Arcadia

Why do some moments stick in our minds?  Often, they are memorable because they are both exceptional and unanticipated.  For me, one was in early March 1995 when the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Arcadia was on at the Playhouse Theatre in Melbourne.  Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was written in 1993 and premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London on 13 April 1993.  It employs what is known as a diachronic narrative method: it is  an exploration of two stories set in the same country house, one charting the interaction between two modern academics, and the other concerned with the residents back in the early 19th century, including aristocrats, tutors and even the fleeting presence, unseen on stage, of Lord Byron.  In shifting back and forth between 1809 and the 1990s it touches on subjects from landscape gardening to thermodynamics to chaos theory.

The 1809 story focuses on an extraordinarily gifted 13-year-old Thomasina Coverly and her handsome tutor Septimus Hodge.  Stoppard imagines this precocious girl, Thomasina, was beginning to toy around with ideas of the laws of thermodynamics and mathematical theory.  This topic is balanced by the 20th century story, in which a university professor, Bernard Nightingale and author Hannah Jarvis are visiting the elegant estate where Nightingale plans to conduct research on a literary scandal involving the poet Lord Byron, while Jarvis hopes to find out more about the so-called ‘Sidley Hermit’, a figure found in drawings of the house’s gardens.  The themes of the play include the philosophical implications of the second law of thermodynamics, Romantic literature and the English ‘picturesque’ style of garden design.

Kate Herbert’s review in The Melbourne Times, in late Feb 1995 offers a wonderful introduction to what I saw.  “We make of history what suits our politics and philosophy, even an earthly paradise – Arcady.  Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia, is impeccably crafted, perfectly structured, intelligent, witty and challenging. I cannot fault script, Simon Phillips production nor any individual performance.  In inimitable Stoppard fashion, Arcadia unravels a superb biographical-historical plot … [which] interweaves an aristocratic family of the late 18th century Romantic period of literature, painting, gardens and classical mathematics with the 20th century’s literary criticism, computer technology and chaos theory.  The result is a mind-bending intersection of worlds charged with sex and conflict.”

Kate Herbert suggests “History always eludes us. It is unscientific, as are natural phenomena and human nature. We cannot quantify it. The unpredictability is the rule, unlike quantum physics and relativity.”  She adds “The play captures the “decline from thinking to feeling” which was the social norm after the Age of Reason. The Romantics created their own chaos as have the Chaos Theorists today. We discover that ‘everything you thought you knew, was wrong’ both in life and in the drama.  The play is moving, passionate, analytical and inspired.”  She was right, a view further enhanced when four years later, during a visit to Winston Salem, North Carolina, I went to another production at Wake Forest University.

So much for when I saw it – but what as it that made this such an unforgettable experience?  Set in Sidley Park, an English country house in Derbyshire, the action takes place in both 1809/1812 and the present day (1993 in the original production). The activities of two modern scholars and the house’s current residents are juxtaposed with those of the people who lived there in the earlier period.  The play’s set features a large table, used by the characters in both past and present.  Props are not removed when the play switches time period; books, coffee mugs, quill pens, portfolios, and laptop computers appear together, blurring past and present. An ancient but still living tortoise also appears in every scene, perhaps as a symbol of long-suffering endurance and of the continuity of existence.

Arcadia explores the nature of evidence and truth in the context of modern ideas about history, mathematics, and physics. It shows how clues left by the past are interpreted in the present, by both laypeople and scholars. Stoppard has said that his initial inspiration came from reading James Gleick’s 1987 bestseller, Chaos: Making a New Science, “which is about this new kind of mathematics. That sounds fairly daunting if one’s talking about a play. I thought, here is a marvellous metaphor,” (quoted by Paul Delaney in Tom Stoppard in Conversation. UMP 1994. p. 224).

As the Wikipedia entry on the play explains “Besides chaos, the play attends to a wide array of subjects, including thermodynamics, computer algorithms, fractals, population dynamics, determinism (especially in the context of love and death), classics, landscape design, Romanticism vs Classicism, English literature (particularly poetry), Byron, 18^th Century Periodicals, modern academia and even South Pacific Botany.  These are all concrete topics of conversation; their more abstract resonances rise into epistemology, nihilism, and the origins of lust and madness”.  Stoppard was writing for an intellectual audience!

In Arcadia, Stoppard presents his audience with several highly complex but fundamental mathematical and scientific concepts. He also uses these theories and ideas to illuminate relationships among his characters, adding to their poignancy.  Arcadia’s complex themes are presented through a series of dichotomies. Most prominent is chaos versus order. The play’s characters and action embody this, moving from a settled social order, in which relationships arise, toward the final scene, where the social order – and even the separation of the two eras – dissolve in the party’s chaos, relationships collapse, and the characters die or disperse.  Yet within that chaos, order can still be found. As Valentine declares: “In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing.” Although the play’s world grows increasingly chaotic – with overlapping time periods, increasingly complex ideas, and ever greater variations in social norms and assumptions – connections and order can still be discerned. The characters attempt to find and articulate the order they perceive in their world, even as it is continually overturned.

One of the play’s main thematic concepts is chaos theory. Paul Edwards, in his essay “Science in Hapgood and Arcadia“, notes that “chaos mathematics is about the recovery of information from apparently chaotic and random systems where entropy is high. […] It is ‘asymmetric’ (unlike the equations of classical physics), yet it finds regularities that prove to be the regularities of nature itself. Strikingly, this mathematics can generate patterns of amazing complexity, but it also has the power to generate seemingly natural or organic shapes that defeat Newtonian geometry. The promise, then, (however questionable it is in reality) is that information, and by extension, nature itself, can overcome the tendency to increase in entropy”.  John Fleming, in his book Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos, makes a similar observation. “Deterministic chaos”, he writes, “deals with systems of unpredictable determinism. … [T]he uncertainty does not result in pure randomness, but rather in complex patterns. Traditionally, scientists expected dynamic systems to settle into stable, predictable behaviour.” But as systems respond to variations in input, they become more random or chaotic.  “Surprisingly, within these random states, windows of order reappear. […] There is order in chaos – an unpredictable order, but a determined order nonetheless, and not merely random behaviour.”

That centre-stage table with props from both time periods in place throughout the play is a vivid metaphor of the chaos/order dichotomy. As Paul Edwards, professor of English and History of Art at Bath Spa University, suggests:

At the end of the play, the table has accumulated a variety of objects that, if one saw them without having seen the play, would seem completely random and disordered. Entropy is high. But if one has seen the play, one has full information about the objects and the hidden ‘order’ of their arrangement, brought about by the performance itself. Entropy is low; this can be proved by reflecting that tomorrow night’s performance of the play will finish with the table in a virtually identical ‘disorder’ – which therefore cannot really be disorder at all.

Paul Edwards, The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, CUP, 178–183

A closely related theme in Arcadia is the opposition of Classicism and Romanticism. This appears most clearly in the running arguments between Noakes and Lady Croom about proposed changes to the garden. Their disagreements are about changing from the tidy order of Classic style to the rugged naturalism and Gothic mystery of the Romantic. A parallel dichotomy is expressed by Septimus and Thomasina: He instructs her in the Newtonian vision of the universe, while she keeps posing questions and proposing theories that undercut it. Hannah’s search for the hermit of Sidley Park also comments on this theme. “The whole Romantic sham!” she passionately exclaims to Bernard. “It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius … The decline from thinking to feeling.”

Another major theme is entropy and the irreversibility of time. Thomasina examines this scientifically, remarking that while Newtonian equations work both backwards and forwards, things in reality – like her rice pudding – cannot be “unstirred.” Heat, too, she notes, flows in only one direction (the second law of thermodynamics). This is embodied by the characters, who burn bridges in relationships, burn candles, and burn letters – and in the end, Thomasina herself (like a short-lived candle) burns to death.  Thomasina’s insights are an echo of the poem Darkness by her ‘real life’ contemporary, Lord Byron.  Written in 1816 , which was described as the  ‘The Year Without A Summer’ when atmospheric ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies fell.  Darkness depicts a world grown dark and cold because the sun has been extinguished.

The play’s end brings all these dichotomous themes together, showing that while things may appear to contradict – Romanticism and Classicism, intuition and logic, thought and feeling – they can exist, paradoxically, in the same time and space. Order is found amid the chaos.  At the same time, scientific and mathematical concepts in Arcadia include the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concept of entropy.  Entropy is the measure of the randomness or disorder of a system which states that overall, the universe is evolving from order to disorder. At the same time, the second law of thermodynamics states that heat spontaneously flows in only one direction, from hotter to colder. These equations embody the ‘arrow of time’ and the eventual ‘heat death’ of the universe.  Thomasina captures the dark side of science.

In Arcadia, Stoppard uses all these concepts to reveal that “there is an underlying order to seemingly random events.” The characters discuss these topics, while their interactions reflect them. Often these discussions themselves create order and connections beneath the appearance of disunity. For example, both Thomasina’s theories on heat and Valentine’s search for a “signal” in the “noise” of the local grouse population refer to the physicist Joseph Fourier and his development of the Fourier transform, which he first used to analyse the physics of heat transfer but has since found wide application. Though the characters would seem to have little in common, their work relates to the same topic.

There is even more to this intellectual tour de force.  The play’s title was abbreviated from its initial version: Et in Arcadia ego.  Arcadia refers to the pastoral ideal, and the phrase literally translates, “and in Arcadia I am”. The tradition of placing a tomb in a pastoral idyll has a long history, and the phrase appears in Guercino’s painting dated in 1618-1622. Both the image and the motto are commonly linked with the phrase being spoken by Death: “I, too, am in Arcadia”.   In the play, Lady Croom, translates the phrase as “Here I am in Arcadia!” Thomasina drily comments, “Yes Mama, if you would have it so”. Septimus notices this and later, suspecting his pupil will appreciate the motto’s true meaning, offers the translation “Even in Arcadia, there am I”. He is right – “Oh, phooey to Death!” she exclaims.   Although these brief exchanges are the only direct references in the play to its title, they anticipate two main characters’ fates: Thomasina’s early death, and Septimus’s voluntary exile from life.

In a more obvious sense, the title also invokes the ideal of nature as an ordered paradise, while the estate’s landscape steadily evolves into a more irregular form. This provides a recurring image of the different ways in which “true nature” can be understood, and a homely parallel to Thomasina’s theoretical description of the natural world’s structure and entropic decline using mathematics.

