good manners (although it is that) and it isn’t only how we think about and talk about others (although it is that, too). Civility resides, for example, in acts of charity, particularly when they are truly costly to us.  Are we being more sacrificial? It is difficult to say. Acting through government isn’t sacrifice – it’s the use of coercion to require sacrifices from others. Coercion isn’t always bad, and there are things government must coerce – but we should be careful to separate acts of state from acts of charity.”

“The distinction matters. Consider for example the substantial literature suggesting that when individual income tax rates rise, so do charitable donations, because the benefit to the giver (the charitable deduction) is worth more at a higher marginal rate. If this is so, however, we must recognize the implicit failure of civility: People are giving money to charity because they are being paid to do it! (The older view, that only the giving of the rich and not the giving of the middle class is influenced by tax rates, seems not to have stood empirical testing.)”

REFLECTIONS: What sort of wisdom can faith traditions inject into turbulent times?

CARTER:  “Our modern word wisdom comes from an Old High German word meaning, roughly, judicial precedent. The idea was that wisdom was the guidance that the experience of the past could offer to the present – and that the guidance of wisdom, absent exceptional circumstance, should be binding.  I have never thought that we should somehow be ruled by the wisdom of the ancients. That doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t consult it and, at times, defer to it. The ancients can be wrong, but so can we. Here it is useful to follow the example of Socrates in Plato’s Apology, and be as acutely sensitive to what we don’t know as to what we do. A lot of traditional teachings are, by our present lights, morally reprehensible, and have quite properly been rejected.  But we shouldn’t turn this around and suppose that they must be morally reprehensible because they’re ancient. When a moral teaching has been held for generations, that at least suggests that a lot of people over the centuries have thought it might actually be true. That fact does not make a traditional answer true, but it does suggest that we should embrace a certain humility when deciding whether to reject what tradition teaches. On the other hand, many religionists are nowadays in retreat from their own traditions – or else cowering in bunkers, trying to protect what tatters of tradition they can from the strengthening cultural and legal assault”

REFLECTIONS: If American history can be characterized as a long debate between individualism and community, who’s winning?

CARTER: “If the question is about sex, individualism is winning. If the question is about just about anything else, community is winning. If you doubt this proposition, just consider where we feel comfortable regulating, and where we don’t.  As more and more corners of life are regulated for the sake of the common good, the tricky question is who’s in charge. Come to think of it, the same question applies to sex. Odd how our culture seems most individualistic in the one sphere where the intellect is least involved in the taking of decisions.”

REFLECTIONS: There’s talk of a “narrative of decline” taking hold in this country. Is that overstated?

CARTER:  “Oh, we’re in a decline. No question. Not because the economy is retrenching – that’ll work itself out eventually, and people will fight viciously over credit the way they now fight about blame – and not because American influence abroad is receding, either – although that, too, presents problems. No, the reason we’re in a decline is that we no longer are capable of being serious about public argument. Election campaigns have become opportunities for entertainment, each side declaring a jeremiad against the other, but mainly pointing to silly gaffes, and lying happily about what the opponent is up to.  Supporters of this or that candidate, when pressed about why the campaigns are so vicious, will routinely answer that their side is just matching the other, doing what’s necessary to win. As a Christian, I find this response terrifying. Christianity seeks to build a morality of means that is every bit as important as the morality of ends, and often more so. And not just Christianity. The late Gore Vidal used to argue that the American idea rests on the proposition that the end doesn’t justify the means, and I think he was right. Our goals obviously matter, but so do our chosen strategies for attaining them. There is nothing admirable in doing whatever is necessary to win, because victory is not a virtue. (John Courtney Murray’s clever mot – “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” – is often quoted in response, but usually out of context.)”

“It’s not that politics wasn’t nasty before. In America, politics has always been nasty. But we used to spend a good deal less time on it than we do now. People paid attention for a few weeks and then went on with their actual lives. Democracy cannot flourish when electoral politics is exalted above all things. The entire point of the concern for civil society is that a successful nation needs its people to be focused on matters more important than transitory partisan advantage. A nation where friends can no longer hold political discussions, for no other reason than that they disagree, is a nation not only in decline but, in the Weberian sense of nationhood-as-common-interest, on the verge of collapse.”

“And our decline matters. I am naive enough, in the innocence of late middle age, to believe that America should still be a beacon to the world, a nation worth imitating. Plenty of countries around the globe have learned to imitate our self-seeking, our obsessions with wealth and celebrity, and our growing incivility. Before selecting our public behaviours, we should perhaps think a bit harder about what it is that we want to export.”

Thirteen years later an interestingly hopeful final line, given the state of the US today!

To have an informative view of matters is often a function of perspective.  Pierre Ryckmans was a man with an enviable sense of perspective, one which allowed him to be writer, essayist, translator, art historian and especially a sinologist, as well as becoming a respected professor.  To have such a broad vantage point was the result of his life experiences, and they were both fascinating and complex.

Ryckmans was born in Brussels, his father a publisher, his grandfather a member of the Antwerp government, as well as anephew of the Pierre Ryckmans who was a governor general of  the Belgian Congo, and of Gonzague Ryckmans, a recognized expert of Arabic epigraphy and professor at the Catholic University of Louvain.  After first studying law and art history at university, his father died at an early age in 1955.  That year he was a member of a delegation of ten young Belgians who spent a month in China.   It was a transformative visit.  He returned having decided “it would be inconceivable to live in this world, in our age, without a good knowledge of Chinese language and a direct access to Chinese culture” (explained in an interview in China Heritage Quarterly, No. 26, June 2011).

It was the beginning of a time of moves.  He enrolled at the Fine Arts department of the Taiwan National University, carrying our research for what was to become his future PhD dissertation subject, the work of a Chinese painter, Shitao.  In 1960, he was called up for military service in Belgium but chose to become a conscientious objector.   He was able to take up a part-time student and teaching job Singapore’s Nanyang University,  but under suspicion of being a communist by the Lee Kuan Yew government, he had to leave and settled in Hong Kong.  During this time, and on his publisher’s advice, he decided to assume the pen name Simon Leys,  to avoid being declared persona non grata in the PRC.  In 1970 he moved to Australia, teaching  Chinese literature at the ANU.  From 1987–93, he was Professor of Chinese Studies at University of Sydney.  After retiring from that position, he returned to Canberra, where he lived until he died of cancer at 78.

During his life, he was a prolific writer, publishing in English, French and Chinese.  His books on China offered ‘scathing descriptions’ of the cultural and political destruction under the Auspices of Mao in mainland China.  He was equally trenchant in his critiques of  Mao’s  western defenders.  I found all his books both enlightening and persuasive.  He wrote regularly for the English-language press  and for the French-language press.  He was a fellow of Australian. Academy of the Humanities, an Honorary Commander of the French Navy (!!), and a member of Belgian Royal Academy of Literature.  He received many awards including the French Academy’s Prix Jean Walter, prix d’histoire et de sociologie, and other of their awards , as well as the Christina Stead Prize for fiction.

However, among the many books of his I have read and reread, one that was rather different was his 1966 Boyer Lectures, given on the theme ‘Aspects of Culture’.  The lectures cover five themes.  The first, Learning, addresses education and what he saw as its present crisis.  The second, Reading, is concerned with the role of books in our lives, and the role of literary criticism.  Next, in Writing, he deals with the creative experience.  Lecture four, Going Abroad Staying Home, is a series of reflections on the outside world and ‘otherness’, balanced against others concerned with inner life and contemplation.  Each of the chapters is humorous, insightful and memorable.

The flavour of Rickman’s approach is evident from the beginning.  Having first told the reader about Rousseau’s Confessions, in which the author reveals a time on which, tongue-tied for whatever reason, he failed to respond to a series of attacks, ones he easily could have refuted on another occasion.  This leads him on the reflecting on a failure of his own when, at a conference, he heard a young critic respond to a speech in such a way if prevented responses.  The critic’s address was as long as the original presentation and took up all of the airtime.  More to the point, in rehashing some of the slogans from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the critic was effectively denying the right of anyone to criticise another.  He was arguing value judgements  were a form of cultural arrogance.  This was to portray the realm of scholarly activity are mere social prejudice.

