The Straits Times
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Published on May 31, 2014
Read any good books lately? I have
Here is selection that touches on life's limitations, ambitions and inner spirit
PEOPLE are always asking me what my favourite books are. With summer almost here, I thought I might recommend eight that have been pivotal in my life.
A Collection Of Essays, by George Orwell - If you want to learn how to write, the best way to start is by imitating C.S. Lewis and George Orwell. These two Englishmen, born five years apart, never used a pompous word if a short and plain one would do. Orwell was a master of the welcoming first sentence. He wrote an essay called England Your England while sheltering from German bombs during World War II. Here is his opening: "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."
Here's how he opened an essay on his schoolboy days: "Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed."
There's a disarming rhythm to each of those sentences; reality is odd, and it takes a few shimmies to get it right. Orwell was famous for sticking close to reality, for facing unpleasant facts, for describing ideas not ideologically but as they actually played out in concrete circumstances. Imperialism wasn't an idea; it was a lone official haplessly shooting an elephant.
His other lesson for writers, even opinion writers, is that it's a mistake to think you are an activist, championing some movement. That's the path to mental stagnation. The job is just to try to understand what's going on.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - This is a novel about characters who are not quite in control of themselves. Kitty goes to the ball in a perfect dress. Even the strip of velvet around her neck fits just so. She is swept up in a sort of ecstasy of movement until a glance at the man she thinks is her beau crushes her in an instant.
Levin falls in love in a way he didn't plan. He experiences unexpected transcendence cutting grass, of all things. He cannot account for his own happiness, which is in excess of what he deserves, and still has to hide the noose at dark moments for fear he might use it.
Anna is a magnetic person propelled by a love that is ardent and unexpected but also headlong and unpredictable. She's ultimately unable to surmount the consequences of her actions or even live with the moral injuries she causes. Was Anna right to follow her heart? Should she have settled for a mediocre life in line with convention? This is a foxlike love story, with many angles, which does not lead to easy answers.
Rationalism In Politics by Michael Oakeshott - This essay dismantles a common form of contemporary hubris - the belief that it is possible to solve political problems as if they were engineering problems, with rational planning. Oakeshott distinguishes between technical knowledge and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort of information that can be put in a recipe in a cookbook. Practical knowledge is the rest of what the master chef actually knows: the habits, skills, intuitions and traditions of the craft. Practical knowledge exists only in use; it can be imparted but not taught. Technocrats and ideologues possess abstract technical knowledge and think that is all there is. Their prefab plans come apart because they simplify reality, and don't understand how society works and the rest of what we know.
All The King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren - This is nominally a novel about Huey Long. But it is also a novel about irony, the way good can come from bad, and bad can come from good, the way people march into public life imagining they are white lambs only to be turned into guilty goats. The main characters are tainted and mottled, part admirable, part noxious. The book asks if in politics you have to sell your soul in order to have the power to serve the poor. It's written in an elegiac tone that I'm a sucker for. The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier are also written in this tone. The narrator of All the King's Men has to lose his innocence to understand the multiplicity and sadness of the truth.
Most of today's books are about limitation - about being propelled by passions we can't control into a complex world we can't understand. Next, I'll find some books that are more self-assured. These come in two baskets, which we'll call Athens and Jerusalem. The Athens books fire external ambition; the Jerusalem books focus on the inner spirit.
We'll start the Athens basket with The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides. In Homer, we see characters who are driven by a competitive desire to be excellent at something, to display their prowess and win eternal fame. This ambition drives Homeric heroes to excellence, but it also makes them narcissistic, touchy and prone to cycles of anger and revenge.
Through the figure of Pericles, Thucydides shows us how to live a life of civilised ambition, in which individual achievement is fused with patriotic service. He also reminds us that in politics the lows are lower than the highs are high. That is, when politicians mess up, the size of the damage they cause is larger than the size of the benefit they create when they do well.
Some of my favourite biographies are about people who followed the Periclean mould and dedicated themselves to public service: Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton; Edmund Morris' series on Theodore Roosevelt; Winston Churchill's endearing My Early Life.
These books arouse energy and aspiration. They have the risk-embracing spirit found in W.H. Auden's famous poem, Leap Before You Look, which opens:
The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap."
And ends this way: "A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.
The books in the Jerusalem basket interrogate worldly ambition and encourage righteousness. Of all the authors I've read, the one with the most capacious mind is Augustine - for his understanding of human psychology, his sonorous emotions and his intellectual rigour. The Confessions is a religious book, but it can also be read as a memoir of an ambitious young man who came to realise how perverse life can be when it is dedicated to fulfilling the self's own desires.
"I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me," Augustine wrote. "I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love, and from the very depth of my need hated myself."
Gradually, he orders his love, putting the higher loves above lower ones, and surrendering to God's ultimate love. He also reconciles with his mother, Monica, the ultimate helicopter mum.
Towards the end of Monica's life, mother and son sit sweetly in a garden, their conversation rising to higher things. There is a long beautiful sentence, which is hard to parse, but which conveys the spirit of elevation. It repeats the word "hushed". The tumult of the flesh is hushed. The waters and the air are hushed, and "by not thinking on self surmount self". Even Augustine's voracious ambition is hushed in this surrender.
For Jewish takes on inner elevation, I'd recommend The Lonely Man Of Faith by Joseph Soloveitchik and Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl. For Christians, you can't go wrong with Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness, or Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy.
Scott Spencer's Endless Love is about youthful passion. It opens this way: "When I was 17 and in full obedience to my heart's most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment's time ruined everything I loved..."
For mature love, we have to turn to George Eliot's Middlemarch. It is hard not to be awed by her characterisations. Some samples:
"She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was."
"We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves."
"His soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying."
I suppose at the end of this bookish piece, I should tell you what I think books can't do. They can't carve your convictions about the world. Only life can do that - only relationships, struggle, love, play and work. Books can give you vocabularies and frameworks to help you understand and decide, but life provides exactly the education you need.
NEW YORK TIMES
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