Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau

This was was very difficult read. Within the first ten pages the author cut me down to the bone by observing that I "lead [a life] of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation". After such a stab, I hoped for consolation, but he just squelched around in the wound for a further three hundred or so pages, although I took much comfort in some passages. I've been inspired to try several changes to my normal life, hopefully they will be for the best. Let me start you off with a nice little excerpt on education:

If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?

So you can see the style here. It was written in 1850-ish. Thoreau spent '45 and '46 in a cabin he built himself beside Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. During this time he grew beans and turnips for food and baked bread from corn and rye meal that he bought - his only regularly purchased items. He kept a diary of reflections and of daily observations on nature. He was an excellent naturalist. He took up surveying and birdwatching and shared his cellar with a never-ending parade of mice, moles, foxes, rabbits, and other burrowing animals. His time at Walden Pond was ended when he decided to move in with a friend's family at a local farm. Thoreau died of tuberculosis at age 44, almost 10 years later. When asked whether he had made his peace with God, he replied "I did not know we had ever quarreled".

So we come to my actual reflections on the book. The above passage on education stuck to me because I am so viciously bitter about the wasting of my youth in an unproductive university education. Most of Thoreau's observations on business, employment, slavery, education, philosophy, and The Good Life strike me as singularly correct. It's impossible to distill down his whole book to a few notes, because it is a brilliant blend of poetry (his description of spring coming to Walden Pond made me feel like I was standing right beside him in the woods) and philosophy. To this man, the most exquisite pleasures available to humankind are a morning swim, a good learned book, a summer evening in solitude, a walk over a frozen pond, or a companion with a sympathetic disposition. He also seemed to think that a person was justified in striving after these pleasures, since they do not inspire greed or force us to compete. There is enough morning sunshine for everyone to get some. He also developed the idea that rather than DOING good a person should BE good. Cultivate your garden, so to speak (thanks Voltaire!). Growing good, generous feeling within yourself will lead to spreading good, generous action among all you meet. It's a more numinous goal than cold-hearted charity and certainly it is more difficult to BE a certain way than to ACT a certain way. I don't doubt that being in nature inspires the best feelings available within me.

I said I was stabbed occasionally by his disdain for the "normal" life. I was comforted then by the idea that I can freely go my own way without caring where the path I choose intersects with the paths any other person may choose. The intersections or overlaps don't define those as better or worse choices. Their goodness lies in whether they are what is best for me. So maybe it's not best for me to move to the woods in a cabin that I build myself, and to never see anyone except those I can walk to visit, and to eat only food that I grow (even though at present I desperately want this). Maybe instead of beans and turnips I can grow Tylenol. Maybe I too can take up surveying my own mind and self and see what good and bad there is inside me. But I have made some notable changes to my life in response to this book: I've started baking all my own bread, because it's not that much work, and I've become a vegetarian because, like Thoreau, killing critters is abhorrent to me.

Overall, 8.9/10. Because the writing tended towards complexity and convolutedness, I found the going pretty tough. I would recommend it to all of you who ever had that pastoral impulse to get away from everything, into nature.

Let me close off with another quote that sort of relates:

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

Quick note on the "Other Writings" mentioned in the title: there were other transcendental works which I skimmed, similar in style to "Walden" as well as the more political essays "Civil Disobedience" (I read it in high school), "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (which kicked off the abolitionist movement in the northern states), and "On Slavery in Massachusetts" (which further established Thoreau as one of the most influential abolitionists of his time). All of these writings, including "Walden", can easily be found online if you wish to have a taste of them.


Up next: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Special thanks to Daniel for the recommendation and to MCC Thrift Store in Elmira on only charging $2 for it!

Candide by Voltaire

This was suggested to me by a friend whose taste I suspected was admirable. I was right! Excellent recommendation!

At approximately 100 pages, this book is more essay than novel. The main advantage there is that I could lump myself over to the library around 17:00 and still finish the book by 20:00.

It is the story of a naive young man, Candide, who experiences trials and tribulations all over the world as he searches for fortune and his sweetheart Cunegonde. He is counseled by an optimist philosopher, Dr. Pangloss, who asserts that all things are the best and for the best. Through many misadventures, Candide and Cunegonde and Pangloss all begin to feel that humans are actually awful and nothing is for the best and nothing makes any sense.