For Ryckmans, this was to remind him of the Mchael Leunig cartoon presenting a trendy modern cleric.  The caption we are told, read ‘Reverend so-and-So does not believe in God, but needs the job.’  It was funny, were it not for the fact that it was also a commentary on the postmodernists task of ‘deconstruction’, where anybody’s values are as legitimate as anyone else’s.  If Ryckman is terrified about the thought that universities might lose their fundamental grounding in agreed vales, he imagines the consequences:  “I should not be surprised if I were to learn that, right now, in the English Literature Department of [one of our] vanguard universities, (duly renamed Departments of Human Communications and Sociocultural Deconstruction) there are earnest candidates for a doctoral degree, hard at work on “deconstructing” the telephone directory.”

I smiled at the story and then stopped smiling:  as he goes on to note “Truth, in other words, is not in thought, , but … it is the condition for the possibility of thinking. … The view that Truth is not a conclusion, but a premise – and the very condition for any intellectual enquiry is important and profound.”  Ryckmans illustrates this idea by quoting a story about the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhi.  A couple of pages later we are pushed harder: “The trap of “seeing  through” things was best exposed by C S Lewis (in a conclusion to his essay on the defence of values):

“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.  It is good that the window should be transparent because the street of garden beyond it is opaque.  How if you saw through the garden too?  It is no use trying “to see through’ first principles .  If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To see through all things is the same as not to see.”

Skilfully, we have managed to explore some key issues in the nature of higher education and the role of universities, gently confronting issues that are as relevant today as they were nearly sixty years ago.  In this first lecture, Ryckman ends by observing that the university “increasingly resembles the cardboard props that were used on the Elizabethan stage, or in the Peking opera, and on which was written in big characters “THIS IS A CASTLE’ or ‘THIS IS A FOREST’ – it amounts to little more than a symbolic signboard ‘THIS IS A UNIVERSITY’.  Can such a fiction retain credibility with the public?

In many ways this lecture in The View From the Bridge is an uncomfortable introduction to Bill Readings 1996 book The University in Ruins (Harvard University Press).  In his book Readings argues the university has outlived its purpose–a purpose he suggests made sense two centuries ago, when the nation-state and the modern notion of culture came together to make the university the guardian of national culture…What, Readings asks, “is the point of the University, if we realize that we are no longer to strive to realize a national identity, be it an ethnic essence or a republican will?” What happens when the culture the university was meant to preserve goes global and transnational along with everything else? This is an intriguing argument. And…it helps to explain much. From this perspective, for example, Readings is wonderfully insightful on the “culture wars” that have wracked universities and bewildered the public for two decades…

Of course, Ryckmans takes the argument as far as to lament what was happening.  Readings wants to go further, suggesting who live and work in universities as well as to those on the outside need to better understand the university’s position in a changing world, ‘to come out of our professional shells, stop pining for a lost world, and actively seek to construct something different’.

In his second lecture, Ryckmans addresses reading, beginning with a nice tale from China about the importance of text, and suggests Chines script is “at the root of Chinese civilisation in a way that has no real equivalent anywhere else in the world”.  Do we respect the written word as much as the Chinese di (and perhaps still do)?  Ryckmans goes on to describe that scene in Peter Weir’s film wen the students are told by their charismatic teacher that their poetry anthology was compiled and had an introduction by a ‘pompous moron.  The teacher tears the offending pages from the book, and, slowly at first, the students do the same, and the scene ends with a ‘joyous iconoclastic  frenzy’.

Ryckmans was horrified by this scene in a film he otherwise enjoyed.  Why?  Because it reminds him of the many other episodes of book destruction and book burning, acts of brutality and horror, from fascist mobs right back to the first Emperor of China.  Books have power.  As he observes: “The point is not that a book can be considered as to have as much value as human life, but that, simply, when a man is bent on destroying books, you know he is capable of anything, since his aim is not merely to kill people, but to kill their souls”.

In case we don’t get the point, he goes on to quote from Primo Levi, who writes about quoting from the Diving Comedy in Auschwitz.  In his memoir, Levi remembers a moment of sudden catastrophe  when his memory begins to fail, at the end of one stanza, unable to complete the Canto: “I have forgotten at least twelve lines … I would give today’s soup to know how to connect the last fragment to the end of the Canto.  I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers, but it is of no use, the rest is silence’.  Thirty years after writing that passage, Levi returned to it, in the last book he wrote a year before his death.  He concluded “When I wrote I would give today’s soup for know how to retrieve the forgotten passage, I had neither lied nor exaggerated.  I really would have given bread and soup – that is, blood – to save from nothingness those memories which today, with the support of printed paper, I can refresh gratis whenever I wish, and which therefore seems of little value”.

Ryckmans ends his comments on literature by rewriting a commentary by  Thomas Merton.  Merton was writing about religion.  In his transposition Ryckmans takes Merton’s world but replaces religious terms with literary concepts: “Literature is not understood.  Those who wish themselves cultured in order to admire themselves in this state are made stupid by literary studies.  What is need is to lose ourselves completely to literature;  what is needed is perfect silence. Literary theory has something revolting about it.”  Yes, just allow yourself to live in the world of great books.

When he moves to writing, Ryckmans becomes rather more critical.  He starts by addressing the strange desire to explain the ‘message’ of a piece of fictional writing, as if the writer was setting out some directional signs.  In response Ryckmans quotes Hemmingway: “When I need to send a message, I go to the Post Office”.  From here it is a short step for Ryckmans to address the importance of ‘inspiration’.  With his strikingly adept use of Chinese stories, Ryckmans finds an appropriate story to illustrate his concern.

“ Prince Yuan wished to have some paintings done.  Many painters came to his palace.,  Having bowed to the Prince, the began immediately to busy themselves with their work, licking their brushes and preparing their ink in front of him.  One painter, however, arrived long after the others, quite at leisure.  He made a casual bow and then immediately disappeared into a back room.  Quite puzzled, the Prince despatched one servant to find out where he had gone.  The servant reported back: ‘He has taken all his clothes off and sits there naked doing nothing.’  ‘Splendid’ the Prince exclaimed.  ‘This one will do, he is a real painter’.

If the point might seem a little subtle, Ryckmans goes on to report how great European painters were well known for their focus on inner discipline to precede and sustain practice.  He quotes from Vasari, who told the story of Leonardo da Vinci working on The Last Supper.  Apparently, he would often send as much as half of the day simply looking at what he had done.  When questioned, Leonardo is said to have replied ‘men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they do the least’.  The View From the Bridge is full of clever anecdotes and observations like these, all of which are intended to do what Ryckmans described as the practice of great painters – encouraging the reader to stop and think.

When he turns his focus to writers, and those who face a writer’s block, he quotes Philip Larkin:

“…. Don’t ask me

Why I stopped.  I didn’t stop.  It stopped.

In the old days, I’d go home at six

And write all evening on a board

Across my knees.  But now … I go home

And there is nothing there.

I am like a chicken

With no eggs to lay.”

          (In Philip Larkin, a Tribute, by George Hartley, Marwell Press, 1988).

Should I continue?  Books like A View From the Bridge are deceptive.  A written version of four lectures, relatively brief and offered for general consumption.  This isn’t a work of scholarship, but an easy to read and engaging overview.  There’s the trap.  To condense your views into four lectures, lectures aimed at an intelligent but non-specialist audience is a challenge.  The lecturer has to speak to a large (and unseen) audience.  The lecturer has to capture the interest of the listeners, using anecdotes, amusing stories and similar devices to create bridges into important topics to offer criticism and comment.

I think Pierre Ryckmans does it brilliantly, yet, if I want you to read the book, perhaps I could  entice you by offering a few more – hopefully tantalising – snippets.  He writes about the dangerous allure of exoticism, about behaving well in the face of death, and about the unlikelihood of a try insightful metaphor.  He reminds us that it’s a plum pudding book, and, like little Jack Horner, that suggests you should stick your nose (and brain) into the essays, and like Jack, find yourself pulling out some plums!