Overall, Arcadia draws on several highly complex but fundamental mathematical and scientific concepts.  Having noted that one of the play’s main thematic concepts is chaos theory, Paul Edwards, (in ‘Science in Hapgood and Arcadia’), notes that “chaos mathematics is about the recovery of information from apparently chaotic and random systems where entropy is high. […] It is ‘asymmetric’ (unlike the equations of classical physics), yet it finds regularities that prove to be the regularities of nature itself. Strikingly, this mathematics can generate patterns of amazing complexity, but it also has the power to generate seemingly natural or organic shapes that defeat Newtonian geometry. The promise, then, (however questionable it is in reality) is that information, and by extension, nature itself, can overcome the tendency to increase in entropy”.  What a compelling perspective for a playwright, that there is order in chaos.  If it is an underlying and unpredictable order, there’s order nonetheless, and far from random.

In Arcadia, Stoppard draws on all these ideas as his characters discuss an almost bewildering variety of topics.  He reveals himself as a Levi-Straussian bricoleur.  In The Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss used the word bricolage to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought, which draw on a variety of things ‘at hand’,  putting objects, ideas and histories together in new ways, using them for purposes that weren’t previously considered.   Like Levi-Strauss analysing mythologies, Stoppard  is a contemporary bricoleur, taking what we know from 19th Century and contemporary science and technology and rethinking ideas, to explore unanticipated possibilities and interactions just as he uses Thomasina’s theories on heat and Valentine’s search for a ‘signal in the noise’ in that imagined analysis of the local grouse population.   Some ideas in the play recall Goethe’s novella Elective Affinities: Thomasina and Septimus have parallels in Goethe’s Ottilie and Eduard  and the historical section of Stoppard’s play is set in 1809, the year of Goethe’s novella.  There is so much more packed into this play, and if you’d like to dive into its riches, go along to a performance.

What more can I say?  Arcadia is a 20th Century intellectual masterpiece and a stunning play.  Vale Stoppard, who died 29 November 2025.  He will be missed; his plays will live on.

DD82 – Gods and Robots

It is hard not to be fascinated by robots, machines that are capable of carrying out complex actions automatically, not under the immediate control of a human.  Although some robots are constructed to resemble people, most are task-performing machines designed with an emphasis on functionality, with little regard for aesthetics.  Going back to ancient civilisations, there have been accounts of user-configurable automated devices resembling humans and other animals, many in the form of animatronics, primarily developed as a form of entertainment. In more recent times it was electronics that enabled the development of robots, right back to those three-wheeled tortoise robots created by William Grey in 1948.

Today robots are familiar, especially after visits to manufacturing facilities.  They have replaced humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks, often those that people prefer not to do or avoid because of the limitations of size.  It is also the case that  recent years have seen increasing concerns over the use of robots and their role in society. Robots are blamed for rising unemployment, and their use in various forms military combat have raised ethical concerns. The possibilities of robot autonomy and potential repercussions have been addressed in fiction and may be a realistic concern in the future.

It is easy to assume that robots are a Twentieth Century development.  However, many ancient mythologies referred to artificial people, such as the mechanical servants built by the Greek god Hephaestus (or Vulcan in Roman times), the clay golems of Jewish legends, let alone the story of Galatea, the  mythical statue of Pygmalion.  In the 4th century BC, a Greek mathematician, Archytas of Tarentum suggested a mechanical steam-operated bird he called ‘The Pigeon’, later followed by such writers as Philo of Byzantium, who made a washstand automaton, and Hero of Alexandria, an inventor who created several user-configurable automated devices, and went on to describe machines powered by air pressure, steam and water, including a ‘speaking’ automaton.  Not just the Greeks.  In ancient China, the 3rd-century text of the Lie Zi describes an account of humanoid automata developed by Yan Shi for the Chinese emperor King Mu of Zhou.  To my surprise, I read the 5th century BC philosopher Mozi contributed to invention of artificial wooden birds (ma yuan) that could fly.

All this is the background to Adrienne Mayor’s 2018 book, Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (published by Princeton University Press).  She reveals that first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine wasn’t created in MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. As she points out “More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, ‘life through craft’.”  In her nicely illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the surprising story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements, and how these visions reflect the invention of real animated machines.

To quote from her preface: “As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for making automata. Mythic animations appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human technicians used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices weren’t just imagined but actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, [perhaps] the original Silicon Valley.”

The word “robot” will soon celebrate its 100th anniversary, as it was coined in 1920 by Czech writer Karel Čapek. But our enduring interest with self-moving devices, or automata, is far older. In her book classicist and science historian Adrienne Mayor surveys the many living statues, robotic warriors, and artificial devices that populated Greek mythology to show the deep roots of our fascination with beings “made, not born”.  However, I should make it clear that Mayor, who is a researcher in the history of science, is not offering a broad historical overview of ancient automata, as her book is largely about Greek mythology, with only some material from ancient India and China.  If you are interested in mediaeval automata, this isn’t the book for you:  she doesn’t even mention Leonardo da Vinci.

Indeed, in the spirit of further clarification, I should explain that the focus of  Gods and Robots is on myths and the dreams of the subtitle, rather than on the machines. As Mayor explains, the ancient Greeks imagined their gods capable of crafting robots without necessarily explaining how these were supposed to work (obviously the gods’ expertise is beyond scrutiny!).  However, this is a serious and scholarly account, coming from Princeton University Press, and it provides us with interesting look into the minds and thoughts of some fascinating ancient Greeks.  Mayor opens with the bronze giant Talos who was said to patrol the borders of Crete. Despite his origins, he turns out to be susceptible to all-too-human ruses and is destroyed by removing a bolt in his ankle, suggesting similarities to the story of Achilles. This causes him to “bleed out” his ichor, a vital substance akin to blood.

An important figure is Daedalus, a prolific tinkerer.  Mayor reminds us that, as with much about the ancient world, the surviving literature and other evidence is incredibly fragmentary, so opinions are divided on whether Daedalus was a real person, a mythical character, or even a group of inventors.  It is an excellent example of her cautious approach.  Indeed, some of the content also makes you wonder whether her book should have a content warning.  She advises us that “the adulterous King Minos, who ruled over the same Crete patrolled by the above Talos, was cursed by his wife Pasiphae. Any attempt at extra-marital sex would result in him ejaculating scorpions, millipedes, and snakes. Pasiphae, in turn, was punished by Zeus to lust after a bull in Minos’s herd. To satisfy her cravings she turns to Daedalus to make her a hollow replica of a cow that she can crawl into and that the bull can then mount.”  Those who working in the livestock industry and who use similar devices to collect bulls semen for artificial insemination might want to ponder some claims about the roots of their profession.

Only some authors have an (often much needed) sense of humour.  That this is true in this case is evident when you read some of Mayor’s commentaries in her book .  For example, she notes Daedalus was so good at making his statues life-like that the theme of statues escaping their plinths became, well, a recurring element in period dramas. But it also led to Socrates questioning whether such automata should be tethered to prevent them from escaping like runaway slaves. Mayor sees many parallels to current conundrums. Are we comfortable considering robots and artificial intelligence (AI) as property, or even as slaves? And who, then, is responsible for their actions? Early accidents with self-driving cars have already shown that this is no mere academic question.

In God and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor opens up ancient history to new interpretations by adopting a rather capacious definition of technology, one that many scholars of the ancient world—according to Mayor—may reject out of hand. Focusing on biotechne, or artificial life, Mayor accepts any figure from the texts and artifacts of the ancient world which was “made, not born” as a technological creation.  Though many of Mayor’s subjects—such as Talos, mentioned before, the bronze automaton that defended Crete from outsiders—were made through divine processes apparently unknown to humans, Mayor argues that ancient cultural constructions of technology were less about the inner workings of a black box (e.g., a giant metal robot) than about the imagining of such things existing in the first place. As Mayor writes, “Ideas about creating artificial life were thinkable long before technology made such enterprises possible. The myths reinforce the notion that imagination is the spirit that unites myth and science”. Yet such an interpretation of these ancient stories raises the question of whether it is not precisely the inscrutable nature of so many technologies that encourages us to, like the Titan Epimetheus, accept them into our lives and societies with little forethought.

Of course, the ancient Greeks could not have predicted the rise of the godlike techno-capitalists of the early twenty-first century, not to mention our relatively unbridled embrace of their freely-given technological wonders. Nonetheless, the idea that we might not so eagerly trust those more powerful than us is central to the character of technological myths through the ages. In Gods and Robots, Mayor offers a new interpretation of many texts and artifacts from ancient mythologies and cultures.  She opens up new ways of thinking about some very old cultural considerations of the relationship between technology and culture. As Mayor argues in the epilogue, technological wonder “might seem a uniquely modern response to the juggernaut of scientific progress in the age of technology” but an ambivalent fascination with technology “surfaced thousands of years ago in the ancient Greek world”.

In nine chapters, Mayor recasts various myths and figures of the ancient Greek world in this new light. The aforementioned myth of Talos represents an early expression of the idea that a sort of independent, if limited, form of life might be replicated through technology. Likewise, Medea luring Pelias into a “cauldron of rejuvenation” represents a forebearer of the “hope and horror [that] still coexist in modern Western reactions to ‘playing god’ with science” (page 42). Mayor also finds evidence for earlier technologies in Celtic and Norse mythology, calling the goddess Freyja an “organic cyborg” (page 68). Ancient “techne-pornography” can be traced back at least as far as the myth of Pasiphae, in which Daedalus—he of the wax wings and Minotaur—built what Mayor calls a “realistic, life-size sex toy” (page 71). Early philosophical writings on the nature of automata, Mayor argues, presaged the complex work of more contemporary philosophers and ethicists on artificial intelligence. Ancient anxieties about how artificial images and beings could seem eerily lifelike find their contemporary analogy, here, in the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. Mayor finds some unnerving references to these myths in the contemporary world, such as TALOS, a “computerized exoskeleton” being developed by the U.S. military (page 138). Each of the chapters is illustrated with reproductions of ancient art representing the myths under discussion.

But as Mayor’s overarching interpretation of the relationship between myth and technology suggests, Gods and Robots is more about ancient Greek imaginings of technology—or how “mechanical technology, evoked sebas, thauma, and thambos . . awe, wonder, and astonishment” (page 102)—than it is about how technology has been wielded as a form of power, both in these stories and in the cultures in which these stories circulated. However, technology and myth do not act as mere vessels for the imagination. For instance, Pygmalion sculpted a sort of semi-living statue that pleased him in a way that “vulgar real women” could not (107). What does this story say about the ancient Greek world’s understanding of who could claim technological power and how that power had been or ought to be wielded?

Among her many fascinating exegeses of ancient myths, Mayor acknowledges these are often focussed on power and technology, noting, for example, that “one of the essential motivations for the creation of machines and robots is economic” (page 152). It’s a pity that, building on this text, she didn’t explore this motivation further, as she covers mythic and factual material in the context of these narratives.  Despite this, Gods and Robots is a revealing account of how technology has functioned in both ways from the beginning of recorded history.

It is easy to get swept up by the stories Mayor uses to illustrate her study of technology and ‘magical transformations’.  However, to do so is to miss the point.  As in so many other ways, her book reveals an important truth, which is that so much of what we think of as modern thinking finds echoes in ideas form 2,500 years ago.  What is old becomes new each time we re-discover themes.  Major does go outside classical Greece, and in one case study looks at Qin Shi Huang , an early emperor in China.  Back in 219 BC, he sent people (‘three thousand young people’) to discover the elixir for immortality.  He failed, and it seems such searches end up in failure, as immortality of the body (and mind) seems impossible.  Indeed, it appears the dream of eternal and ageless life never goes away – it‘s still with us in 2025, with some of the new ‘super-heroes’ of the virtual computer technologies seeking ways to live for ever.

In one section she touches on another dream , that of enhancing ourselves, finding ways, through technology to be like other members of the animal kingdom.  In Roman times one example was the story of Daedalus who focussed this energies on creating wings for humans, his way to save Icarus.   His attempt failed because the wax he used to fix the feathers to his artificial wings melted as Icarus strayed too close to the sun.  It was an improbable story, but it has left us with that image of many dangers in ‘flying too close to the sun’.

If we stand back from the various stories and myths she relates, Mayor’s book is a thoughtful piece about the ongoing desire humans possess to step beyond their limitations.  We can go down deep in oceans, fly, and even travel away from the earth.  However, this is only because we sit inside inventions that are designed to protect us.  We remain weak, easily crushed., killed and readily eaten, our only hope to build artificial carapaces to protect us.  It’s not surprising, those ancient Greek and Roman dreams of changing our bodies live on.

Mayor writes of the “tensions and gaps between imagination and actuality, representation and reality”, an issue that somewhat mirrors William Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, which ends with Leontes, the King of Sicily encountering a statue of his wife Hermione, whom he had had unjustly executed years before for an infidelity of which she was innocent. Standing before the sculpture of Hermione, Leontes mournfully intones “Still, methinks, /There is an air comes from her! What fine chisel/Could ever yet cut breath?”  Suddenly, Helios arrives on his chariot and the statue of Hermione comes to life and embraces her husband.?

After reading Mayor, perhaps we should think of Hermione in a third way, as an Artificial Intelligence programmed with the consciousness of Hermione, encased in the body of a robot shaped like a woman. Such robots (and their ancestors) have always existed in that uncanny valley between the inert and the living, the artificial and the natural, the human and the divine. They encourage a sense of wonder, with a god from the machine emerging above an Athenian stage, or a statue coming to life in a Sicilian workshop, or in any of the innumerable dreams and myths which animated both classical and the contemporary minds.  The idea won’t go away.

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.

The King Must Die

What is the skill which allows some writers to take the familiar and represent it in such a way that what we read is refreshed, almost as if we are following a story that is slightly familiar but which we really didn’t know?  I have written before about some great examples, as with the two series of outstanding novels written by Madeline Miller and Claire North, in which they retell familiar myths about Ulysses and people around him.  They do this by highlighting some of the key characters who might not have been so central in other versions.  In her 1958 book The King Must Die, Mary Renault does the same but pulls off another extraordinary trick – as she tells us about Theseus’ early life and adventures, she does so through his eyes, and even does so starting with his life as a boy.  I guess it is fair to say the result is ‘magical’.

At one level, The King Must Die is simply a thrilling story told in five sections.  The first, Book One or Troizen, deals with Theseus’ childhood.  Among other adventures, he learns about the ‘horse sacrifice’ , and for the first time hears the sound of the surging sea, an ability that warns him an earthquake is about to occur.  He grows up entranced by horses, but eventually becomes a skilled wrestler, as much through strategy and agility as opposed to brute strength.  Indeed he is shorter and slighter than many he defeats.  At the age of seventeen, his mother takes him to a sacred grove and explains that his father , whose identity he doesn’t know, made her swear not to tell Theseus who he was until he could pry up a heavy stone. Theseus does this using a lever, finding a sword and sandals underneath.  He also learns he. is the only son and heir of the King of Athens.

On his way to Athens, in Book Two: Eleusis, Theseus is chosen to kill the year-king, and replace him, only to be sacrificed in a year’s time.  He builds up a gang of Eleusinian youths and the Queen of Eleusis realises his aim is to overthrow this system and tries to have him assassinated.  She fails and attempts suicide.  Her eventual fate is left unclear.  After this, Theseus finally goes to Athens (Book Three).  His father, Aigeus, attempts to poisoned him, before he recognises Theseus is his son and proclaims him his son and heir.  However, when a Cretan ship comes to collect a yearly tribute of seven boys and seven girls from Athens, Theseus, based on what he believes Poseidon is asking him to do, offers himself in one boy’s place and becomes a Cretan slave.  Once In Crete, Theseus and the other tributes become bull-dancers.  Now in the Minoan court, Theseus becomes Ariadne’s lover, meeting her in the Labyrinth under the Knossos Palace.

However, now in Book Four, we learn Asterion is gathering power to take the throne, and also plans to marry Ariadne, his half-sister. Theseus slays Minos at his request and promises to marry Ariadne, but Theseus senses a major approaching earthquake and as it strikes, he leads a revolt against the Labyrinth aristocracy.  When Asterion begins the ritual to make himself the new Minos, wearing a bull mask, Theseus interrupts the ceremony and fatally wounds the Minotaur, and sacrifices the dying Asterion, using a sacred axe. In the final part of the book, Theseus and his gang, together with Ariadne set sail for Greece.  Things begin to fall apart.  At one stage Theseus realises Ariadne isn’t quite the woman he had hoped.  Closer to home, by way of foolish logic, he ensures that his father will die.

It is a thrilling story, with many twists and turns.  However, the story isn’t the magic, but the way Mary Renault breathes life into the characters, and imbues events with startling and, at time, horrifying precision.  In her hands Theseus becomes a change agent, lightly built with the agility of a wrestler and the ingenuity of an inventor and entrepreneur.  His skills and abilities are tools to help him achieve what he sees as his destiny, complemented by his belief that he is guided by Poseidon, and an instinctive ability to sense earthquakes, possibly a gift from Poseidon.  As the story evolves, he establishes his own loyal band, the Cranes, seven females and seven males (of whom Theseus is one).

Around Theseus is a dazzling cast of characters.  There’s the beautiful Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, a high priestess revered as a goddess by the Cretans. Apparently gentle and timid, Theseus eventually sees her hidden capacity for violence and abandons her.  Asterion, the Minotauros, is heir to King Minos of Crete, and is getting ready to take the throne.  Another king, the  King of Athens Aigeus, is Theseus’s father, once a dominant leader, he is now losing his power and commitment.  He’s also troubled by Medea, his lover, she wants the Athenian throne for her two sons.  Jointly with Persephone she persuades Aigeus to attempt to poison Theseus in return for the lifting of a curse, before he realises Theseus is his son.

Among many others, another who stands out is Persephone, the 27-year-old queen of Eleusis.  Beautiful and manipulative,  she persuades Theseus kill her current husband the King.  However, Theseus is more than she had assumed, overcomes the rule that the king must die after one year of rule, and starts a revolution,  persuading the men of Eleusis to change the structure of their society to impose their rule on the women.   On four occasions Persephone attempts to end Theseus’ life and even attempts suicide when she fails.

Are the characters what makes this novel read so well?  Yes, in part, but it is more than the story and more the than the individuals.  The King Must Die draws on our love of mythology, the idea that an account is more than just a fiction, but addresses something important about ourselves and our world.  Myths are part of the backbone of society, whether they are about the story of Henry Ford, going from a childhood as part of a family of Irish immigrants to creating one of the world’s major companies, Julius Caesar conquering parts of Western Europe, only to die at the hand of some conspirators.  They are more than stories, they are larger than life, often partially or totally untrue, but embodying themes that matter to the culture.  Henry Ford embodied the view that anyone can make it in business, and Julius Caesar that military might is not the same as universal approbation.

I think that myths are usually seen as part of folklore, narratives that play a fundamental role in society.  As such their importance is not in their veracity, though many do involve supernatural being and impossible feats.  Rather they justify and explain origins of nations, religions, groups and families, as well as their defining values, symbols and central practices.  Honko, a Finnish folklorist is quoted in Wikipedia as offering a succinct explanation of myth:

“Myth, a story of the gods, a religious account of the beginning of the world and creation, fundamental events, the exemplary deeds of the gods as a result of which the world, nature and culture were created together with all parts thereof and given their order, which still obtains. A myth expresses and confirms society’s religious values and norms, it provides a pattern of behaviour to be imitated, testifies to the efficacy of ritual with its practical ends and establishes the sanctity of a cult”.    (pages 41-2 of Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, UC Press, 1984).

As commonly used by social anthropologists, to use the word ‘myth’ is not to imply whether the narrative may be understood as true or otherwise.  In the mid-20th Levi  Strauss proposed a structuralist theory of mythology, argued that myths reflect patterns in the mind and interpreted those patterns more as fixed mental structures, specifically pairs of opposites (good/evil, compassionate/callous), rather than about unconscious feelings or urges.  This was a little after Malinowski had developed an approach to analysing myths in rather more functional terms.  Today both these perspectives have been important in treating myth as a form of narrative that can be studied, interpreted, and analysed like ideology, history, and culture. In other words, “myth is a form of understanding and telling stories that are connected to power, political structures, and political and economic interests”.  However, outside of social science, many hold that myth has some type of essential connection to ultimate sacred meanings that transcend cultural specifics.

How does all this help us understand the attraction of a book like The King Must Die.  In part, of course, Mary Renault is an excellent writer.  Her command of narrative, description and plot complexity is superb.  Through that clever device of speaking through Theseus, we are easily swept up, living with him through adventures, dangers and moments of triumph and delight.  However, it is more than that.  By taking and re-introducing us to an old myth, she is also re-animating the Theseus myth.

First of all, she does this by creating a character who is both unlike anyone else, but also extraordinary.  He can hear Poseidon, anticipate earthquakes, and discover secrets.  In addition to these skills, he also embodies opposites:  a lonely and somewhat isolated boy who is the son of a king, a smaller man he excels in some sports, especially wrestling, using intelligence and strategy to outwit those stronger than himself.  He is the ideal character to capture our attention:  we want to be like him, an outsider, capable of achieving remarkable feats, willing to take risks.  A natural leader, who attracts others to follow him because of his achievements and insights, not because he is the strongest, boldest or toughest in the group.

In the 21^st Century, Theseus is best known for killing the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster that lived in the Labyrinth.   The standard story is that  Theseus volunteered to go to Crete, stripped of his weapons.  On his arrival Ariadne, King Minos’ daughter, fell in love with him and, on the advice of Daedalus (who had designed the Labyrinth), she gave him a ball of thread to unwind as he travelled to meet the monster and by which  he could find his way out  As soon as Theseus entered the Labyrinth, he tied one end of the ball of string to the doorpost and brandished his sword which he had kept hidden from the guards inside his tunic. Theseus followed Ariadne had learnt from Daedalus, to go forwards, always down, and never left or right, and finally met  the sleeping Minotaur. The beast awoke and following a tremendous fight Theseus overpowered the Minotaur with his strength and stabbed the beast in the throat with his sword (although in some accounts, Theseus strangled it).

The magic that Mary Renault weaves is to take a story that we ‘know’, a familiar legend, and then retell it in a way that does more than refresh the basic tale, but actually makes it new again.  Such a retelling process is the way in which myths are passed on from one generation to another.  The basic story that the myth embodies is always there, but it is offered to a new audience  – refreshed and made current and timely.

It isn’t always in books, of course.  Romeo and Juliet  is a well-known Shakespearean romantic  tragedy about  two lovers each from one of two bitterly opposed families.  Written between 1591 and 1595, it was first published a quarto version in 1597 (and later amended).  Romeo and Juliet fall in love, initially unaware they come from the two rival families.  The stage is set for their desperate attempt to get away, to get away from their families and to get away from the tensions that have kept the families in constant warfare.  We hope, forlornly, they will succeed, but we sense from early on this is going to have a tragic ending.

Over more than 400 hundred years the play has entranced and devastated audiences across the globe, and offered directors a challenge as to how to refresh the story.  Just as Mary Renault does with Theseus, among many others, two 20^th Century directors found a novel ways to ‘re-present’ Romeo and Juliet, in both cases transforming the action to the present.

One of these clever contemporary versions was West Side Story, which first appeared as a 1957 Broadway production, directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins,   The show had an even longer-running West End season, and was followed by a 1961 film adaptation of the musical.  The musical converts the rivalry between the Montagues and Capulets families into a tale based on ethnic confrontations.  Now the story is about fights between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs – The Sharks, recent migrants from Puerto Rico, and the Jets, New York City whites.  In this version, Tony, a former member of the Jets and best friend of the gang’s leader, Riff, falls in love with Maria, the sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks. The dark theme, sophisticated music, extended dance scenes, tragic love story, and focus on social problems marked a turning point in musical theatre.

Baz Luhrman’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet) is another take on the familiar story shifting the action to Verona Beach, a fictional location in Miami.  In Verona Beach, the Capulets and Montagues are two rival business empires. The animosity of the older generation, Fulgencio and Gloria Capulet and Ted and Caroline Montague, is felt by their younger relatives.  Benvolio and Romeo learn of a Capulet party that evening, which they might be able to gate-crash.  Romeo agrees to this as Rosaline, with whom he is madly in love, is attending. They meet their friend Mercutio, who is able to get them into to the party. Romeo takes ecstasy, and the effects of the drug and the party overwhelm him.  On his way to the restroom, Romeo meets Juliet, and the two instantly fall in love, both unaware of who the other is. Tybalt spots Romeo and vows to kill him for trespassing into his family’s home.

Despite these different setups, West Side Story and Romeo + Juliet  remain true to the original in most key respects, with death, misunderstandings and fatal fights slowly ensuring things will come to a ‘sticky end’.  We watch these ‘new’ versions, already knowing that the path of this love affair, will be shaped by family tensions and circumstances beyond the control of either lover.  No matter: the power of the story ensures we remain entranced.

Mary Renault does the same.  The legend of Theseus, the Minotaur, and the Labyrinth is at the centre of many stories, and a basis ripe for retelling for a contemporary audience.  It is impossible to go past Cretan King Minos and his wife Pasiphae, who fell in love with a white bull; how her husband’s architect, Daedalus, built a cow-like contrivance in which Pasiphae crouched to fulfill her desire; and how a child, half bull and half human, Asterion or the Minotaur, was born to the queen.  A  “Labyrinth” is built to imprison the Minotaur, who craved meat and demanded human victims.  In the original story Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, betrayed her half-brother by showing the Athenian prince, Theseus, how to negotiate the Labyrinth and kill the monster.   As the relentless logic of a tragedy continued, Theseus abandoned Ariadne and married Ariadne’s sister, Phaedra, who, tragically, fell in love with Theseus’s son as a result of  an earlier entanglement. It’s quite a story.

Mary Renault is a compelling story-teller.  She takes the myth, changes it in some critical and exciting ways.  She offers an eminently  believable historical setting.  Moreover, by subtly changing the fantastical elements in the original concerning monsters and the appearances of gods, she presents us with an archaeologically and anthropologically plausible story, a version of what really happened that was to develop into the myth.  It’s a ‘tour de force’.

DD69 – The Alchemist

There is a vast literature devoted to the business of ‘finding yourself’.  One way is to overcome some demanding tests, to confront challenges to realise your key nature.  This is the path of explorers and adventurers, people who push themselves to extremes, to achieve, but at the same time wanting to know themselves and their limits.  There are others who see the path to knowing yourself is internal, that the truth that really matters is inside you, waiting to be uncovered and understood.

I recently wrote about Ernest Shackleton, one of the many amazing people whose adventures are one of the highlights in the so-called ‘age of exploration’, that ran from the middle of the 19^th Century to the middle of the 20^th. Shackleton’s expedition in 1914-17 was intended to be the first to cross the Antarctic but it faced huge and often almost overwhelming challenges at every stage.  It began when the expedition’s ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice and eventually was crushed and sank.  After camping on moving ice floes, and unable to march across to the mainland, the explorers launched three lifeboats for Elephant Island.  Then Shackleton and five others set off in an open boat for South Georgia some 800 miles away.  As if they hadn’t faced sufficient disasters, they reached the island only having to cross it on foot to reach a whaling station.  Amazingly, some three years after the expedition began, he returned to collect the others without loss of life.

The polar regions acted as a magnet for explorers.  Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was Norwegian, who began his career as a polar explorer as first mate on a Belgian Antarctic Expedition.  From then, in 1903 to 1906, he led the first expedition to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage.  As if that were not enough, he planned to reach the south  pole in October and  became the first to reach the South Pole on 14 December 1911.  Next, he wanted to reach the North Pole, and after a first failed attempt, he began planning an aerial approach. On 12 May 1926, Amundsen and 15 other men in the airship Norge became the first to have reached the North Pole.  .

The two poles have always drawn explorers!  Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen, a Norwegian, led the team that made the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888, traversing the island on cross-country skis.  He wasn’t just an explorer  After 1896 his main scientific interest switched to oceanography, making scientific cruises, mainly in the North Atlantic, and then devoted himself primarily to the League of Nations, as its High Commissioner for Refugees from 1921-1930.  He was determined.  His crossing of Greenland was hampered by disasters, but he overcame them and later claimed a record for reaching the northernmost latitude in a North Pole expedition (1893–96).

If the Arctic and Antarctic were two key destinations for explores, they weren’t the only ones in this age of adventurers.  David Livingstone was an African explorer.  He was obsessed with finding the sources of the Nile, especially as he thought this might help him end the slave trade.  His travels through central Africa proved to be the culmination of the European geographical discovery of Africa and the colonial penetration of the sub-continent.  Livingstone was hailed in England with having “opened up” Africa, (although there was a long-established trans-regional network of trade routes, and Portuguese traders had reached the middle of the continent from both sides).  However, the near-mythical status held by David Livingstone is not without merit. He’s probably best known for more than crossing the African continent (in 1852-56), he also navigated the Zambezi river (1858–64) and sought the source of the Nile (1866-73).

It wasn’t only men, of course.  Isabella Bird left Britain in 1872 at the age of 41, first going to Australia and then Hawaii.  Next, she moved to Colorado, travelling  over 800 miles in the Rocky Mountains in 1873.  In 1878 was travelling again, to Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaya.  Nearly a decade later, in  February 1889, Bird visited India, the borders of Tibet, Iran, Kurdistan and Turkey.  A mere two years later she travelled through Baluchistan to Iran and. Armenia.  Was that the end?  No, in 1897, when she travelled up Yangtze and Han rivers in China, before she went to Morocco.  Not bad for a 67 year old!

If we consider explorers from times other than the 19^th Century, others equally famous preceded them.  Captain James Cook was known for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 to the Pacific and Southern Oceans. He completed the first recorded circumnavigation of the main islands of New Zealand and was the first known European to visit the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands. He mapped coastlines, islands and features from New Holland to Hawaii, on a scale not previously charted by Western explorers. He contacted numerous indigenous peoples and claimed various territories for Britain.

In the same way, and a little later the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition, was a United States expedition to cross the newly acquired western portion of the country.  President Jefferson had purchased the territory of Louisiana from France (for about 4 cents per acre). He needed the newly acquired land explored and mapped as well as fixing a route across the western half of the continent.  Captain Lewis and Clark followed the Missouri river westwards, overcame rapids and hostile conditions, establishing (often tense) relations with indigenous populations as he went. They arrived at the Pacific Ocean in late 1805.

Time for Australia?  The Burke and Wills expedition was organised by the Royal Society of Victoria in Australia in 1860–61. Initially comprising nineteen men led by Robert Burke, with Wills as a deputy commander, its objective was to cross of Australia from Melbourne in the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north, a distance of around 2,000 miles.   They left in winter, made slow progress, and only reached Cooper Creek at the beginning of summer, and never arrived at the northern coastline.  The return journey was equally dreadful, and when Burke and Wills reached Cooper Creek, it had been abandoned just hours earlier:  they died on or about 30 June 1861. Seven men died, and only one, John King, crossed the continent and returned alive to Melbourne.

Going back even further, Marco Polo the Venetian merchant, explorer and writer travelled through Asia along the Silk Road in the latter part of the 13^th Century, with his father and his uncle.  In an  epic journey to Asia, he explored many places along the Silk Road until he reached ‘Cathay’.  Later he went on many missions in Kublai empire and Southeast Asia, including journeys to present-day Burma, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.  He also travelled around China, living there for 17 years, and in doing so visited many places previously unknown to Europeans.

These are all examples of explorers travelling foreign, often dangerous and inhospitable regions, pushing back frontiers and discovering unfamiliar countries and civilisations.  There’s another sense of travelling, where the issue is about a journey having an internal character.  There are many such stories, and of these, one of the most famous has to be Paulo Coelho’s novel, The Alchemist.

The Alchemist concerns a shepherd boy,  Santiago, who dreams of a treasure while in a ruined church.  A Gypsy interprets his dream, telling him it’s a prophecy, and he will discover treasure at the Egyptian pyramids.  On the way, he meets Melchizedek, the ‘king of Salem’,  who tells him to sell his sheep to fund his travel to Egypt and accomplish what has become his ‘Personal Legend’.   Arriving in Africa, he is robbed, and has to work for a merchant to earn enough to continue his journey.   He joins up with an Englishman, who is searching for a famed alchemist, who can change any metal into gold.  Next he meets and falls in love with an Arabian girl, Fatima, who promises to marry him only after he completes his journey.  Frustrated, but he is beginning to learn some deep truths, that true love will not stop nor must one sacrifice one’s destiny to it.  To do so robs it of truth.

As he continues, eventually meets the wise alchemist, who teaches him to realize his ‘true self’. Together, they take a journey through the territory of warring tribes, where Santiago is forced to demonstrate his oneness with the “Soul of the World” by turning himself into dust storm  before he is allowed to proceed.  When he reaches the pyramids and begins digging, he is robbed by thieves.  They ask him what he is doing, and he explains his dream has led him to buried treasure.  After laughing, their leader relates a dream he once had about treasure under a tree at a ruined church.  On hearing this, Santiago realizes the treasure he sought was where he had his original dream all along.

The plot of The Alchemist draws on a traditional folktale.  In the Arne-Thompson-Uther Index of  folktales, this is an example of ‘Treasure at Home’:  “A man dreams that if he goes to a distant city he will find treasure on a certain bridge. Finding no treasure, he tells his dream to a man who says that he too has dreamed of treasure at certain place. He describes the place, which is the first man’s home. When the latter returns home he finds the treasure.” (no. 1645).  It’s a traditional tale, found both as a poem by the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, and also in the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, a collection of tales.  As with these other examples, this is a story on the theme of finding one’s destiny.  The advice given to Santiago that “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire so that your wish comes true” is the core of the novel’s thinking.

Ignoring for the moment the complexities in saying this, at one level it is reasonable to claim fiction and fact are different.  Fact is the material of our shared world, drawing on empirical data.  Fiction is invention, imaginative accounts that may or may not draw on some ‘facts’ to help the story along.  However, such simplicity ignores some important subtleties.  In particular, there is a category of what might be called ‘self-help’ books., and in these there is a common theme of ‘finding yourself. Kelly Nickels in her blog Wakeful Travel.com, commented on the issue and travel and finding oneself.  Her commentary begins with a quote from by Emily Mcdowell:

“Finding yourself is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. Finding yourself is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering of who you were before the world got is hands on you.”

Santiago’s story is a great example of finding yourself.  As Kelly Nickels goes on to comment, “Traveling can help you ‘find yourself’ by:

• Throwing you into the unknown, so the only known that remains is you
• Helping you realize traveling isn’t the answer, but rather a helpful ‘tool’
• Opening up new perspectives and ways of thinking
• A reminder to be grateful for what you have, adding “If we continue to externalize our search for love, we will not find lasting, satisfying love in this lifetime.”

If Coelho was writing a self-help book, a story to illustrate the importance of searching for happiness, success, or love outside of yourself, but the paradox is that you won’t find it until you internalize that search as well. You may find glimpses, but eventually all roads lead back to introspection. They lead back to yourself.

Traveling can help on this journey because until you do it, you may think that the reason you are unhappy is because you haven’t travelled enough. “Maybe if I see more of the world or move to a new city, then I’ll feel complete.” But you could talk to someone who has travelled from Nepal to Thailand and every other beautiful place you can think of, yet they still share that same restlessness.  Jim Carrey once said, “I wish everyone could get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that’s not the answer.”  I think what he was getting at is that seeking fulfillment outside of yourself will never yield peace. If you had all the toys you’ve ever wanted, accomplished every goal or dream you’ve pined after, and travelled to every country on Earth, would you be satisfied?  I  don’t think so.  Then why travel at all? Well, if you can find yourself anywhere, then you can find yourself anywhere. Might as well embrace your wanderlust! Go to Costa Rica, visit the Hobbit Holes of New Zealand, take that plane flight to South America.  However, remember Coehlo’s one important insight;  Finding yourself is internal work.

If The Alchemist isn’t entirely satisfying, there’s an army of therapists to give you more than Coehlo’s rather trite story.  Back in 2023, John Kim, wrote a blog about finding yourself.  While it is one among thousands, it does make good sense.  He begins by proposing “finding yourself is important because it is the key to living  … When you truly know yourself, you can make decisions that align with your values, passions, and purpose. It’s about understanding who you truly are, embracing your unique story, and living authentically.

Face value that seems rather simplistic, so let’s continue with his proposals.  So, what does “finding yourself” really mean?  “Your story is what makes you unique and powerful. Take the time to reflect on your life experiences, both positive and negative. What have you learned from them? How have they shaped you?   Embracing your story means accepting every part of it, even the challenging moments. By doing so, you can gain a deeper understanding of yourself and what the universe has in store for you.”

Not sure about the universe’s role in this.  However, he goes on to suggest “When you find yourself, you can live authentically, being true to who you are at your core. This means embracing your strengths, accepting your weaknesses, and showing up in the world as your genuine self. Living authentically allows you to attract people and experiences that align with your true essence.  After noting there are though patterns that can hold you back, he goes on to observe: finding yourself helps you uncover your purpose in life. By understanding your values, passions, and unique gifts, you can identify the path that brings you the most fulfillment and meaning. Your purpose gives you a sense of direction and guides your decisions, leading to a more purposeful and satisfying life.”

But he isn’t satisfied with staying as you are.  “Think about what new behaviors or thoughts can replace the old ones. This step requires conscious effort and practice. By consistently implementing these new thoughts and behaviors, you’ll start to see a shift in your life.” He adds:  “when you know who you are, you develop a strong sense of self-confidence.”

One powerful way to find yourself is by shifting your focus from yourself to others. When we constantly worry about how we are perceived, our light can feel dimmed. Instead, focus on how you want to be remembered and the impact you want to have on others. By making it about others, you’ll feel a sense of purpose and invincibility.  Finding yourself allows you to attract and cultivate meaningful relationships.

Finally he warns us “finding yourself is an ongoing process. Embrace change and growth as you navigate through life. Be open to new experiences, challenge yourself, and step out of your comfort zone.  Remember, it’s in the moments of not knowing and feeling lost that our true potential emerges.  Knowing yourself helps you make choices that align with your values and aspirations. You become more aware of what truly matters to you and can make decisions that support your personal growth and well-being. This leads to a greater sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in life.  Finding yourself is a deeply personal and unique journey.”

He finishes: “Remember, finding yourself is a continuous journey of self-discovery. It’s about exploring, learning, and evolving as you navigate through life. Embrace the process, be patient with yourself, enjoy the adventure of uncovering your true self, and know that you’re not alone. We’re all trying to find ourselves.”

I guess we are.  To be truly alive is keep questioning who you are and what you are seeking.

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.”

Love in a Cold Climate

Why are some books compulsive, even when they seem so out of touch with one’s everyday concerns.  Nancy Mitford’s ‘Love in a Cold Climate’ is, for me, a wonderful example.  An extraordinary account of the life of the idle rich in the years before the 2nd World War, It is a book about rich, aristocratic people, people with titles and no jobs, and with some unacceptably undemocratic ideas about the role of women and who should get to vote.  Despite all this, and if you are able to read it as a book from an era (published in 1945, it was set in the pre-war period) it is subversive and funny.  It describes a group of people who know or are convinced they are the top of the pile and are entitled to the wealth and lifestyle which  they enjoy.  However, Mitford manages to gently send up their absurdities, and even includes a central clearly gay character who has a wonderful time and is allowed a happy ending

It is hard to say how she does it, but the tangled lives she describes become hypnotic. Against the odds you want to know what will happen, and , right up to the end the story seems improbable.  That’s even more the case at the end when Nancy Mitford throws a completely unexpected and sudden change. This was a series of stories from another world, a class going into decline.  The publisher’s blurb summarised it well:

“Love in a Cold Climate is a wickedly funny satire, brilliantly lampooning upper-class society. When Polly, a beautiful aristocrat, declares her love for her married, lecherous uncle – who also happens to be her mother’s former lover – she sparks off a scandal that has both disastrous and delicious consequences. Love in a Cold Climate is an unforgettable tale of the absurdities and obsessions of the elite.”

There’s a bewildering cast of players.  Narrated by Fanny, the story explored the lives of Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie and their impossible children, together with the health-obsessed Davey Warbeck.  However, far more important in many ways (and absolutely so in the mother’s view) are the Montdores, who are very grand, with a daughter Polly, who’s very beautiful but appears to lack sex appeal, and who ends up banished from the family and disinherited!  The Montdores track down their replacement for Polly, a male heir, an almost lost distant cousin, Cedric, who was last heard of in Canada.  He turns up, not as the anticipated provincial lumberjack but as an exotic, blond and beautiful Parisian gay man, and promptly entrances the formerly conservative and rather horrible Lady Montdore with her “worldly greed and snobbishness, her terrible relentless rudeness”.

Lady Montdore  is a wonderful creation clearly  crass, vulgar and tactless, and throughout the events of the novel never softens or acquires a heart of gold.  Early on, Lady Montdore, Fanny and Polly share a car on the way home from a wedding: “Lady Montdore was wonderful when it came to picking over an occasion of that sort, with her gimlet eye nothing escaped her, nor did any charitable inhibitions tone down her comments on what she had observed.”  It is a fine example of how Nancy Mitford lampoons and mocks her own class but can’t hide her  affectionate view of them as she does so.   Despite this, she does an excellent job in depicting assumed privilege and the high handedness that comes with it, especially the lack of sympathy for the situations of others.

At the same time, Lady Montdore is a compelling horror.  She needs to feel that she is significant and exploits her presumed connections to the extent that even minor or disgraced aristocrats will serve her purpose.  At the same time, her social crassness and lack of insight mean she doesn’t seem to realise that she is being used by those she thinks she is exploiting.  She ignores her manipulative behaviour as she bulldozes her way through life, bullying her husband into being someone, bullying her child into marrying someone, in both cases order to make herself feel like someone. She is calculating and cunning, with nothing carried out without good reason.  She observes everyone around her constantly, while making comments that seem innocuous but which barely hide her true feelings. She is a frightful snob, sneering at people who live suburban rather than country lives, who don’t possess ancient family silver or other heirlooms. However, her transformation into a bejewelled doll by the dazzling Cedric is ‘divine’.  And Cedric, by the way, is amazing: camp, flamboyant, charming, hilarious, a flash of light in the gloom of Hampton.

The people in Love in a Cold Climate are bumbling and self-centred. They don’t really have to think about anything because the world is handed to them on a plate.  Indeed, Mitford is constantly illustrating the ignorance and disregard that characterises this class.  However, her sympathy is evident, as she charts an undercurrent of sadness that arises from people not living the life they want but having to meet the expectations of others. Alongside that sympathy, for much of the time she is scathing about the way some families live their lives and raise their children. I felt sorry for both Fanny, abandoned by her parents and no longer in contact with her father, and Polly, whose mother is controlling and whose father is distant and ineffectual. Both young women have been affected by their upbringings and are trying to make the best of their unhappy situations.  Often funny, it is easy to overlook the wisdom and insights buried within the comedy.

Fanny is the perfect narrator.  She is naïve but not too naïve, understanding more than she lets on, and using her reputation for innocence to extract tasty gossip from her elders.  She provides a certain detachment as the story’s narrator, and in doing so gives breathing space to her observations.   Her supposed innocence and naïveté create an atmospheres in which the people she observes feel secure enough to be indiscreet, and Fanny can deliver to the reader an uncluttered view of life within her class.  However, it’s also the case that Mitford can be a bit sneaky and she throws in a quite marvellously unexpected ending to the story, one on which in which quiet Fanny plays a key role.

The book explores notions of class, particularly the friction between old money and new typified by the resistance of the upper classes to the elevation of banking families to ‘Society’, and the jealousies between the aristocracy and the upper middle classes represented by the academics among whom Fanny goes to live.  Mitford is insightful, illustrating the expectations that ‘Society’ places on its members – to be interesting, to behave as the rules say they should, to marry well and appropriately – all of which she depicts as going hand in hand with the excitement but also the boredom of forbidden love, people hopping in and out of relationships, beneath a veneer of respectability.

Mitford puts across the simultaneously repressed and fascinated British attitude to sex well. Everybody in the book gossips about sex, and who is doing what to whom and how, while at the same time being reluctant to really talk about it. Jassy and Victoria quiz their married sisters and the newly married Fanny about ‘IT’, but the older women are vague in their descriptions. I don’t think Mitford thought much about the attitudes held in her society towards sex, they were what they were (still are, which is why our tabloid newspapers are still full of who did what to whom and how) and she incorporates them into the novel as a seamless part of the overarching attitudes of the British upper class.

The book is a satire, using overdrawn characters to fuel Mitford’s critique of the British aristocracy.  However, in some ways the overblown elements of the story are more about social settings and actions, rather than dramatic characters.  Mitford describes the kitsch imported French chateau that is Hampton, filled with lesser treasures because it will pass out of the immediate family, with the things of most value kept in the London house that will pass to Polly. The bewildering conversations at the first dinner party Fanny attends at Hampton, are meaningless in content but it is as if they are designed to set off their participants in a certain and rather fascinating light.

Mitford knows her class very well and makes fun of the paths trodden and words spoken more than she does individual characters.  Is it a chronicle of the country lives of the upper classes in between the world wars, or is it slightly nasty  satire?  It was  written after the war, at a time when society was changing, becoming marginally more equal, moving towards being a meritocracy, albeit one powered by access to money.  I can’t help feeling that Nancy Mitford was looking back fondly and humorously to a time that had passed.

In a sense, Nancy Mitford is speaking to a perspective that is true for many of us.  If you ever watched the US version of the TV show ‘The Office, in the series finale Andy Bernard reflects on his days at the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. Thinking back on his past – on the friends he made and the fun times he had – he says, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” Is that right? Are we able to look  back at the past and accurately recall things, and in so doing recall the “good old days”, even if we didn’t know they were like that at the time?  Nancy Mitford is describing many of the stories of the past in her world, and much of what she writes is tinged with nostalgia.  Are we likely to sew the past as if it was  the “good old days?”

Some psychologists have concluded there is evidence to suggest we frequently tend to remember and recollect past events in a more favourable light than when they actually occurred.   They even have a term for it, describing it as rosy retrospection.  This is a version of the more general comment that it is a human tendency to see things “through rose-tinted glasses”, describing events in a positive light and often better than they really are. This memory bias applies to all of us – and it explains why we often recall the past much more fondly than the present. More generally, rosy retrospection represents one example of the way memory is not as accurate or reliable as we would like to believe.  Memory is surprisingly fallible.

Of course, once psychologists get hold of something, they keep going.  Some thirty years ago, two psychologists described three stages in the way we offer a positive gloss on events that might have been less enjoyable.  The first stage, which they describe as rosy projection, involves anticipating events more positively than they will be. In other words, if you’re really looking forward to something, you’re more likely to falsely remember it as being more positive after the event. The second stage – dampening – involves minimizing the pleasure of current experiences (compared to past ones). Rosy projection and dampening increase your likelihood of engaging in the third and final stage, which is – you guessed it – rosy retrospection. You’re especially prone to this when an event is a positive one, you’re personally involved, or the event is self-contained (self-contained meaning that the event doesn’t have any important consequences that might possibly affect the way we remember it in the future.

All that, of course, leads us on to forgetting.  Psychologists have even more fun with forgetting.  On the positive side, they are prone to offer all sorts of exercises, diets and other behaviours which will keep us from forgetting too often.  As usual, the cures are often worse than the problem, and you won’t be surprised to learn one of the simplest ways to keep the brain healthy and prevent forgetting is to stay active and exercise: they suggest staying active is important because overall it keeps the body healthy. When the body is healthy the brain is healthy and less inflamed as well. ^\Active older adults appear to have had less episodes of forgetting compared to those older adults who were less active. In the same vein, a healthy diet can also contribute to a healthier brain and aging process which in turn results in less frequent forgetting.

In a way far more exciting than  taking daily walks, and far more interesting than the healthy body and mind school to stop forgetting, Sigmund Freud theorized that people intentionally forgot things in order to push bad thoughts and feelings deep into their unconscious, through a process he called ‘repression’.  This he theorised was a defence mechanism,  that “ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering into it.”

Freud developed a complex model, of which the first stage was what he called “primal repression”, a process that blocked feelings from entrance into the conscious”, as well as a second stage of repression, repression proper (an “after-pressure”), which affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative.  In the primary repression phase, he thought it was highly probable that the immediate causes of repression were outbreaks of intense anxiety.  This was to have more recent expression in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, who maintained that there is no ‘mechanism’ as such that represses unwanted thoughts. He suggested that  “all consciousness is conscious of itself” we will be aware of the process of repression, even if skilfully dodging an issue” (quoted by John Wilson, “Sartre and the Imagination: Sexuality & Culture. 20 (4).

Was Nancy Mitford engaged in at least some rosy reconstruction in her portrayal of the idle rich, giving their activities a gloss of fun and value, when the world she was describing was full of misery and declining values, not just among the rich but across society as a whole.  Given that she was a part of the culture she was describing, was she repressing some of what she knew, or simply picking and choosing among her own memories to offer an enticing, funny and silly portrait?

Isn’t that like everyone?   Except in our darker moments, we like to portray ourselves in a good light.  Sometimes that might be showing we are thoughtful caring and even virtuous.  On other occasions we prefer to give our actions and our thoughts a veneer of silliness or humour, as if, foolish us, we couldn’t help making a mistake or doing something slightly silly.  Of course we suffer from darker moments, reflecting on past mistakes, and more than trivially foolish behaviour.  But these are actions, motivations and views that we are likely to keep close, maybe relating them to a close partner, and sometimes to no-one.  These are the moments that haunt us and can reappear in our thoughts when times are gloomy, when the world seems out of sorts, or when some crisis has unfolded, and we imagine our contribution was central.  Are those real memories?  Or are they another part of that strange internal psychology that twists and reshapes what did happen to suit our later aspirations and fears.  Nancy Mitford conveys all that well, as she tells the story and then how the characters retell and reimagine it.  Beware, as it’s not just the Montdores of this world who distort their world – we do it too!

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

There is little more fascinating than discovering and meeting with people from another culture, especially if that culture is strange and exotic.  It has been a theme in literature for decades, wonderfully exploited in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, a novel containing one Lemuel Gulliver’s narrative about his four fictional voyages to remote regions of the world.  In the first, Gulliver is shipwrecked off the shore of Lilliput.  Falling asleep he is tied up by the Lilliputians, people who are less than 6 inches tall. The Lilliputians are not just small, they are small-minded, with  ridiculous customs and petty debates. At one point Gulliver is asked to help defend Lilliput against the Blefuscu empire at odds in a war over at which end of a cooked egg the shell should be broken.  If you thought that was weird, his second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, inhabited by a race of giants.  In that story the Brobdingnagian king responds to Gulliver’s description of the government and history of England by concluding that the English must be a race of “odious vermin.”

The voyages continue, and in yet another, the third, he finds himself arriving on the flying island of Laputa, where the people are so lost in thought that they must be reminded to pay attention to the world around them. They’re so greatly concerned with mathematics and music, they have no practical applications for their learning.  Finally Gulliver visits the land of  the Houynhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are cleaner, more rational and considerate than a brutish, filthy, greedy, and degenerate humanoid race called Yahoos.  After Gulliver describes his country and its history, the Houyhnhnm concludes that the people of England are as unreasonable as the Yahoos.  Gulliver returns to England so disgusted with humanity that he avoids his family and buys horses to converse with them instead.

Gulliver’s Travels is a satire on humans, but it can be read as a children’s story, as science fiction and as a forerunner of the modern novel.  It is often read as a systematic rebuttal of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a rather more optimistic account of human capability. It seems likely Swift was writing his fiction to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, (as Defoe’s novel about Robinson Crusoe seems to suggest).  Gulliver repeatedly encounters with established societies rather than desolate islands and uses them to lampoon various ways of thinking.  For example, the experimenters in Laputa are used to illustrate the effects and cost on society on an extreme embrace and celebration of policies pursuing scientific progress, together with a questioning of modern liberal democracies.

Alongside such fictional views of the world of others, sit the results of real life accounts by social anthropologists.  One of the early classics of social anthropology was a study carried out in the Trobriand Islands by Bronislaw Malinowski, who had decided to accept voluntary internment in the Southern Pacific during the First World War.  His monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, was a wonderful piece of ethnography, observing, describing and interpreting a series of exchanges, of shell necklaces and arm bands, between leaders in the various islands.  The exchanges were concerned with status, and the objects were never ‘owned’, but looked after by the recipients before they were exchanged in the next round.

A discussion of the Kula Ring, as Malinowski described it, deserves a commentary of its own.  However, quite apart from the study and analysis, there are other less central parts of this research study that deserve mention.  One of these has to do with Malinowski himself, and a couple of photographs in the books.  They are quite stunning, and very revealing.  There is Malinowski in his tropical gear, safari suit and pith helmet, surrounded by a nearly naked group of young men and women.  They make clear, with unexpected clarity, Malinowski’s relationship to the Trobriand Islanders.  He was a Westerner, who sustained his identity in a rather idyllic tropical location, clearly and markedly separated from those he met.  He was an observer, and he could have been studying the inhabitants of a distant planet.

Those photographs speak to a view of social anthropology of which Malinowski was an exemplar.  We have moved from fictional imagination to observation, looking at another group.  However, Malinowski was a distinct and detached observer:  he could have been studying the islanders as if they were the inhabitants of one of those glass sided ant farms.   When you read his book, a marvel of observation and analysis, you know you are on the other side of a window.  You can observe what is taking place, every action described in detail, but you are doing so ‘objectively’, a scientist observing his specimens.

Some 40 years later, another anthropologist was undertaking fieldwork, this time in Brazil.  David Maybury-Lewis found himself ‘poised between two worlds’. Despite their rich heritage, the Shavante were urged to join the rural poor or follow the missionaries. “Nobody mentioned the other option,” wrote Maybury-Lewis, “that they might retain their lands and enter the Brazilian economy while modifying, but not abandoning, their own traditions.”  In The Savage and the Innocent he details his own mid-20th-century time when he met and befriended a people regarded by westerners as the ‘wildest Indians’ and ‘notorious savages’, claimed to have killed multiple previous parties of white interlopers.  However, he isn’t a Malinowski, and he neither romanticises nor ennobles the ‘savage’, but instead reveals, with empathy, what happens to people like these who do not resist western encroachment.

Key in this was his wife, Pia.  Wanting to travel, he was encouraged by a Cambridge professor to pursue fieldwork among the Indigenous tribes of Brazil, a relatively unexplored territory for anthropologists at the time.  David left for South America in 1953, and Pia followed several months later via a 24-day trip on a freight ship from Norway.  On their first visit to the Xerente, Pia noticed the deplorable racist attitudes Brazilians held towards the country’s Indigenous Peoples. David took a turbo-prop plane and Pia, due to lack of space on the flight, again followed, in a boat. “The [riverboat] captain heard that we were going to see the Xerente. He said at night he just stops in the middle of the river because they eat you. There wasn’t a horrible thing they didn’t say about the Indians,” she recalled.

After living with the Xerente for 18 months, the Maybury-Lewis’s returned to England and Pia gave birth to their first son, Biorn. When it was time for David to return to Brazil to begin his fieldwork with the Xavante, Pia’s family encouraged her to stay behind and take care of the baby, but Pia insisted on following her husband and bringing her child with her.  David, Pia, and Biorn spent several months with the Xavante over the next year.  Pia worked in the fields with the other women, carrying Biorn on her back in a sling wherever she went.  “He was a toddler. A little baby would have been easier,” she remarked.

It is probably fair to describe this as another step forward in social anthropology as David and Pia Maybury-Lewis describe what they find disturbing, annoying, and even disgusting about the Shavante and the neighbouring Sherente people, but also what the Sherente and Shavante find savage, disgusting and risible about their uninvited white guests. Maybury-Lewis’s toddler son quickly adapts to village life and helps David and Pia develop the self-critical instincts and an understanding of the anthropologist’s perspective that was to transform the ethnographies of the 1980s and 1990s.  Rather than the distanced observations of Malinowski, now the observer’s own relationships to those described are exposed, and so is our insight into an author’s awareness of limits to his own understandings.

These academic studies of other cultures are paralleled by the accounts of missionaries, studying the native populations of groups they were sent to convert.  One extraordinarily detailed account is that given by Harry Ignatius Marshall, whose 1922 book The Karen People of Burma contains rich data on the lives of these people.  For example, in Chapter XIX he includes an extraordinarily detailed account of a marriage.  Here’s one part:

 “the villagers early on the second morning of the wedding ceremonies prepare a feast of rice and chicken curry for their guests. Not less than two young roosters or two pullets are used in the preparation of this final feast, every part of the fowls being cooked, even the intestines, which have been carefully cleaned. Bits of stewed plantain stalks are included in the dish, inasmuch as the prolific nature of this plant is supposed to be communicated to those partaking of its, thus assuring the large families desired. A joint of bamboo full of liquor is also brought out. The bride and groom must then dip their fingers into the liquor and the food, while calling out “Pru-r-r k’la, heh ke” (“Pru-r-r k’la, come back”), two or three times. The elders now shout: “This day you twain, husband and wife, have become one spirit. May God take care of you. May the Just One watch over you, May the powerful Thi Hko Mu Xa (Lord of the demons) shield you. May you have strength to work and gain your livelihood. May you sleep in peace and eat the fruits of the land. May you have long life, ten children, and one hundred grandchildren.” 

Our fascination with other cultures is never-ending, whether in terms of fact or fiction.  To move to contemporary fiction, Peter Matthiessen wrote a masterly, and eventually rather dark, novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which combines the study of other cultures with missionary activities and human fallibility.  This complex and amazing story is set far away from civilisation, so very far back in the jungles of the Amazon headwaters that not even an anthropologist has visited nor observed the lives the Indians of a little naked tribe which might be the last in the world still untouched by civilization (the dream of most social anthropologists).  This story explores how this remote society is ‘touched’ and how it falls undone, largely the result of the actions resulting from the allure of ultimate remoteness and almost obsessive enchantment this hidden society exerts on an assortment of Americans.

As reviewers have noted, “Matthiessen’s novel has nearly everything–a powerful plot, a rich variety of characters, a perceptive, deeply felt view of man’s yearnings and his essential ironic tragedy and a prose style that is vivid, sensuous and disciplined by his intelligence”.  At the same time, it leaves us, as do so many other accounts of societies unlike our own, feeling outside the events, as observers curiously detached from much of what is happening.  Perhaps it is always like this when we try to write about people who live in another culture, trying to make sense of another and often almost impossibly different world.

This tribe in the Amazon rain forest, the Niaruna, is depicted as utterly primitive, stone age Indians whom everyone outside wants to change. The Niaruna are seen as dangerous, both politically and morally. This is because they harass neighbouring Indians, so that the local chief is under pressure to ‘civilize’ and pacify them, or drive them across the border, or kill them, or get rid of them some other way.  To do this, he hires two cynical, rootless mercenaries to bomb the forest. One of them, Lewis Moon, a North American and half-Indian himself, bails out, and soon becomes someone whom the Niaruna tentatively accept as a god.

To add to the complexity of the story, on the edge of the jungle worldly Roman Catholic and fanatical Baptists missions are already competing for the honours of converting the naked savages to Christianity. “I am enjoying the profits of a business deal I entered into with the Lord,” exults one inspired Baptist.  The novel tells how this begins as by plane, outboard motor canoe and jungle trail a group of Americans, including two missionary families, bring about the first successful contact of the modern world with the ‘savage Niaruna’.  It’s dramatic.  At every stage of their complicated adventure, the various characters are exposed to every variety of danger, confronted by piranha-infested rivers, by the filth and disease of jungle outposts, by the treacheries of the local government-appointed official, by their enmities for one another, by drink, drugs, madness, by machine gun and rifle and pistol fire, by spears, machetes, arrows, knives, fists, and broken bottles.  If that wasn’t enough, they are tormented day and night by lusts, racial hatreds, and religious enthusiasms.  It’s a catastrophic tale, in which some die, while others find their lives dramatically altered.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a novel of adventure, and it’s a good old-fashioned story about adventurers going into an unknown world.  However, Peter Matthiessen doesn’t fool around with the elements of an adventure story, but rather he tells it straight. The perils of his adventurers, both physical and spiritual, are the key elements of the plot, and his tale is serious, full of modern sensibilities, and extremely engaging, to the point our excitement in wanting to know what happens next, leads to an almost unconscious acceptance of how skilful and even ingenious a story is being told.

In the first place, he makes it clear the characters assembled here are far from an accidental or coincidental group, coming together by chance while pursuing  their separate fates. Each of them has his own complicated necessity for the push through the jungle to the Niaruna tribe. Their relations with one another are characterised by their confrontations, quarrels, fights, and loves, often leading to unexpected stages in the plot. If the perils are vivid and violent, no single adventure seems to be there just for the sake of giving the reader a thrill.  Rather, the events keep increasing in intensity, until every character has been laid bare, every gun that had been hanging on a wall has been proven to be no mere ornament, and the basic elements of the novel’s opening prove themselves to be inescapable omens of fate and necessity.

Two antagonists in the story compete for the Niaruna, each wanting to save them. One is a soldier of fortune, totally disenchanted and self-debauched, but because he is, of all things, a college-educated American Indian, he is determined first of all to find some “real” Indians, and then, finding them, he is determined to lead them in what might well be a successful military defence of their territory. The other is a missionary, one of the American group determined to save the Indians’ souls for Christ. The soldier of fortune, of necessity, becomes a god; the missionary, of necessity, loses his faith and becomes the tool of secular interests. And between them, in their exchanged roles, they destroy the tribe they have so spectacularly risked their lives to save.

However bizarre and astonishing, for the reader these plot elements and complications don’t come across forced or impossible as they unfold.  The story remains to the end an adventure, with the scale and intensity of the action constantly growing almost uncontrollably.  This is no mean an achievement. If, having finished this novel, you were to turn back to the start and read the early chapters again, you would see how all this was brought about. This is a good old-fashioned writing, albeit using a plot resting on an exotic locale, combining jungle, river, sky, bars, latrines, bordellos, hog-wallows, and other sordid horrors of frontier villages.  False morality, myth, magic, the Noble Savage, man’s tragic destiny to corrupt himself and find innocence only in madness, are at the centre of “At Play in the Fields of the Lord”, a title that masks that this isn’t a comedy but a tale of bitter endless irony.  And it’s all too real …

After Pooh

And after Pooh, there was Piglet.  If Winnie-the-Pooh was to offer an introduction to the world of Western philosophy, then his shy but determined friend Piglet was clearly the ideal candidate to introduce us to Taoism.  It was in a previous blog I had explored how Pooh was used to provide us with an introduction to philosophers  and their ideas over the centuries, as covered in John Williams excellent book Pooh and the Philosophers.  It would have been easy to move on from there to Benjamin Hoff’s excellent volume, The Tao of Pooh, to offer a further program of enlightenment.  However, Hoff went on some years later to issue a second introduction to Taoism, in the Te of Piglet.  Why Piglet?  This cautious and yet very thoughtful creature was the embodiment of Taoist thinking.

In The Te of Piglet, Hoff uses Piglet to explain how this Chinese concept means ‘power’ or ‘virtue’, through the Taoist concept of ‘Virtue—of the small’; though in his ruminations with Piglet, he also has the opportunity to elaborate on Taoism.  In this book we find Piglet is shown to possess great power—a common interpretation of the word Te, which more commonly means Virtue—not only because he is small, but also because he has a great heart or, to use a Taoist term, Yz’u, and elaborate on how Taoism explores living in harmony with the Tao.

So, what are these terms?  Hoff explains that Taoism is counterbalance to Confucianism.  As Hoff explains, Confucianism is concerned with human relations, how we relate to one another, and the importance hierarchy, social rules and political systems.  Taoism is about the individual’s relationship to the world.  Rather than focussing on social rules and systems, it is addressed to scientific, artistic and spiritual thinking.  Hoff suggests the key principles are “Natural Simplicity, Effortless Action, Spontaneity, and Compassion”, and goes on to add that, in contrast to the rather patriarchal message of Confucianism, “Taoism is happy, gentle, childlike and serene – like its favourite symbol, that of flowing water.”

The Daodejing  (also known as the Laozi after its purported 3^rd Century author) has traditionally been seen as the central and founding Taoist text, though historically, it is only one of the many different influences on Taoist thought, and at times, a marginal one at that.  The Daodejing changed and developed over time, possibly from a tradition of oral sayings, and is a loose collection of aphorisms on various topics which seek to give the reader wise advice on how to live and govern, and also includes some metaphysical speculations.

Some scholars have argued that the Daodejing prominently refers to a subtle universal phenomenon or cosmic creative power called Dào (literally “way” or “road”), using feminine and maternal imagery to describe it.  Dào is the natural spontaneous way that things arise and exist, it is the “organic order” of the universe.  James Giles, however, argues that the Dào refers to a meditative state of awareness in which one sees that one’s own awareness is what enables things to arise and exist.  The Daodejing distinguishes between the ‘named Dào’ and the ‘true Dào’ which cannot be named (無名;wúmíng; ‘no name’) and cannot be captured by language.

The Daodejing also mentions the concept of wúwéi (effortless action), which is illustrated with water analogies (going with the flow of the river instead of against it) and “encompasses shrewd tactics—among them “feminine wiles”— which one may utilize to achieve success”.  Wúwéi is associated with yielding, minimal action and softness. Wúwéi is the activity of the ideal sage (shèng-rén), who spontaneously and effortlessly express dé (virtue), acting as one with the universal forces of the Dào, resembling children or un-carved wood (pu).

A further basic concept mentioned in the Daodejing is guigen (return to the source or root) or guifu (return again). This concept is employed in several examples from nature, such as when plants return to their dormant state after a cycle of luxuriant growth or when a stream that has become muddied returns to clearness. After each such example, it is suggested that people can likewise return to a state of stillness or clarity and thus achieve the Dào. According to Giles, this back and forth movement between stillness and the constant flow, what he calls the double return, refers to a feature of human awareness in which stillness and activity co-exist in awareness. According to Giles:

What happens is in finding the stillness within the constant flow, one disengages from actively participating in this flow. One lets the perceptions and thoughts go on their way without oneself being swept along with them. This is returning to the root or source of awareness. It is the root of awareness because it is this state that allows us to see the workings of awareness. It is the root from which the ceaseless activity (luxuriant growth) of awareness issues forth. This root is, as it were, a vantage point from which the other operations of awareness can be quietly observed.

This, says Giles, is the meditative state of awareness that is the Dào. It is the state of awareness achieved by sages.

Sages concentrate their internal energies, are humble, pliable, and content; and they move naturally without being restricted by the structures of society and culture.  The Daodejing also provides advice for rulers, such as never standing out, keeping weapons but not using them, keeping the people simple and ignorant, and working in subtle unseen ways instead of forceful ones.  It has generally been seen as promoting minimal government

Hoff offers a masterly approach to the issue of perception, or how ‘It All depends on How You Look at Things’.  The sad but rather brilliant story of what happens when Pooh and Piglet decide to build a house for Eeyore, captures this memorably.  They realise they would need material to build a house, sticks for example:

“‘There was a heap of sticks on the other side of the wood’, said Piglet.  “I saw them.  Lots and lots.  All Piled up.”

So they took the pile of sticks and made a house for Eeyore.  And later when Eeyore couldn’t find his pile of – that is , when he couldn’t find his house, he and Christopher Robin went looking for it and met Pooh and Piglet, and …

Where did you say if was?’ asked Pooh.

‘Just here’, said Eeyore.

‘Made of sticks?”

‘Yes.’

‘Oh!” said Piglet.

‘What?” said Eeyore

‘I just said ‘Oh’’ said Piglet nervously.  And so as to seem quite at ease he hummed Tiddely-pom once or twice a what-shall-we-do-now kind of way.

‘You’re sure it was a house?’ said Pooh.  ‘I mean you’re sure the house  was just here?’

As Pooh and Piglet contemplate what they have done, neither can quite admit the truth about how they had looked at things.  They are saved by Piglet, who eventually remarks:

“‘It’s like this’, said Piglet quickly. … ‘Only warmer’ he added after deep thought.

‘What’s warmer?’

‘The other side of the wood where Eeyore’s house is.’

So they went there and Eeyore found his house and …

“So they left him in it; and Christopher Robin went back to lunch with his friends Pooh and Piglet, and on the way they told him of the Awful Mistake they had made.  And when he had finished laughing, they all sang the Outdoor Song for Snowy Weather the rest of the way home.”

Goff isn’t interested in a light-hearted opinion, however. Te is serious, and Hoff wants us to understand this.  He is particularly interested in exploring the nature of ‘problems’ and he presents two critical observations on these.

First There is the issue of defining and dealing with problems before they arise.  He observes it is often difficult to see ‘problems in the making’, because the best time to see them is when they are relatively small, minor difficulties that could have been avoided or their consequences stopped if we had addressed them early on.  This isn’t just a matter of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care”, but it is also a matter of perception.  Minor irritations and issues can grow large and troublesome, but Lao-Tas noted “Trouble is easily stopped before it commences.  Put things in order before chaos occurs”.

Equally important is the recognition that many problems aren’t really problems at all.  “People who don’t see situations for what they are often struggle against difficulties that aren’t there, and create difficulties in the process”.  Goff quotes some wonderful Taoist writings.  Here is a story by Liu An:

An old man and his sone lived in an abandoned fortress on the side of a hill.  Their only possession of value was a horse.

One day, the horse ran away.  The neighbors came by to offer sympathy. “That’s really bad!” they said.  “How do you know?” asked the old man.

The next day, the horse returned, bringing with it several wild horses.  The old man and his son shut them inside the gate.  The neighbors hurried over.  “That’s really good!” they said.  “How do you know?” asked the old man.

The following day, the son tried riding one of the wild horses, fell off, and broke his leg.  The neighbors came around as soon as they heard the news.  “That’s really bad!” they said.  “How do you know?” asked the old man.

The day after that, the army came through, forcing the local young men into service to fight a faraway battle against northern barbarians.  Many of them would never return.  But the sone couldn’t go, because he’d broken his leg.

Taoism is hard to ignore.  It places an emphasis on simplicity and often seems to cut through the complex and tangled path we follow.  Hoff offers many somewhat blindly optimistic views as indicative of failing to pay attention to simple but critical facts.  It is hard to go past his observation that the US has 5% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of the world’s energy, and emits 25% of the world’s greenhouse-effect-producing gases.  Isn’t the problem clear?

In many ways, The Tao Te Ching is a seductive read for Westerners.  It describes the Tao as the source and ideal of all existence, unseen, but not transcendent, immensely powerful yet supremely humble, something to be found at the root of all things. People have desires and free will (and thus are able to alter their own nature), but many act “unnaturally”, upsetting the natural balance of the Tao. The Tao Te Ching is regarded as seeking to lead students to a “return” to their natural state, in harmony with Tao.  As a result both  language and conventional wisdom are critically assessed. Taoism views them as inherently biased and it presents various paradoxes to sharpen the focus on what is really the case.

‘Non-action’ or ‘not acting’, is a central concept of the Tao Te Ching. The concept is complex, and reflected in the words’ multiple meanings, even in English translation; it can mean “not doing anything”, “not forcing”, “not acting” in the theatrical sense, “creating nothingness”, “acting spontaneously”, and “flowing with the moment.  It includes the concepts that value distinctions are ideological and seeing ambition of all sorts as originating from the same source.  The term is used broadly with simplicity and humility as key virtues, often in contrast to selfish action. On a political level, it means avoiding such circumstances as war, harsh laws and heavy taxes.

Unsurprisingly, the Tao Te Ching has been translated into Western languages over 250 times, mostly to English, German, and French.  One writer has suggested “It is a famous puzzle which everyone would like to feel he had solved.”  Many translations have  written by people with a foundation in Chinese language and philosophy who are trying to render the original meaning of the text as faithfully as possible into English, but some of the more popular translations are written from a less scholarly perspective, giving an individual author’s interpretation.  Indeed, Russell Kirkland goes further to argue that these versions are based on Western Orientalist fantasies in his 2004 book, Taoism:  The Enduring Tradition and argues they represent the colonial appropriation of Chinese culture.  Others suggest that while they do not pretend to rigorous scholarship, they meet a real spiritual need in the West. These Westernized versions aim to make the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching more accessible to modern English-speaking readers by, typically, employing more familiar cultural and temporal references.

It is easy to regard The Tao Te Ching as another way in which Western students latch on to something apparently esoteric and give it unwanted credence and attention.  There is good reason to consider this unfair, and that Hoff is addressing an important area of thinking and reflection.  It  should be recognized as a seminal work, often insightful; but one where it is the task of the reader to reflect and want to work out the full implications of its often provocative or sometimes apparently tangential insights. It shares a background set of ideas and assumptions with other early Chinese philosophical texts, but it does invite reflection on the very core of being beyond any cosmological assumptions. As is the case with other unfamiliar material, while the production of meaning is context dependent, new horizons do emerge from great works of philosophy.

The power of the Tao Te Ching is best understood as seminal insights rather than in its doctrines, but in its seminal insights. The ills of discrimination, exploitation and intellectual hubris, so deeply embedded in language and value systems, remain as serious today as they were in early China. The healing power of nonaction still strikes a chord and commands continuing reflection and engagement. Although in working out these insights differences will no doubt arise, they unite many Western interpretations  of the Tao Te Ching and draw new generations of readers into the mystery of Taoism and its virtue.  If it is through the apparently simplistic of his reflections that some readers find their way into this literature, The Te of Piglet offers an excellent stepping stone.