The thing I liked best about this was the dark wittiness. If sass were an Olympic sport, Voltaire would be Michael Phelps. One German town is named "Waldberghofftrarbkdikdorff". I think the humour is a way for the author to create an emotional distance between the characters and the audience so that we don't get so lost in the character that we miss the bigger themes.

Clearly Voltarie was a very well-educated person. He does that Oscar Wilde thing from Dorian Grey: have characters discussing all the important literature, music, and art of the day so that he can show off all the stuff he knows about it. I always like that because it feels like the writer is very close to the surface of their own disguise.

In the end, Candide and his friends are not optimists, but they aren't pessimists either. It reminds me of Ecclesiastes, where the conclusion is:

So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them. All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.

As it is with the good,
    so with the sinful;
as it is with those who take oaths,
    so with those who are afraid to take them.

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope—even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!...

Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

Voltaire, like Solomon, concludes that the greatest happiness available, above any philosophy or adventure, is to cultivate our garden. I highly recommend this book and also gardening.

Up next: Walden and other writings by  Henry David Thoreau. As always, please recommend more things to read if you think of them! I'll try anything but James Joyce.

Cocksure by Mordecai Richler

A small book about a man and his penis. If you're going to be uncomfy with this, I suggest you click away now. I will try to be tasteful although the writer wasn't.

Mordecai Richler won a Governor General's Award f this book in the 70s. The writing is convivial in tone, and there is a current of humor through it. The writing style was right up my alley, which I why this book took all of an hour and a half to read. Clear and intuitive, just the sort of prose that ought to be made in Canada. Themeatically...

It's about a man who is never sure he's big enough, and he is mistakenly called Jewish, which he isn't, and he is accused of being anti-semetic when he tries to correct the mistake. He tries to clear up these things while his marriage falls apart a he has an affair with a woman half his age. It's kind of a mid-life coming of age story. He battles feelings of irrelevance, inadequacy, and frustration with the norm. I loved the dark humor that th author draped around these themes, which haunt all of us to some extent.

Then everyone talks about sex a lot. It isn't particularly lewd, it's just kind of Freudian. I did find it funny, but I would likely not recommend to my general acquaintanceship because it's weird to tell someone to read a book about a... Yeah.

So I would probably read something else by this writer and check it over first for genitalia before reading the whole thing.

I am getting Candide from the library today! Back on to solid, dick-free ground for a few days!

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This was a strange one. The scope of it alone was enough to render it bewildering. It follows members of the Buendia line from their founding of the village Macondo to the death of a last male - over one hundred years. Alternating between intimate conversations and sweepingly general recollections, the author paints the character of a dynasty.

I thought this was going to be much more narrative. Not that there isn't a story to it. The scenes are so brief and are connected so conversationally that it reminds me of reading a diary. A diary of a family over 3 generations.

So aside from the daunting scale of the thing, I enjoyed the writing (it's translated from Spanish, so hard to tell what implications that has). I also enjoyed the mythology that follows the family through the matriarch, Ursula. She is warned that her children would be born with a pig's tail if she married Jose Arcadio, but she does it and only realizes in her senility that their fatal flaws were just as bad as pigs' tails.

The solitude theme was a big deal but I am still not entirely sure how to distill it into something rational out of all the masses of instances I've just acquired. It does seem though that each character lives only when they are in the family home and they reach out for contact between similar spirits. They die spiritually when they become absorbed by their work, or when they destroy a relationship. Always their physical death is penultimate, and their ghosts carry on to advise the survivors. The real death is when they seek their solitude and isolat themselves from the cares and joys of life.

Also, the familial naming tradition made it difficult to be sure entirely which Jose Arcadio, Aureliano, or Amaranta was being referenced at any time. Could have been a literary device to indicate that they were all the same Aureliano, just in a different era. I am going to treat it as purposeful rather than incidental and applaud the masterful execution.