The End of the Affair

Some books are disconcertingly good.  Why disconcertingly?  It might be because, for the reader, they offer the kind of insights that don’t just seem very true, but it is as if they are revealing more than perhaps we want to know and yet can’t help but be fascinated.  Graham Greene wrote several compelling stories, of which several were set overseas, the action  taking place at those fascinating intersections between exotic locations, the intrigues of the spy business, and the vagaries of love, sex and passion.  His stories aren’t always comfortable, which is part of what makes them so involving:  it is as if we have been invited into a real set of lives, where confusions, jealousies, hopes, fear, rejections and deceits all swirl around, sometimes creating dramatic moments, yet more often just showing the reader the unpredictable outcomes of minor choices and chance decisions.  However, it is his more domestic dramas that are possibly even more uncomfortable and unsettling.

The End of the Affair is centred around  Maurice Bendrix, an author who is beginning to establish a reputation, with the first stages of his story set in the final years of the Second World War.  Bendrix falls in love Sarah Miles, the wife of an impotent and apparently rather boring civil servant, Henry Miles.  Before long, Bendrix begins to fear that his affair with Sarah will end as quickly as it began.  We can see why this is likely, as their relationship suffers from his overt and admitted jealousy. In particular, he is frustrated by her refusal to divorce Henry.

Their affair seems to end when Bendrix and Sarah are in his flat.  Somewhat nonchalantly, as was the case with their attitudes at many of the times they were together, they ignore the air raid sirens.  However, when a V-2 rocket explodes near Bendrix’s building just as he is outside in the hallway.   Bendrix falls down a staircase and awakes later, bloodied but not seriously hurt. He walks upstairs, where Sarah is shocked to see that he is alive.  Bendrix accuses Sarah of being disappointed that he survived and she leaves, telling him, “Love doesn’t end just because we don’t see each other.

On a rainy London night in 1946, two years after the V-2 Rocket explosion, Maurice Bendrix has a chance meeting with Henry Miles.  His obsession with Sarah is rekindled; he succumbs to his own jealousy and works his way back into her life.  Henry tells Bendrix that he believes Sarah is having an affair.  Increasingly alarmed that Sarah might have a new lover, Bendrix hires the bumbling but amiable private detective Mr. Parkis, who uses his young birthmarked son Lance to help him investigate.  Despite their now rather cold relationship, Bendrix and Sarah continue to meet, and she tells him about Henry, and reveals her almost non-existent relationship with her husband.

The die is cast.  Bendrix is still caught up with his largely unconfirmed jealousy, and when he sees Henry crossing the Common that separates their flats, it seems to him that Henry has finally started to suspect something.  At one point, Parkis manages to steal Sarah’s diary and passes it on to Bendrix.  It’s an uncomfortable revelation, showing their affair from her perspective.  It reveals that while Bendrix was temporarily knocked unconscious by the bomb, Sarah had run downstairs to finds him still and not breathing.   She had tried to revive him, then she ran back upstairs and began to pray for Bendrix’s life. Just as she says to God that she will stop seeing Bendrix if he is brought back, Bendrix comes into the room.

Now knowing why Sarah ended their affair, Bendrix tries to get Sarah to reconsider. She hesitates, and tells him she has felt dead without him, and can no longer keep her ‘promise’ to God.   Meanwhile Henry, who has figured out that it is Bendrix who was Sarah’s lover, desperately asks Sarah not to leave him.  He fails.  Shortly after, Bendrix goes to meet Henry, from whom he learns Sarah has a terminal illness.  Bendrix and Henry meet regularly, and Bendrix stays with Henry and Sarah over her final days. At her funeral, Parkis tells Bendrix that his son’s birthmark went away after Sarah kissed it during a chance encounter. Now living at Henry and Sarah’s house, Bendrix completes his most recent novel, which is essentially a diary of hate directed toward God. While Sarah doesn’t need to see God to love Him, Bendrix prays God will leave him alone, thereby finally acknowledging His existence.  Despite this, by the last page of the novel, Bendrix comes to believe in a God as well.

There is ample evidence to suggest that Bendrix is drawn to some extent on Greene himself, and in the novel, he reflects often on the act of writing a novel.  Sarah was probably based on Greene’s lover at the time, Catherine Walston, to whom the book is dedicated.  The End of the Affair is often considered among Greene’s best novels.  Evelyn Waugh commented that the story was “a singularly beautiful and moving one”.  However, it was Alex Preston writing for The Independent in February 2012 who observed on Graham Greene:  “The End of the Affair is his masterpiece: an astonishing, painfully moving interrogation of the contradictions in a Catholicism he couldn’t live without but struggled to live with.”

Well, there it is.  There is no reason to doubt that The End of the Affair was partly based on Greene’s life and his relationship to Catholicism.  But it is far more than that:  Graham Greene is an outstanding writer.  He turns a searchlight on the small, often perverse and silly ways in which we examine our relationships.  We reflect on things we have said, things we have done, regret actions and at the same time wish we had said more.  What Greene does is to make this about individual foibles, the inability to step back from the immediate actions and choices we make and see them in a larger perspective.

It is one among several I’ve recently reread about the complexities and confusions of love.  It is tempting to believe that the ever hasty Bendrix would have understood more if he had read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s second and wonderful novel.  Published 1813, it portrays the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial and actual goodness.

Perhaps this was a simpler world than the UK in the middle of the 20^th Century.  In the early 19th century, the Bennet family live near the English village of Meryton.  Mrs. Bennet’s greatest desire is to marry off her five daughters to secure their futures.  Events begin with news about a Mr. Bingley, a rich bachelor who rents a neighbouring estate.  His arrival gives Mrs Bennet hope that one of her daughters might marry him, especially because ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’, a view Mrs Bennet declares at the beginning of the novel.  It’s a memorable line!

The family, five daughters, go to a ball, where they are introduced to Mr. Bingley, his two sisters, Caroline, who is unmarried, and Louisa, who is married to Mr. Hurst, and his closest friend Mr Darcy.  Well the die is cast.  While  Mr. Bingley’s friendly and cheerful manner earns him popularity among the guests, Mr. Darcy, reputed to be twice as wealthy as Mr. Bingley, appears haughty and aloof. He declines to dance with the second-eldest Bennet daughter, Elizabeth, as she is ‘not handsome enough’. Although she jokes about it with her friends, Elizabeth is deeply offended.  However, despite this first impression Mr. Darcy secretly begins to find himself drawn to Elizabeth as they continue to encounter each other at social events, appreciating her wit and frankness.

This isn’t the dark and bafflingly secret world of Bendrix and Sarah, but it is similarly complex and revealing about the factors that affect love.  Jane Austen weaves a tangled web built around misunderstandings, confusions, deceit and disaster.  After various obstacles and very antagonistic exchanges, we begin to understand Darcy’s true feelings for Elizabeth, while he works behind the scenes to sort out various misadventures involving her sisters.  Throughout all these additional complications and despite the evidence, Lady Catherine De Bourgh begins to sense that rumours suggesting Elizabeth intends to marry Mr. Darcy.  She visits her and demands she promise never to accept Mr. Darcy’s proposal, as she and Darcy’s late mother had already planned his marriage to her daughter Anne. Elizabeth refuses and asks the outraged Lady Catherine to leave.  Darcy, heartened by his aunt’s indignant relaying of Elizabeth’s response, proposes to her (for a second time) and is accepted.  This is a story of love conquering all, positive in its outcomes.

In picking this as the first of a series of novels dealing with love and its complexities, the next two novels take us, step by step, into deeper and more fateful misunderstandings between men and women.  Austen’s complications are about the misperceptions of class and gender, sometimes infuriating, sometimes silly, but there is a sense that ‘sense and sensibility’ will prevail.  Just thirty four years later, a couple of powerful novels, by the Bronte sisters, Charlotte and Emily, were to throw fire and acid into the gentler worlds of Austen’s stories.  Pride and Prejudice was about adults.  Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are bildungsroman, charting the psychological growth of a young woman to adulthood.

Jane Eyre is by Charlotte Bronte. It was published under her pen name ‘Currer Bell’ on 19 October 1847. The first American edition was published the following year in New York.   Jane Eyre follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine from child into adulthood, and centres on her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.  The novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of Jane Eyre; its setting is somewhere in the north of England.  In five sections it explores stages in Jane’s life, the focus psychological.

It begins with Jane Eyre, aged 10, living at Gateshead Hall with her maternal uncle’s family, where the nursemaid, Bessie, proves to be Jane’s only ally.  Jane has an unhappy childhood.  Mrs Reed gets the harsh Mr Brocklehurst, the director of Lowood Institution, a charity school for girls, to enrol Jane.  Mrs Reed cautions Mr Brocklehurst that Jane has a “tendency to deceit”, which he interprets as Jane being a liar. Before Jane leaves, however, she tells everyone at Lowood how cruelly the Reeds treated her.  Once at Lowood Institution, Jane soon finds that life is harsh. She attempts to fit in and befriends an older girl, Helen Burns. In due course Mr Brocklehurst visits the school. While Jane is trying to make herself inconspicuous, she accidentally drops her slate. She is then forced to stand on a stool and is branded a sinner and a liar. Many students fall ill when a typhus epidemic strikes; Helen dies of consumption in Jane’s arms.  While benefactors ensure conditions at the school improve, this isn’t a Jane Austen saga.  It is proving far more complex and internally revealing.

After 6 years as a pupil & 2 as a teacher at Lowood, Jane leaves in pursuit of a new life.  She takes a position at Thornfield Hall, teaching Adèle Varens, a young French girl.  One night, she meets Edward Rochester, master of the house.  Jane saves Mr Rochester from a fire, but the next day he leaves,  returning with party, including the beautiful Blanche Ingram. Jane starts to feel jealous.  Despite this, Rochester proposes marriage. During the wedding ceremony a lawyer reveals he cannot marry because he is already married. Rochester admits this is true and asks Jane to go with him to the south of France and live with him as husband and wife. Jane is tempted but realises that she will lose herself and her integrity if she allows her passion for a married man to consume her.  She must stay true to her Christian values and beliefs, and despite her love for Rochester, she leaves early the next morning.

Jane travels as far from Thornfield Hall as she can using the little money she had previously saved. Exhausted and starving, she eventually makes her way to the home of Diana and Mary Rivers but  it is clergyman St John Rivers, Diana and Mary’s brother, who rescues her. After Jane regains her health, St John finds her a teaching position at a nearby village school. Jane becomes good friends with the sisters, but St John remains aloof. St John learns Jane’s true identity and discovers her uncle, John Eyre, has died and left her his entire fortune of 20,000 pounds.  John Eyre is also his and his sisters’ uncle. Jane insists on sharing the money equally with her cousins.  Eventually Jane reunites with a severely injured Rochester.  Overjoyed at her return, he fears that she will be repulsed by his condition. Now financially independent Jane declares that she will never leave him. Rochester proposes again, and they are married.

Also first published in 1847, Wuthering Heights is the only novel by Emily Bronte.  It concerns two families, gentry living on the Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and the turbulent relationships centred around the Earnshaw’s foster son, Heathcliff. The Earnshaws lived at Wuthering Heights with their two children, Hindley and Catherine.  Returning from a trip to Liverpool,  Earnshaw brings home an orphan, Heathcliff. His origins are unclear but he appears to be ‘like a gipsy’.   Hindley beats Heathcliff, who gradually becomes close friends with Catherine.  After Hindley was away at university, his father died and three years later he returns as the new master of Wuthering Heights. He and his new wife Frances force Heathcliff to live as one of their servants.  Following a fight Heathcliff is made to live in the manor’s unheated, dusty attic and swears that he will one day have his revenge.

The complexities mount, and events become bizarrely interwoven.  We’re a long way from Jane Austen.  Two years later, Catherine becomes engaged to Edgar, but admits she loves Heathcliff but cannot marry him because of his low social status. He flees the household.  However, just three years later, Heathcliff returns, now a wealthy gentleman, and elopes with his neighbour’s sister, Isabella.  However, when Heathcliff discovers that Catherine is dying, he visits her in secret. She dies shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Cathy, and Heathcliff rages, calling on her ghost to haunt him for as long as he lives. Twelve years later, after Isabella’s death, her sickly son Linton is brought back to live with his uncle Edgar at the Grange, but Heathcliff insists that his son must live with him. He becomes increasingly wild and reveals that on the night Catherine died he dug up her grave, and ever since has been plagued by her ghost. When Linton unexpectedly dies, Cathy has no option but to remain at Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff declines, eventually dying in Catherine’s old room.  Confused?

In some respects, The End of the Affair is a culmination of this genre.  Like the other three novels, it exposes the motivations and expectations of the key characters, and they all thrive  on the expectation that we ‘know where this is going’.  Elizabeth Bennet will marry, happily, if others in her family lead less charmed lives.  Jane Eyre will survive disasters , eventually marry and have a child.  Heathcliff and Catherine will both die, leaving behind a complex mess.  Step by step the disastrous side of love becomes more dominant.  By the 20^th Century, even that’s not enough, and the fascinating but flawed Bendrix will fail in love, only to remain stuck and bitter.  All four novels, in their own way, remind us that real life is messy, painful, and far from perfect, and by the time we’re in Greene’s world, life is truly bleak.

Lolita: In Its Purest Form

In a sense, all I want to say is ‘Read this book, it’s really brilliant’.  As if it were that easy.

Is it possible to return to a book and push aside all the commentaries and  exegeses that have developed over time?  Is it possible to return to the untainted, fresh account of the original?  Perhaps it cannot be done, because in many cases later comments have shaped perceptions and understandings.  Every year we read yet another explanation of the ‘meaning’ of  Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Great Expectations, Animal Farm or One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Novels by Jane Austen, Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Gabriel Garcia Marquez appear to be continuously re-examined and interpreted to us.  Given this, I suspect it is close to impossible to get back to an original text, the ‘ur-text’, and read it without being influenced by all those subsequent commentaries.

Of the many books on my list of ‘great and compelling’, I suspect one by Valdimir Nabokov, Lolita, might have suffered the most.  Vilified, tossed aside and often banned, it is an extraordinary novel, less read than criticised.  Many would know of the story through cinema representations, especially Adrian Lyne’s 1997 version with Jeremy Irons as Humbert and Dominique Swain as Dolores ‘Lolita’ Haze.  Unlike a previous version, Lyne’s film is close to the novel’s darker elements.  Although praised by some critics for its faithfulness to Nabokov’s narrative and the performances of Irons and Swain, the film received a mixed critical reception in the United States.  However well done, the film is not the book.

Given its place in popular culture, can we return to the novel in its purest form, as if it had never been read and criticised before?  Claire Messud in the 3 April 2025 edition of the L A Review of Books offers an insightful commentary.  Here are few observations of my own.

Before turning to the text, it might be helpful to remember something of the author.  Vladimir Nabokov was born in Russia in 1899, then lived in Cambridge from 1919 to 1922, Berlin 1922 to 1937, Paris from 1937 to 1940, and finally arrived in the USA in where he lived for just over two decades before returning the Europe, settling in Montreux from 1961 until his death in  1977.  His first nine novels were written in Russian , but he achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, then choosing to write in English.

It was during the time between 1948 to 1959 that Nabokov was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University.   While he was there, his 1955 novel, Lolita, appeared.  Lolita is ranked fourth on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best 20^th Century Novels, which appeared in 1998 and is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest works of 20th-century literature, (his Pale Fire, published in 1962, ranked 53rd on the same list).  His memoir, Speak Memory, 1951, is considered among the greatest nonfiction works of the 20th century.  Commentaries on his approach suggest Nabokov was a proponent of individualism, rejecting concepts and ideologies that curtailed individual freedom and expression.

Nabokov produced his own translations into Russian two books he originally wrote in English:  Conclusive Evidence andLolita. The ‘translation’ of Conclusive Evidence was made because Nabokov felt that the English version was imperfect. Writing the book, he noted that he needed to translate his own memories into English and to spend time explaining things that are well known in Russia; he decided to rewrite the book in his native language before completing the final version, Speak Memory.

As for the task of translating Lolita, Nabokov wrote, “I imagined that in some distant future somebody might produce a Russian version of Lolita. I trained my inner telescope upon that particular point in the distant future and I saw that every paragraph, pock-marked as it is with pitfalls, could lend itself to hideous mistranslation. In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version of Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by vulgar paraphrases or blunders. So I decided to translate it myself” (this was revealed in an interview with Alvin Toffler, Playboy, January 1964).

Nabokov’s creative processes involved writing sections of text on hundreds of index cards,  which he expanded into paragraphs and chapters and rearranged to form the structure of his novels, a process screenwriters have enthusiastically adopted since then.  He published under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin in the 1920s to 1940s, sometimes to mask his identity from critics.   He also makes cameo appearances in some of his novels, such as the character Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov”), who appears in both Lolita and Ada.  His complex plots relied on clever word play, with daring metaphors, and a prose style often described as ‘capable of both parody and intense lyricism’.

Lolita was where he addressed the controversial subject of paedophilia.  It is prefaced by a fictitious foreword by one John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books. Ray explains he is presenting a memoir written by a man using the pseudonym ‘Humbert Humbert’, who had recently died of heart disease while in jail awaiting trial for an unspecified crime. The underlying approach of the book itself is one of a memoir, which addresses the readers as his jury, and begins with Humbert’s birth in Paris in 1910 to an English mother and Swiss father.

Offering a perspective far more complex than the film versions, in the novel Humbert Humbert spends his childhood on the French Riviera, where he falls in love with his friend Annabel Leigh. This youthful and physically unfulfilled love is interrupted by Annabel’s premature death from typhus, which leads him to become sexually obsessed with a specific type of girl, those aged 9 to 14, whom he refers to as “nymphets”.

So, now we face a dilemma,  Should I reveal more of the plot, or should I say; ‘you have to read it for yourself’.  The first of these options precludes useful comment; the latter can make it hard to draw conclusions for yourself, without any helpful exegesis.  To be clear, this is a detailed, carefully constructed novel, full of ambiguities and subtle hints and suggestions.  At around 336 pages, (but the length varies according to type face and type size).  At same time, the complexity is a function of allusions, suggestions, some things that appear to be facts, and others might more likely be fantasies.  I suggest the web he is weaving is, in large part, a function of how Humbert wants the story to read.  The overall plot is important, and so this is adapted from the Wikipedia summary, which makes clear the key elements of the story.

After graduation, Humbert works as a teacher of French literature and begins editing an academic literary textbook, making passing references to repeated stays in mental institutions at this time. He is briefly married to a woman named Valeria before she leaves him for another man.  Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Humbert emigrates to the United States. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town where he works on his book. However, his new home is burnt down, and he’s approached by a widow, Charlotte Haze, who’s looking for a lodger.  Humbert visits Charlotte’s home and was about to decline her offer when he goes into the garden and  there meets Charlotte’s 12-year-old daughter Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lo, and Lola), who is sunbathing.  For Humbert Dolores, (whom he calls Lolita), is the perfect nymphet.  He quickly decides to move in.

Wracked with passion, Humbert seeks discreet ways to fulfil his sexual urges, usually via small moments of physical contact with Dolores.  When Dolores is sent to summer camp, Charlotte writes to Humbert.   She confesses her love for him and gives him an ultimatum: either marry her or move out immediately.  Stunned, Humbert realises the advantages of being Dolores’ stepfather, and so he marries Charlotte. Humbert experiments with drugging Charlotte with sleeping pills,  planning to sedate both her and Dolores so that he can sexually assault Dolores. But Charlotte discovers Humbert’s diary, learns of his desire for her daughter and the disgust he feels towards her.  She announces her plan to leave, taking Dolores with her, and writes a number of letters to her friends warning them about Humbert and his intentions.  Disbelieving his false assurance that the diary is only a sketch for a future novel, Charlotte runs out of the house to send the letters but is hit and killed by a swerving car.

Humbert destroys the letters and retrieves Dolores from camp, claiming that her mother has fallen seriously ill and has been hospitalized. He then takes her to a high-end hotel that Charlotte had earlier recommended, where he tricks her into taking  a sedative by saying it is a vitamin. As he waits for the pill to take effect, he wanders through the hotel and meets a mysterious man who seems to be aware of Humbert’s plan for Dolores. Humbert returns to the hotel room where he discovers that he has been fobbed off with a milder drug, and Dolores is merely drowsy. He dares not risk sexual contact with her that night.

The next morning, Dolores reveals to Humbert that she engaged in sexual activity with an older boy at camp that summer.  Humbert is furious and rapes her.  Leaving the hotel, he tells Dolores her mother is dead, and they start travelling across the country, driving all day and staying each night in motels along the way.  They finally settle in a small New England town, where Humbert adopts the role of Dolores’ father and enrols her in a local private school for girls.  He controls all of Dolores’ social gatherings and forbids her from dating and attending parties.  He does agree to Dolores’ participation in the school play, but the day before the premiere, Dolores runs out of the house.  He finds her in a drugstore and she tells him she wants to leave town for another road trip. He’s delighted, but as they travel, he becomes increasingly suspicious, feeling they are being followed by someone Dolores knows.

As Humbert becomes increasingly paranoid, certain that he and Dolores are being trailed.  Dolores falls ill, and Humbert checks her into a local hospital, but from where she’s discharged by an ‘uncle’. For the next two years, Humbert keeps searching for her until, unexpectedly, he receives a letter from a 17-year-old Dolores, telling him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert tracks her down and finds out that her abductor was the famous playwright Clare Quilty, who had crossed paths with Humbert and Dolores several times when they were travelling.  Quilty had tracked the pair with Dolores assistance, but later kicked her out when she refused to star in one of his pornographic films.

Humbert claims to the reader that it was at this moment he realized that he had been in love with Dolores all along and implores her to leave with him, but she refuses.  Accepting her decision, he gives her the money she is owed from her inheritance and then goes to the drug-addled Quilty’s mansion and shoots him dead.  Soon after, Humbert is arrested, and in his closing thoughts, he reaffirms his love for Dolores and in prison asks for his memoir to be withheld from public release until after her death.  The Foreword to the story has already told us that Humbert died shortly after the beginning of his imprisonment, as did Dolores in childbirth on Christmas Day 1952.

Variously described as erotic, lewd, and even pornographic, Lolita has been a constant target for criticism and praise, with many writers observing how popular culture accounts bear little relationship to the book.  Author Lance Olsen described Lolita in 1995 as a “Janus text”:

“The first 13 chapters of the text, culminating with the oft-cited scene of Lo unwittingly stretching her legs across Humbert’s excited lap… are the only chapters suggestive of the erotic.”  Nabokov noted in the novel’s afterword that a few readers were “misled [by the opening] … into assuming this was going to be a lewd book … [expecting] the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored.” 

Inevitably Nabokov was constantly questioned – and criticised – about the novel.  In a 1967 Paris Review interview we read: “Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry—to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing”.  He added “No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert–Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita. Humbert was fond of “little girls”—not simply “young girls”. Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets or ‘sex kittens’. Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his ‘aging mistress’”.

When asked in the same review about coming up with Humbert’s doubled name, he described it as “a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, and I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble.” Critics noted that, since the novel is a first person narrative by Humbert, there is very  little information about what Lolita is like as a person, that in effect she has been silenced by not being the book’s narrator. Nomi Tamir-Ghez writes: “Not only is Lolita’s voice silenced, her point of view, the way she sees the situation and feels about it, is rarely mentioned and can be only surmised by the reader … since it is Humbert who tells the story … throughout most of the novel, the reader is absorbed in Humbert’s feelings.” (in Ellen Pifer’s OUP book, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita).

Does Nabokov objectify Lolita?  It’s a challenging question.  Brian Cox, who played Nabokov in a stage monologue based on the novel commented it wasn’t “about Lolita as a flesh and blood entity. It’s Lolita as a memory.” Elizabeth Janeway holds: “Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh.” (quoted by Erica Jong in The New York Times in 1988).

I could keep on quoting those for and against the novel.  Lionel Trilling warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: “we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents” (in The Bostone Globe, February 2011). That year Dorothy Parker described the novel as “the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls” and Lolita as “a dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered.”  Perhaps a final comment comes from literary critic Wayne Booth, who trusts that ‘skilful and mature’ readers will repudiate ‘Humbert’s blandishments’, picking up on Nabokov’s ironies, clues and ‘dead giveaway’ style, but warns many readers “will identify Humbert with the author more than Nabokov intends”, given all of the “seductive self-justification of skilful rhetoric.”  Yes, indeed.

Sometimes to attempt to write about a book in just four pages is ridiculous, almost an affront to a work that demands a significant exegesis, not a few rather cursory paragraphs of introduction.  To do so about Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 book in this series of blogs so briefly is close to offensive, but it is a novel I have loved, reread and constantly thought about, and I can’t leave it alone.  In Wikipedia, it is introduced as one of the supreme achievements in Hispanic if not world literature, an extraordinary example of what is often called the ‘magical realist’ style.  It has been received numerous international awards, and it was central to García Márquez’s receipt of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. According to Wikipedia it topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last 25 years, based on a survey of international writers.

If you haven’t read it, and want to know something about the story, it is about the life and eventual death of a town called Macondo, isolated and almost entirely out of contact with the rest of the world (except for a group of Gypsies, who arrive once a year).  It was created by a couple who have run away from their hometown (in a fictional party of South America), emerging in the dreams of one of them, José Acadio Buedia, as a city of mirrors that reflected the world in and about it.  José decides to establish his city by the river.  Soon after it has been founded, it becomes clear Macondo is a place of extraordinary and magical events.

Eventually and several generations later, Macondo is exposed to the outside world, only to come under the control of the government of the newly independent Colombia.  Next the railway comes to the town, bringing in new technology and foreign settlers. An American fruit company establishes a banana plantation nearby, and it decides to build its own segregated village across the river. This ushers in a period of prosperity that ends in tragedy as the Colombian army massacres thousands of striking plantation workers.  By the novel’s end, Macondo has fallen into a decrepit and near-abandoned state, seemingly about to go out of existence.

Well, this isn’t a book to be presented in a summary.  As the saying goes, you will have to read it for yourself, if you haven’t already done so.  In offering this commentary, the point is not so much the content as the themes this extraordinary book explores.  In doing this, I have relied on the Wikipedia entry on One Hundred Years of Solitude as a key source.

For any reader, there are some obvious themes and metaphors.  Perhaps one of the most important is the sense of inevitability and the repetitive nature of history.  Right from the extraordinary beginning to the equally extraordinary end, the characters manage to be both real and yet the victims of ghosts, and themselves live on in unexpected ways.  Daniel Erickson explained this well in his comments of fatalism in the story: “Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities. The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create.” (in Ghosts, Metaphor, and History, Macmillan, 2009).

A second fascinating theme is the use of colours.  Commentators have noticed yellow and gold are the most frequently used, probably because they are common symbols of imperialism.  In particular gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction.  However, particularly intriguing is the image of Macondo as a glass city.  This is an image that is the basis for the original choice of the city’s location.  It is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. However, not only is it the reason for Macondo’s location, but it is also a symbol of its fate. Higgins writes, “By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history” (in Gene Bell-Vilada’s casebook compilation of essays on the novel, OUP 2002).

Finally, the use of particular historic events and characters renders the book an outstanding work of magical realism, as Garcia Marquez compresses decades of cause and effect within the framework of his story, while drawing on Latin American history.  It is possible to read One Hundred Years of Solitude as an abbreviated history of  Latin America discovered by European explorers. The book can be read as an archive of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument.  It’s a clever concept, as  “the world of One Hundred Years of Solitudeis a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain.” (this comes from Michael Wood’s 1990 analysis of the text, published by CUP).  Within the compass of the story of Macondo, we are exposed to humankind’s actions, in every variety, whether creative, amusing, compelling, sad, funny and yet always fascinating.

Why is it magical realism?  Well, it is a fiction, with the events, the place and the story all invented, but it is also a form of myth, putting events and their consequences in the context of the realities of South American politics, economics and history.   Like the myths studied by social anthropologists, García Márquez manages to combine an account of the prosaic and everyday life of his characters with magic, with fabulous events and with almost surreal flights of fancy.  It has been described as giving literary voice to Latin America:  “A Latin America which neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration” (from The Dialectics of our America by José David Saldívar, Duke University Press, 1991).

García Márquez Is something of a magician himself.  He manages to make the fictional blend in with the real, the magical and extraordinary seamlessly intertwined.   Cleverly, much of the story is told in a laid-back style, so that it is impossible to separate different realities, different kinds of events and even the borderline between imagination and reality.  After reading for a while, what you absorb no longer seems strange or surreal:  you’ve been cleverly, almost surreptitiously, absorbed into a different world.

To quote from Wikipedia: “Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected.  Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for himself or herself, the Buendías become representatives of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America, a living style in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel.  This egocentricity is embodied, especially, in the characters of Aureliano, who lives in a private world of his own, and Remedios the Beauty, who innocently destroys the lives of four men enamoured by her unbelievable beauty, because she is living in a different reality due to what some see as autism.  Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity.”

Above all, A Hundred Years of Solitude is a stunning example of myth.  Anthropologists have long been interested in myths, and especially Claude Levi-Strass, who has asserted “myth is language”.  Using the approach of structural theory, he has argued “Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at ‘taking off’ from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling.” (Structural Anthropology, page 210). He has proposed that meaning is not isolated within the specific fundamental parts of the myth, but rather within the composition of these parts. Although myth and language are of similar categories, language functions differently in myth. Language in myth exhibits more complex functions than in any other linguistic expression. From these suggestions, he draws the conclusion that myth can be broken down into constituent units, and these units are different from the constituents of language, words, structure and narrative all interwoven.

Finally, unlike the constituents of language, the constituents of a myth, which he labels “mythemes,” function as “bundles of relations. A myth is categorized sequentially and by similarities. Through analysing the commonalities between the “mythemes”, understanding can be wrought from its categories. Thus, a structural approach towards myths is to address all of these constituents. Furthermore, a structural approach should account for all versions of a myth, as all versions are relevant to the function of the myth as a whole. This leads to what Lévi-Strauss calls a spiral growth of the myth that is continuous while the structure itself is not. The growth of the myth only ends when the “intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted.”  The complex story of Macondo and its inhabitants is a representation of South America, its people and its character.

In other ways, García Márquez addresses some more prosaic themes.  One is his criticism of the Latin American elite through the stories of the members of a high-status family who are essentially in love with themselves, to the point of being unable to understand the mistakes of their past and learn from them, as Elsa Brendy points out (in her lecture on “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” at Hofstra University in March 20200.  Other commentators have observed how elites in Latin America do not pass down history that remembers them in a negative manner.  In the same way the Buendía family honour their unique background by using the same names for their children over and over again. “José Arcadio” appears four times in the family tree, “Aureliano” appears 22 times!  The action takes place a  Big House, or hacienda, the centre of a large land holding in which elite families lived and managed their lands and labourers.  Colombian ‘Big Houses’ were known for being a grand one-story dwellings with many bedrooms, parlours, a kitchen, a pantry and a veranda.

If some of the story is magical, and some prosaic, the key figures are similarly complex.  José Arcadio Buendía is the patriarch of the Buendía family and was the founder of Macondo.  He had left his hometown in Colombia, along with his wife Úrsula Iguarán after being haunted by the corpse of Prudencio Aguilar (a man he’d killed in a duel), a corpse which constantly bleeds from its wounds and he tries to wash it.  José Arcadio Buendía is an introspective and inquisitive man, as well as the possessor of immense strength and energy, obsessed by scientific pursuits. He flirts with alchemy and astronomy and becomes increasingly withdrawn from his family and community.

Another key figure is Úrsula Iguarán, the matriarch of the Buendía family who is both wife and cousin to José Arcadio Buendía.  She sits as the centre of One Hundred Years of Solitide, living to be well over 100 years old and overseeing the Buendía household through six of their seven generations.  Like her husband, she is a person very determined.  At the same time she fears her family will continue with incestuous practices, that her inbred relatives will tend to have animalistic features.  In keeping with the magical elements of the novel, she is reduced to a plaything for the family’s sixth generation, Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano in her last years, slowly shrinking to the size of a newborn baby before she finally dies.

To describe the complex, fantastical and compelling character of One Hundred Years of Solitude can’t explain why it has such a hold on its readers.  García Márquez’s book isn’t short, but it absorbs many readers from beginning to end.  It’s continuing influence and dominating place among Spanish-language books is unarguable. Over 30 million copies have been sold, (second only to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which has had a four-century head start).  It is the only other book to receive the honour of a Real Academia Española edition.  Perhaps its enduring fame is because, through magic realism, Garcia Márquez found a way to describe modern human reality in its fluidity and strangeness, life as a fever dream of history and family from which we are never more than half awake.

As Robert Kiely observed in his review in the New York Times back in 1970, “If this is a book with magical elements, there is nothing here about elves, moonbeams and slippery mountains, nor midgets and fairies.  Many books of this kind seek to forget the earth. At least that is one idea of enchantment.  It is obviously not shared by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who has created in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” an enchanted place that does everything but cloy. Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. It is a place flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch. The hero can lead a Quixotic expedition across the jungle, but although his goal is never reached, the language describing his quest is pungent with life:

‘The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”

This is the language of a poet”

The final character to have the name Aureliano is also the town and the family’s lone survivor, and the novel’s culminating figure of solitude. His final act is to make sense of the prophesies that surrounded him: “He began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror.” Here is a reader and a character reading the same lines at the same time. This identification between reader and character invests the novel’s abiding sense of solitude with a subtle if literal sense of fellow feeling, which makes the apocalyptic final sentence the more bearable:

“Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that [Macondo] would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment Aureliano . . . would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Is beauty natural?

In 1833, two years into his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle, a 24-year-old Charles Darwin wrote to his sister Catherine, entreating her for supplies. He didn’t ask for food or funds,  but “for more books; those most valuable of all valuable things. His correspondence is dotted with Austen references in a way that conveys a genuine fluency with her work. …

Though she would never encounter Darwin’s research – Austen died in 1817 – her own work was steeped in the same scientific and philosophical tradition that paved the way for his theory of evolution. She wrote in an era obsessed with explaining the natural world; the word ‘biology’ burst into usage in England around 1800. Austen’s acute, almost clinical, attention to detail resembles the style of early British naturalists. In Jane Austen and Charles Darwin (2008), the literature scholar Peter Graham explores parallels between Austen’s sensibility and Darwin’s, arguing that both ‘were keen observers of the world before them, observers who excelled both in noticing microcosmic particulars and … discerning the cosmic significance of those small details.’

The two also share a concern with the philosophically rich relationship between the natural world and aesthetic beauty. Darwin was fascinated by capricious ornamentation – natural features such as the peacock’s plumes, which seemed to serve no other purpose but beauty, even to the detriment of other sorts of biologic fitness. He saw a paradox: the naturalist posits that all that exists can be explained in natural terms. And, yet, there is a sense in which ornament, in its superfluity, goes beyond what nature dictates. How can the naturalist make sense of ‘excessive’ beauty, of nature’s ‘wonderful extreme’, which may appear to defy or transcend the closed logic of the naturalistic worldview?

Austen prefigures Darwin’s contention that aesthetic ornamentation is a natural human practice that places us in continuity with the wider natural world. Like Darwin, she grapples with ornament’s apparent superfluity, and the tension between naturalism and aesthetic ‘excess’. She writes evocatively of this clash in Pride and Prejudice: ‘I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild,’ gossips Mrs Hurst after Elizabeth traipses across dirty fields to see her ill sister. Worst of all: ‘her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain’. The aesthetic is literally drenched in the natural; human ornament splashed with mud. …

Austen’s interest in the natural is readily apparent. Her relationship to naturalism is more difficult to pin down. There are two closely related respects …  Firstly, she is stylistically engaged with naturalism as an artistic movement, or what Peter Graham describes as ‘selective and artful manipulation of detail’. In his naturalist manifesto ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1893), Émile Zola characterised this as an aversion to ‘irrational and supernatural explanations’. In Northanger Abbey, Austen makes her literary naturalism transparent; she critiques a popular journal’s ‘unnatural characters’ and ‘improbable circumstances’ as a mark against its literary merit. Northanger expresses through satire what Zola asserts in his manifesto: ‘[N]ature, being there, makes itself felt, or at least that part of nature of which science has given us the secret, and about which we have no longer any right to romance.’

The second way in which Austen engages with naturalism extends beyond participation in the literary movement, to her philosophical commitments. As Graham notes, a philosophical naturalist is ‘someone who believes that natural causes offer sufficient explanation of the world, its origins, and its development.’ This philosophical perspective is characterised by an extreme sort of empiricism that privileges the scientific method as the highest, or even only, avenue to truth. Graham proclaims Austen and Darwin as ‘perhaps the great English empiricists of the 19th century’. Austen’s ‘clear, cold eye’ directed ‘at the concrete particulars of the world’ situates her alongside philosophical empiricists who rejected the existence of anything that couldn’t be verified through sense data, i.e., non-material things like God, mind/consciousness, Platonist universals, transcendent moral law, etc.

… For Graham, Austen’s naturalism is more than mere metaphor. She participates not only in the literary movement of naturalism, which favoured realism and detail, but also in the reductionist empiricism emerging in her time and brought to a height with Darwinism. Applying the observational method of natural science, Austen situates human beings in a continuity with the wider natural world. In her novels, writes Graham, ‘human beings and their societies are understood to be part of nature’; Austen gazes ‘with scrupulous, penetrating, and relatively unbiased attention at the rich and messy details of the world around them.’ Her interests are not in abstract universals; Woolf complains that her work lacks ‘moons, mountains, and castles’. Rather, Austen’s interests lie in the animal particulars of courtship and kin ties, the ‘specimens destined for extinction (those social dinosaurs the landed Elliots)’, as Graham puts it, and the evolution of social arrangements more primed to survive, such as Wentworth’s social mobility, or the unusual marriage dynamics of the Crofts.

Austen’s work models a sort of everyday analogue to the scientific method. I would argue that the primary mode by which her characters progress in their moral development is via a form of epistemic humility and responsiveness to evidence. By learning to see beyond their motivated biases, Austen’s heroines are able to take in new information that allows them to better understand their social world. This can be seen everywhere in her work: Elizabeth’s revision of her hypothesis about Darcy’s character, in light of the updated evidence of the fateful letter; Emma’s continual observations and modifications of hypotheses regarding ideal matches; Marianne’s revised judgment of Colonel Brandon – the list goes on.  Writing in The Journal of Aesthetic Education (2008), Eva Dadlez argues that Northanger Abbey mounts ‘a naturalistic argument for the adoption of naturalism … Step-by-step, Austen moves us from melodrama to naturalism, negotiating an evolution in our reactions and our sympathies as she does so.’ … Austen’s keen observation extends to her rich aesthetic sensibility. And, yet, beauty figures strangely in a naturalist’s worldview.

Darwin, who develops the naturalistic worldview to a new extreme, was deeply troubled by ‘ornament’ in the animal kingdom as a potential threat to his theory of natural selection. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin marvels that ‘The development, however, of certain structures’ – such as horns, feathers, and so on – ‘has been carried to a wonderful extreme; and in some cases to an extreme which, as far as the general conditions of life are concerned, must be slightly injurious.’ The peacock’s feathers are superfluous to its biologic fitness; their cumbersome size may actually be antithetical to any one bird’s individual survival. And so their existence seems to fly in the face of naturalistic explanation.

In his early writings, Darwin ‘conceived of beauty first of all as scandalous excess, as potentially self-destructive luxury,’ writes Menninghaus. This was a deep problem for the naturalistic worldview in which what exists is what evolution strictly accounts for. Excess is an unnatural aberration, its putative existence a counterpoint to the theory. In Sense and Sensibility, we see a vivid instance of ornament’s destructive tendency: a pin in Lady Middleton’s dress pierces her progeny, ‘slightly scratching the child’s neck’ as it ‘produced from this pattern of gentleness such violent screams’. The order of life and its perpetuation through motherhood is marred by a tiny ornament.

In his later work, Darwin offers a way to reconcile the tension between the apparent existence of excessive beauty and naturalism’s denial of excess. His solution is a paradox at the heart of existence: superfluity is itself necessary and, as such, never really superfluous. He assigns ornamentation a biologic function in sexual selection. Menninghaus writes that ‘though [they are] mostly handicaps in the “general conditions of life”, aesthetic ornaments provide competitive advantages in the highly specialised context of sexual courtship.’ As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, ‘the power to charm the female has sometimes been more important than the power to conquer other males in battle.’

In part, the very purposelessness of these aesthetic features is what renders them desirable. One recalls the fragile fabric of Northanger’s Mrs Allen’s dress at the first ball in Bath, impractical for dancing, but ‘such a delicate muslin’, unlike anything ‘in the whole room, I assure you.’ Its delicacy impedes the dress’s function, and yet this very delicacy is what distinguishes the dress and makes it attractive. By devising a functional explanation for the appearance of excess, Darwin can make sense of ornamentation in a purely naturalistic framework. Far from being unnatural, abundant ornamentation is a phenomenon germane to, and demanded by, the natural world. What we might perceive as excessive beauty is an illusion. Nothing in nature is genuinely superfluous. These instances of ‘extreme beauty’ serve a critical function in providing competitive advantages in sexual selection.

Darwin and his supporters sublimate fashion into a perfectly natural strategy of sexual selection. However, not all share his optimism about a naturalist explanation of ornament. Walter Benjamin, in the 1930s, opposes Darwin’s reading of fashion. Influenced by a complex blend of Jewish mysticism, idealism and romanticism, Benjamin resists the absorption of beauty into the natural realm. On this reading, our human insistence on beauty, even when impractical, inutile and dangerous, represents a transcendence of our evolutionary nature. The superfluity of ornament, the way the peacock’s cumbersome feathers or a woman’s silk petticoat hinder biologic fitness, becomes a protest against the constraints of naturalism, and indicative of the mysterious transcendence that permeates existence. As Benjamin writes: ‘the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.’

If Austen is a strict naturalist, we might expect her to side with Darwin in this debate. But the picture we get in her novels is more complex. Austen’s attention to fashion is often pejorative. It is primarily villains who are concerned with clothes, while a heroine is more apt to ‘clothe her imagination’. And yet, Graham uses Austen’s observations on clothing as a primary example of her naturalistic attention to detail. Her observations on women’s fashion in an 1814 letter are ‘analogous, one might say, to Darwin’s fascination with the diverse and fanciful variety in breeds of domestic pigeons.’  Even as she satirises certain sartorial attitudes, Graham argues that her focused attention betrays a ‘genuine interest’. …  For Austen, it appears that good taste in dress ‘unites beauty with utility’.

Though at moments in her corpus Austen seems poised to offer Darwin’s tidy resolution, she maintains a steady line of critique premised on the notion that there are more or less natural ways to engage with fashion. Not every instance of apparent superfluity is absorbed into the logic of sexual courtship, and her disdain toward extravagance goes far beyond Darwin’s perturbed fascination. Where Darwin is awestruck at nature’s ‘wonderful extreme’, that which is superfluous really is unnatural to Austen; it calls out for contempt, and its role in courtship can’t wholly redeem it. …

To what, precisely, is Austen opposing ‘natural’? One might consider the original meaning of ‘fashion’: a verb meaning to fashion something into another; to contrive, manufacture, create. Austen approves of Elizabeth, whose ‘person, behaviour, and dress’ is ‘without fashion’. She disapproves of Mrs Elton’s ‘studied elegance’. The dividing line between natural and unnatural engagement with dress has something to do with authenticity. Fashioning is seen as inauthentic, whereas a refusal to fashion – be it Lady Russell’s lack of rouge, or Elizabeth’s muddy skirts – is authentic, and therefore natural in the sense of true to one’s own nature.

If we read Austen’s use of natural as ‘authentic’, we discover a continuum of ways to engage with style. There are multiple senses in which one might dress ‘unnaturally’, that is, inauthentically. For instance, one can adorn oneself with superfluous ornaments that limit your capacity even to move and act as one ordinarily would, such as Mrs Allen’s dress: ‘But I think we had better sit still, for one gets so tumbled in such a crowd!’ Splashing mud on Elizabeth’s muslin skirt in Pride and Prejudice (so indulgently portrayed in countless film adaptations) becomes a visually evocative way of contrasting her true free nature with an artificially imposed and constricting one.

One might also forgo authentic self-expression for imitation. Austen complains that the Musgroves ‘were now like thousands of other young ladies, living to be fashionable’. This, too, is unnatural in one sense because it divorces the girls from their authentic natures. In another, more traditionally naturalist way, however, this behaviour is the most natural. It’s ‘herd mentality’, an animal function of assimilation. For naturalists like Darwin, this type of imitative inauthenticity represents nature at its most totalising, our deference to evolutionary patterns of behaviour serving sexual selection. With this framing in mind, Austenian heroines’ very refusal to fashion themselves defies naturalistic logic. Authenticity, going against the imitative herd, becomes in some manner ‘supernatural’, that is, beyond what is natural.

This unnatural, or rather supernatural, engagement with dress can be a site of subversion, much in the manner of Benjamin’s transcendence. In rare glimmering moments, choices regarding dress become a vehicle for self-expression that can oppose the tides of the social ecosystem and transcend the limits of what has been deemed natural. Elizabeth’s brazen wearing of the muddy dress is an act of aesthetic autonomy, a fashion statement as real as any other. It’s unnatural in the sense that it defies the herd evolution of fashion norms, natural in the sense of true autonomy, realised through authenticity to her own nature. Lady Russell’s decision not to wear rouge strikes Sir Elliot as unnatural; her dress artificial for being ‘formal and arrangé’. Mr Tilney’s knowledge of Indian muslin, so rare for a man, seems to Catherine to fly in the very face of nature. She stops herself before blurting out as much:  How can you,’ said Catherine, laughing, ‘be so – ’ She had almost said ‘strange’.

In Austen, the unnatural is not always bad, and the natural not always good. It is worth noting that she was writing in an era when horticulture was on the rise and florists first set up shop in major cities. Just as the ‘florist’s flower … was compact of both reality and fiction, at once the stuff of Nature – Nature’s gift – and an artefact of human fancy and fetishism,’ writes the literature scholar Deidre Shauna Lynch, Austen seems to suggest that fashion is both in continuity with and can stand opposed to nature. She is insisting on a contradiction that a novelist can make and perhaps a natural scientist like Darwin can’t. Resisting the urge for resolution, she holds taut a tension for readers to tightrope across.

Both Darwin and Austen are sharp observers, responsive to evidence and resistant to supernatural explanations. And, yet, the pair also share an obsessive interest in beauty, in its abundant and even superfluous presence in our world, and the way it may threaten a naturalistic worldview. Reading them alongside one another enriches our understanding of both. Darwin’s love for Austen illuminates his deep fascination with the aesthetic, and his contention that accounting for beauty is an important part of giving an account of the natural world. Austen, read alongside Darwin, invites questions regarding the contours and perhaps limitations of her naturalism. In her insistence that fashion can be engaged with in more or less natural ways, she resists Darwinian resolution without fully committing to Benjamin’s transcendence. This tension between totalising naturalism and a transcendent aesthetics of ornamentation pulses throughout her corpus, and keeps the questions she and Darwin both grappled with alive and in view.