Speaking of executions... so many! Not sentimentally referenced, or even excruciatingly described, but just numerous and varied. The Colombian civil war plays a large part in one Aureliano's life, and they get pretty free with the executions. The other ridiculous recurrence was incest. A father and son each having a child by the same woman, a nephew having a sneaky relationship with his aunt, another Aureliano accidentally marries his aunt, two brothers keep the same concubine, one adopted sister marries her brother. I don't think there are family curses, but heritable temperments would make certain sins repeated along a family line.

Conclusion: 3 out of 4. The main problem I had was keeping pace as the author did not accelerate or slow while providing a diary of 4 generations' births, deaths, loves, sins, and jealousies. It was just exhausting. Too great in detail for me to digest in 6 hours. It reminds me of Steinbeck's East of Eden, though I liked it less. Steinbeck should have gotten a Nobel Prize for Literature, although Mr. Garcia Marquez is supremely talented.

Next: Cocksure by Mordecai Richler.

*edited to add*: I've been thinking about this more and I think one of the excellent things the author does does this book is to show characters, not describe them. He demonstrates that this Jose Arcadio is active and vicious, while the other Jose Arcadio is active and generous, and another Jose Arcadio is silent and brutal. For this ability alone I could happily reccommend the writer to anyone. Also, my cousin called this a "magic realism" book and I like that description a lot! It blends the grand mythos ofhumanity with the dreary inanity of daily life. Good catch, cousin!
Finally, I seem to have contracted, from this book, a deep fear of dying in solitude. I had avoided it well up till now. Daaaang.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

I had never read a spy book before this one, unless you count Harriet the Spy, which you shouldn't. Detective books like Sherlock Holmes or mystery books like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo are definite a separate endeavour from this one.

Quick synopsis for those of you/me that haven't seen seen the film starring Gary Oldman. George Smiley is called up by old workmates in british intelligence to find out which of his circle of old workmates are working for communist Russia. Set in the Cold War era, it swaps narrarators endlessly until I am half-certain I'm a double-agent myself because I have too many facts to keep straight and no less than 3 justifications for every event in the book. Even during the final climactic exposition I wasn't completely sure I had a handle on who had done what or why.

I suppose that's what makes le Carré the supposed master of the genre. The disjointed narration and everyone's distrust of everyone gives the novel and the reader a mood of suspended belief. At the same
time I realize I place perfect, blind faith in the character of Smiley. No matter everyone else's motives, no matter his actions, he is the good guy, the side I want to be on. I know now it is because he is is cuckold, almost a King Arthur archetype. His discovery of betrayal by his wife is set in parrallel to the betrayal by the country he serves and the brothers he serves with. Maybe it's the complete lack of bitterness in his submission to the deception by his wife and ultimately his close friends in intelligence service. I think this is where the literary genius begins to dawn on me. The author seems to be showing the reader how blind all trust is, be it between friends, enemy operatives, or lovers. He seems to say that our guts decide who to trust, not our brains, even if they are very good brains. Who we trust determines so much of not only our lives but our characters  and it's basically an alchemy of affection who we fall in trust with.

I guess the trust thing strikes me viciously because I am a classic trustophobe. It has certainly made me evaluate certain areas of my life in a brighter light.

I don't know if I recommend the novel. It's cerebral, certainly, and there is some excellent suspense. The writing style itself is somewhat tedious though overall I would say that the construction and orchestration of the trust theme makes up for it. So what's that, a 7.5 out of 10? Somewhere in there anyway.

Up next: it will depend on the ol' Elmira Library but I will try to get Candide by Voltaire. In the interim I may make some notes on other things I've read recently or revisit some of my treasuredest works.

P.S. If there are bizarre errors of orthography or syntax, it's because I composed this on my phone and the interface for creating posts is LOUSY!

The Secret Garden (two years later)

It's hard to describe the effect this book has on me. It makes me feel like like I could live forever and ever.

Something about the cadence of the words. She captures the joy and splendour of the world waking up in spring. No matter how many times I read those words I still feel the same exhilaration. How did she write down that feeling of smelling cool, living earth for the first time in spring?

It's hard to describe, but I am full of that feeling and I love it!

Up next: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré.