Booklog for Charlotte

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes

I have had in mind to read this weighty book (600 pages) about the arrival of Europeans in Australia written by an art historian for a long time. 

Between the original landing of Captain Cook in Botany Bay in 1770 and the arrival of the first wave of transported convicts in 1788, no British ships came to the area. The Botany Bay area would not have supported them; if Captain Phillip hadn't gone north and found Sydney Harbor, they would have perished. As it was, they barely survived. 

Many factors led the British to think this rash act was a good idea. Some of those factors:

• There was an epidemic of lawlessness in Georgian England and there was no law enforcement in evidence until Sir Robert Peel established a police force in 1827.  
• At night the highwaymen were in control of the countryside, gin was consumed in great quantities, and the population growth in London resulted in widespread poverty and crime.
• There was no system of penitentiaries in Britain. The punishment choices were limited to hanging or transportation.
• Beginning around 1717 over the course of 60 years 40,000 felons were sent to America or the Caribbean by contracting with shippers who then sold their labor for seven or fourteen years to colonists. American independence ended this practice and the British needed someplace to send these folks.

I was surprised that Transportation lasted from 1788 to 1868. Transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840, but continued in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and Western Australia.  The heaviest time was 1831-35. A total of 164,300 prisoners were transported.

Ireland was in nearly open rebellion against Britain during the period and though relatively few political prisoners were transported, the hatred between the British and Irish in Australia as evidenced in literature is not surprising.

Australia was built with convict labor. They built infrastructure for the government (clearing land, building roads, putting up buildings) or were assigned to settlers to work for them. The settlers were required to house, feed, and attend to their health in return for their labor for the period of assignment. The labor of the convicts created the economic base that made free emigrants want to go to Australia and made it possible for those who completed their sentences to succeed. 

"Bushrangers" was one of the terms for escaped convicts who roamed the countryside. The gangs became romanticized in the public imagination as early as 1814. The death of Ned Kelly in 1880 marks the end of the era. Kelly remains an iconic figure in Australia, partly as an emblem of the oppressive treatment of the Irish by the British. The parallels between the bushrangers of Australia and the gangs of the Wild West in the US are remarkable.

I had thought of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, in charge from 1810 to 1821, as the fellow who spread his name thickly around the city and countryside, but he was much more. He was the first to act on the assumption that this undertaking was more than punishment for the wicked. As Hughes put it, he began the "conversion of a jail into a colony." Britain was not ready for that and wanted Australia to be "an Object of real Terror," so his reforms were limited.  

Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island were places of horror for the prisoners convicted of crimes in New South Wales. As word of the practices there made its way back to England, from 1835 on, opinion began to change and revulsion against the system of transportation grew among upper classes. At the same time "the opinion of the lower classes keep drifting the other way. The belief, or hope, that a convict could make his or her fortune in Australia (or at least, a better living than could be scratched from England) had become fixed in the popular imagination." These two trends made the whole enterprise less viable.

It was awful to read about the sadistic torture that occurred on the two islands; with a brief exception of the reformer Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island, each one is described as worse than the last. I noted in particular the story of the Arctic explorer John Franklin, told in Richard Flanagan's Wanting. His (and his wife's) role in the death of all Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land is described. 

In his Introduction Hughes says one impetus for writing the book was that the convict history of Australia was ignored in schools and given short shrift in universities. He says, "The idea that whether or not England should feel ashamed of creating the System, Australians certainly had cause to be proud of surviving it and of creating their own values despite it, was rarely heard." A reasonable criticism of the book is that Hughes' descriptions of the horrors on the islands used for secondary punishments overshadowed the success of the rehabilitation of so many felons by the assignment system. Though he writes about the success of those who came to New South Wales, it is the torture that one remembers. 

Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, 603 pages. Available in the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

As a child I was terrified of the flock of chickens on my family's small farm. I'm not sure which worried me most: their horrible feet, their scary beaks, their alien feathery bodies, or the apparently random movement of the noisy flock. So a book about training a raptor as a grief healing mechanism is incomprehensible to me and it languished on my Books to Read list for nearly three years. I have been amply rewarded for overcoming that distaste.

The author has an interesting background; she says her parents did not go to the university and her father was a photographer for a newspaper. She studied at Cambridge and when she introduces herself to us, she is nearing the end of a three-year fellowship there. She tells us that her father teased that she must be a spy, as that is his idea of someone employed by Cambridge, while she observed that unlike her work, his involved the closely watching others as a spy might. As a child she always loved falconry, had ties to that community, and knowledge of the process of training. She tells about reading a book when she was nine that T.H. White had written about training his goshawk. She was horrified by it as was everyone else knowledgeable about training these birds. 

Which brings me to one aspect of the book I want to remember. As she tells us of her path to depression and despair at the death of her father and recovery as she trained her goshawk Mabel, she recounts experiences of T.H. White. He was the anguished author, most famously of The Once and Future King, the retelling of the tales of King Arthur, giving us "Camelot" and Disney's "The Sword and the Stone." She recounts the disastrous experience he had with his hawk, called Gos, along with her own fraught time with Mabel. Though she was an experienced trainer, her emotional vulnerability made her doubt herself at every turn. As she examines her own path, she tells about his through his letters, his various books, his notes, and his book about his goshawk. 

Another subject that caught my attention was the mysteriously named chalk-mysticism that refers to the chalk land formation in southern England. The mysticism "concerns itself with purity, a sense of deep time and blood belonging, and assumes that these solitudinous windswept landscapes are finer, better, than the landscapes below." As I understand it, this has a connection to that Nazi phrase "blood and soil." Here I'm going to quote from a website written by Dr. Stephen Quilley, a Canadian academic writing about this aspect of the book, as he captures my reaction perfectly. 

Referring to the affective sway of the ancient Ridgeway path, the stone circles of Avebury, Stonehenge and the Glastonbury plain, she wonders about the powerful sense of belonging that people feel in aligning themselves with ‘deep history’. But of course any unblemished sense of alignment connecting lineage and culture with organic rootedness has darker and troubling connotations. Such myths ‘hurt…[because they] wipe away other cultures, other histories, other ways of loving, working and being in a landscape. How they tiptoe towards darkness’ (261). God I love that phrase. Are we not all, always tiptoeing towards darkness.

It's a dilemma:  Humans need a sense of belonging and connection, while that very sense can slide us toward that darkness. 

On the matter of dealing with grief, doing something you love that requires your full attention so you live in the moment is surely positive. Immersing yourself in an activity that connects you with wildness and killing little animals seems less likely to help. The story of her path through these thickets was engaging.

Well, it's a fine book that is endlessly thought-provoking, but I fear I've given short shrift to much of its strength. I do recommend the NYT review.

 Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk, Grove Press, 2014, 300 pages (I listened to the audiobook read by the author). Available from the UVa and public libraries, and through Amazon. 

The Boy Behind the Curtain by Tim Winton

I found this audiobook of essays written and read by Tim Winton so heartening that when I finished it, I listened to it again immediately. I have never done that before, either listening or reading a book, so what is different about this one?

First he writes so beautifully, using such a literate vocabulary with the bonus of the vernacular of Australia, perhaps in particular, working class Australians of a certain age. The subjects of the essays vary widely from his (and other Australians') connections to guns, the effect of his family's evangelical religious bent, his work in the environmental movement, class divisions as he observes it, and running throughout, his love of living near the sea and surfing.

Church loomed large in his family life and Sundays were exhausting so that Monday seemed a day of rest. He tells about one poignant story of his experience:

When I was six, I approached an older gentleman called George Smith to ask him about the size of my soul. I sidled up to him after church one morning and stood at his side until he registered my presence. He was younger then than I am now, but to me he had a wise and ancient mien. Maybe it was the specs. I don't remember why, at that age, I required soul dimensions, all I know is that my need was urgent. Mr. Smith took off his glasses, gave 'em a bit of a buff. Eventually he took my hand, closed it and pressed it against my chest. He told me he'd never actually seen a human soul but his best guess was that mine was about the size of my fist. I considered this skeptically; I may have only been six, but I wasn't stupid. Then I thought how sometimes my spirit ached like the aftermath of a sucker punch, burning right there, where old George Smith had his hand in mine like a thump in the chest whose afterglow left a feel and shape of a fist. And so his answer rang true. In the years since, my satisfaction with it has only deepened not because it convinces me in the literal sense it once did, but because there's such humanity and imagination in the image. What moves me most is that he bothered to answer my question at all.

It's a pleasure to read personal essays by someone who is so unconventional in that he doesn't fit any stereotypes. He makes me think of my father's assessment of my sister in 1967; in trying to puzzle out what she might be up to in college, he concluded she was too weird to be a hippie. Winton is a Christian, but not in any predictable sense. He doesn't own any guns, but has a complicated connection with them. He is a brilliant writer, but seems uneasy in any literary establishment sense.

I was unnerved to realize that it took a second listening to recognize that an experience in my own life was surprisingly similar to one in his. When he was six years old, his father was in an accident that nearly cost his life and required a long convalescence and later surgeries. He tells how much this affected his life and shook his sense of safety.

A week before my seventh birthday my mother drove her car into the path of a train where there was no crossing arm. I remember the moment we were told and my father was whisked away. My teenage older sister took charge and assured me everything would be fine. My mother was terribly injured:  her broken neck alone made it seem unlikely that she would survive. But she did and though she was a different person, she eventually recovered to manage our household. The community, particularly the church community, stepped in and cared for us in countless ways. I grew up feeling the great kindness of all those people and always loved that church family even through my teenage years when I had lost my faith. That accident made me conscious my family was different from others as my mother was so marked physically by it. 

This is a wonderful book that I will return to for comfort and relief in the face of the trials that continue to come our way in this country.

Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain, Picador, 2017 (I listened to the audiobook). Only available from third party sellers through Amazon.

Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia by Tim Heaphy

In the last few days I have been focused on the novella-length report of the summer's awful events, especially the one I wrote about that occurred on August 12. Though I was skeptical about the report, given that Heaphy seemed to be buddies with various people in City government and that he requested to undertake this project paid for by the City. I believe he did a creditable job. As I said at the time, we were failed by government at every level and this report documents all those failures. Besides City government, the appalling actions of the Virginia State Police were brought into the light.

Heaphy criticizes the City for its failure in two areas vital to our civic life:  failure to insure free expression of ideas (however repugnant) and ensuring public safety. The most common reaction everyone had to the events of August 12 was that police did not intervene in violence between the Alt-Right White Supremacists and the Anti-fascists opposing them. Though the police -- both City and Virginia State Police -- deny that they had a "stand-down" order, that is exactly what they did, including failing to respond to pleas for help from people. It seems to have been their plan to let the violence escalate until they could give the order to shut down the event, thus denying free expression requested by the Alt-Right group.

When I read about one of the earlier events of the summer, a visit by the silly-looking Ku Klux Klan who have lost their terrifying clout, I remembered how discouraged I was by the apparent unwillingness of some in our community to recognize their right to free speech. I believe their speech, with the help of their pointy hats and purple robes, discredits them rather than giving them a platform to intimidate people. I recognize that it's not always so simple, but having grown up in the time when protesters against the Vietnam War were struggling to have the right of free speech, I am not comfortable shutting it down.

It's been poignant in the last few days to walk and drive the streets where these terrible things happened. This summer after the murder of Heather Heyer to honor her I walked to the street where she died almost every day as long as the street was closed to traffic. It was heartening to see the flowers and many other offerings of tribute people left there.

A healing for this community seems a long way off, but it is a good start to see an honest accounting of the events in print. 

Timothy J. Heaphy, Hunton & Williams, LLP, Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia, 2017, 207 pages. 

Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver by Diane Ott Whealy

This is the story of one strain of the national movement to preserve our plant heritage. In this case a couple who were drawn to living close to the land expanded their reverence for the vegetables of their elders to working to preserve the vitality of that heritage. Shortly after Diane and Kent were married and living near her parents in Iowa, he asked her grandfather for seeds from the morning  glories that her great-grandparents had brought to Iowa from Bavaria. The author grew up in Festina, IA.

By the 1970s the traditional seed catalog offerings had begun to diminish and were replaced by hybrids whose seeds could not be used reliably. Awareness of the dangers of losing genetic diversity was growing. The Whealys began their work by compiling a list of like-minded people and in 1975 there were 29 gardeners who sent 25 cents and an envelope to receive the True Seed Exchange, a list of seeds others were willing to share. Now, according to the Seed Savers Exchange website the organization maintains a collection of over 20,000 heirloom plants and 13,000 members share seeds with one another. They have one of the largest non-governmental seed banks in the US. The non-profit is headquartered on a 890-acre farm six miles from Decorah, Iowa.

I heard about this book from Dorothy, who loaned it to me after I told her Jennifer lives in Decorah. And what a treat it has been to read. Knowing Decorah as I do, it's fun to encounter it this way. The Whealy kids were enthusiastic about moving there, drawn by Mabe's Pizza and the wonderfully-named Whippy Dip. And I was excited to learn that the Food Co-op where I have shopped countless times had its monthly potluck suppers at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, where Jen and family attend, a half-block from their house. I did go to Seed Savers once, but because my gardening involves flowers and herbs that arrive with roots attached, I was only an admirer of their work.

Aside from the Decorah connection, I found the book held my interest much more than I would have guessed. One method of increasing the interest and connection of seed savers all over the country was to have annual camp-out weekends which began with a dozen people when the Whealys were living in Missouri. Those involved at the outset were dedicated and their continuing contributions were recounted. When they began to have more success and land and buildings needed to be paid for, there were stories of attracting funding. When barns were to be saved or new buildings constructed, the old-fashioned methods were detailed. Still, my interest did not wane! The various undertakings described in the book brought back the 1970s, as did the sumptuous, carefully chosen illustrations in the book.

At the end of the book the author recounts the end of their marriage and the dramatically changed connection the two ultimately had to the enterprise. She describes an article she read about founders of mom-and-pop operations that grow to organizations beyond those founders' control. A person who makes so many sacrifices for an organization finds it hard to let go.

Diane Ott Whealy, Gathering:  Memoir of a Seed Saver, Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services, 2011, 231 pages. Available from Amazon.

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers

This book is a compilation of conversations between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers describing Campbell's teaching on mythology. The conversations occurred near the end of his life and are pretty free wheeling at times. I listened as I worked and marked a few passages on my phone that struck me as of particular interest. Below are my efforts to reproduce them. 

Campbell says that every religion is true in its metaphorical sense. Rather than rejecting the story, we should think about what the metaphor means. The story for Christianity is that Jesus ascended bodily to heaven; in Campbell's view this is a metaphor for going inward in order to ascend to heaven toward that source from which all life comes. The word Buddha means "the one who woke up" implying that we can all wake up to the goodness, to "the Jesus that is within us." He says "heaven and hell and all the gods are within us and this is the great revelation of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C....Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, metaphorical images of the energies within us." 

In another conversation he describes the ancient practices of the ritualistic methods of animal burial. He says, "The basic hunting myth I would say is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world where the animal gives its life willingly. They are regarded as willing victims with the understanding that their life which transcends their physical entity will be returned to the soil or to the mother through some ritual of restoration." Sounds to me like humans are kidding themselves.

In talking about the virgin birth he says that concept is an interesting development in western religion; the only gospel with the virgin birth is the Gospel of Luke who was a Greek. Virgin birth is an important aspect of Greek mythology, he says. He described a view from India of the birth of compassion coming from the heart region of the body in contrast to all that comes from the pelvic region (the need or desire to procreate, eat, and conquer). Deities who are conceived in the part of the body relating to compassion reflect the transformation to beings who act in terms of compassion rather than those basic drives.

I found it pleasurable to listen to these ramblings of an amazingly well-informed man; the stories and complicated thoughts just flowed by at a great rate. This is to say I'm in no position to judge and barely to react to what I listened to. 

I would add one funny and surprising bit. Though he died in 1987 he mentioned he had a computer. Given his knowledge of the gods, he was able to identify the computer as an Old Testament god as it has a lot of rules and no mercy. 

Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, HighBridge Recorded books, originally published by Doubleday, 1988, 231 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa and public library and from Amazon. 

Modern Romance: An Investigation by Aziz Ansari

This book was an interesting mix of laugh-out-loud funny moments, embarrassingly silly not funny jokes, and an interesting take on digital lives of people of a certain age. He did a significant amount of research on the subject and along with Eric Klinenberg, sociologist from NYU, did some focus group type of research himself.

They contrasted the ways people met each other in the 40s to current methods. When they asked people who are now in nursing homes how they met their spouses, they learned that many people met their mates in their neighborhood. Ansari said his parents had an arranged marriage:  his father had three choices, two were eliminated for being too tall. After talking to the third woman for 30 minutes, they married and have had a successful marriage for nearly 40 years. Now in the digital age, when people have access to countless prospects, people look for the perfect mate and can spend years and untold hours looking for that person. 

The most startling information is how many people meet significant others online. I would have guessed that the majority of people find their mates when they are in college, but it turns out that marriage occurs later for many people so that there is an extended period of single adulthood. 

When I read English literature from another country I like to note usages that are out of my own experience. A notable word in this book was the verb to bone, meaning to have sex. Though this was a book written about my own country, that sure was an alien word use for me.

Ansari quotes work of Jon Haidt and apparently interviewed him for the book. When Jon taught at UVa, he lived next door to us; he teaches at NYU now.

Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance:  An Investigation, Penguin, 2015, 288 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

If the Oceans Were Ink by Carla Power

The subtitle of this book is An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran. The friendship is between the author, an American journalist who has worked all around the world and a former colleague of hers, Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a Muslim scholar from India who eventually studied at Oxford. The author spent a year studying with the Sheikh, including attending day-long lectures he gave.

Power's father had been an unfulfilled law professor in St. Louis, and had taken every opportunity to spend as much time as possible in locations such as Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan as she grew up. Ms. Power recognized that they were tourists, and though her father worked to be immersed in the culture, her family enjoyed the beauty of the exotic locations while living apart from them. Her time with the Sheikh made her realize that her view of herself as a tolerant person with a pluralist outlook had not been tested. 

Although the Sheikh followed tradition that he learned growing up in India, he has written extensively of the Islamic women scholars. Power says he is "A traditionally trained scholar who scandalizes conservatives and disappoints progressives. And sometimes just the reverse. A champion of women's rights who accepts that Islam allows polygamy." He says repeatedly that the repression that women suffer is cultural rather than Islamic. 

He says a distinguishing characteristic of Islam is that their spirituality does not come through abstract ideas, "like closeness to God, and being a good neighbor, and loving one another." "Christians are not concerned about what Jesus did. They're not concerned with the details of the way he led his life. Our spirituality comes through doing the five prayers, as the Prophet Muhammad did. Or through giving charity, just as the Prophet did." You can see how that could be problematic:  what is known of the actions of a single individual who lived in the the seventh century may not always be the best guide for today.

The Sheikh saw polygamy as "an acknowledgement of male weakness, and an efficient system for minimizing its damage. 'Many men cheat,' he said. 'It's so easy for them to fool a woman, and leave her, maybe with a child.' Marrying a second wife, he argued, gives women protection:  the relationship is made public, and the man's responsibilities to provide for the woman are, too. 'A second marriage is better for the woman,' he said. 'They get a house and they get expenses.' The logic here is worrying:  the possibilities of societal accommodation for other "male weaknesses" could be problematic. And there's the human weakness for the illicit. 

Over the course of the time Power studied with the Sheikh, he revised his position on the issue of the marriage of minors. The Prophet's most articulate and respected wife had been a child bride; they were said to have been very happy. Two women students brought to his attention the oppression and injustice occurring within child marriages today. He was then moved to find the writings of an eighth century jurist who argued that women's right to autonomy was abrogated if they were married before puberty. 

On the passage that many Muslims say allows husbands to hit rebellious wives, the Sheikh said the key word "daraba" does in fact mean "to beat." He outlined many conditions that must be met before a husband can beat his wife and said that the limits were so stringent that no husband was hitting his wife according to Islamic law. 

Power says, "I'd always been taught that justice was the cornerstone virtue of Islam, occupying much the same position that love does in Christianity." There are exhortations to polygamists to be just with their wives, merchants to make fair deals in the marketplace. "A just leader," the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said, will be "the most beloved of people to God." When Power asked the Sheikh about the idea of justice, he noted that it was important to note that it may not arrive in this life. Well, this sure makes Christianity look good.

And on the subject of the afterlife, Power attended an intense eight-hour lecture that rivaled the hellfire sermons of movies. "The next world is our destination. This one is for travel," the Sheikh said. Paradise is a cool lush garden with shade trees and low-hanging fruit. When more gingery drink is wanted, the shiny goblets would be refilled by young boys, all "so nice-looking, you will think they're sprinkled with pearls!" according to the Sheikh.

It has taken me a long time to read this book. That was caused partly by the upheaval related to my town becoming a hashtag (#Charlottesville), but it was hard to attend to these ideas quickly. I can well understand why the author acknowledged that her previous experience had not tested her view of herself as a tolerant person.

Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink, Henry Holt and Company, 2015, 336 pages. Available at the UVa and public libraries, and from Amazon.

Aunts Up the Cross by Robin Dalton

Robin Dalton is a renown literary agent (four of her authors won Booker prizes) and movie producer (Oscar and Lucinda). She was born in 1920 in Sydney and moved to London in 1946. This short book that she wrote about her eccentric family was first published in 1965 and again recently with an introduction by Clive James.

It opens with this irresistible bit:

My great-aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was traveling very slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been traveling fairly fast in the wrong direction.

And so begins the stories of the family, with eight daughters who lived in a beautiful house in King's Cross called Maramanah (the images are worth a look). The older four, including Robin's mother, married and brought their husbands into the house; she says, "Their husbands were all, in bearing and repute, substantial characters but, stationed as they were in innumerable family photographs amid the lace flounces of their joint spouses and sisters-in-law, they resembled so many currents on a richly iced cake."

The younger four did not marry and remained for many years in Maramanah after the married daughters moved out. Though she never met them, they loomed large in Robin's life in stories. Their names were Lilla, Mina, Netta, and Anys; her father called them Litter, Titter, Fritter and Anus.

Robin's parents moved to a house not far from there with her grandparents where they all lived for thirty-five years. After the first year, Robin's father never spoke to her grandmother (his mother-in-law). Among Robin's store of tales includes, predictably because he's everywhere, a reference to Ned Kelly's gang. Her father's father was reputed to have fought and vanquished two members of the gang.

Another feature of Australian life as I understand it is the gambling, particularly on horses. Saturday was racing day in her family's household and she was allowed to pick a winner as well. "I once dreamt correctly a 20 to 1 winner:  for three subsequent Friday nights I was sent to bed early with a glass of hot milk and a copy of the Form Guide under my pillow--but it was an isolated occasion...." Her mother regularly placed bets with her bookie and often borrowed her Aunt Juliet's jewels to make good on her bets until she had a good week. 

My mother's attitude to money was delightful, but impractical. She had been brought up by my grandmother in the same way I was, and by having repeated to her frequently the words of my great-grandfather who was reputed to have dinned into the ears of his twelve children, 'Never worry about money. It's only an attitude of mind, and the next best thing to being very rich is to think you're very rich."

This was very fun to read. I enjoyed dipping into a different era and place via tales told with a slant toward the wild and crazy relatives.

Robin Dalton, Aunts Up the Cross, Text Classics, 2015, 142 pages (I read the kindle version). Available from Amazon.

American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag

I cannot possibly recount all the important bits I want to remember about this book and it is even less plausible for me to give an overall accounting of the book. The NYT review does the latter admirably and I will just record a few of my favorite ideas.

While teaching philosophy at UMass-Lowell, John Kaag happened on the private library of John Ernest Hocking who taught philosophy at Harvard for forty years, beginning in 1914. The library had many priceless books: Rene Descartes' Discourse on the Method (First English Edition 1649), John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690), Immanuel Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Riga: 1781) to name a few. What made some of these books especially wonderful was that they had been owned by other eminent philosophers; imagine finding a book with margin notes by William James. When Kaag came upon it, the free-standing library on the Hocking estate was unheated and used only by critters that ate those priceless pages. Kaag began visiting this library in its remote location in New Hampshire often and surreptitiously, "cheating" on his wife as their relationship deteriorated. He fell in love with the library and eventually with a colleague who began to visit the library with him to save the books.

Kaag begins the book with a personal exploration relating to a talk given by William James in April 1895 to the Harvard Young Men's Christian Association on the topic "Is Life Worth Living?" The Christian young men presumably had accepted the "Yes!" taught to them, but James, often a despondent fellow, could only come up with "Maybe." Kaag says, "On the one hand, we cling to the hope that our world is both rational and meaningful; on the other, we may eventually come to see that it is neither." Kaag says that "For American philosophers like James, determining life's worth is, in a very real sense, up to us. Our wills remain the decisive factor in making meaning in a world that continually threatens it. Our past does not have to control us." As James worked on The Varieties of Religious Experience he was seeking "experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they must consider the divine." As Kaag says, "In other words, he was searching for some indication that each of us was not, despite evidence to the contrary, inconsolably alone in an uncaring universe."

One day Kaag began work in the library by reading from Descartes' work Dissertation de Methodo

It is the heart and soul of rationalism, arguably the most important claim of modern philosophy--"Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). American philosophers working in the nineteenth century were a diverse group of thinkers, but they found common ground in their critique of this seemingly innocuous statement. 

Descartes is credited with being the first to put humans' ability to reason at the forefront of philosophy. Some of the shortcomings of relying on our ability to be rational are found in the book I wrote about by Russell Shorto, Descartes' Bones (our "rationality" is often not too rational). And more important, those early American philosophers "pointed out that in its search for order, the Cogito argument had relinquished a question that was supposed to remain central: What makes life significant?"

Here's another passage I want to remember:

In [Alfred North} Whitehead's system, the world doesn't consist of discrete billiard ball-like objects that knock against one another. Instead, parts of the universe live and move together, and have their being in a logic of events in which individuals freely participate. The task of philosophy was not to secure an individual's solitary existence, divorced from all other beings, but to affirm a shared life in a common place. The experience of this shared life was not unlike James's appeal to the "varieties of religious experience" that temporarily quelled the fear of existential isolation.

Kaag describes Jane Addams and her work with Hull House with such respect that I would like to read more about her work.

Kaag describes philosophy today this way:

Analytic philosophers tend to understand philosophy as the task of parsing arguments, breaking down complex and confusing phenomena by analyzing their constituent parts. Like scientists at a laboratory bench, these thinkers dissect human experience in order to see how it ticks. Of course, this dissection often results in the distortion or destruction of the experience itself, but many analytic philosophers don't seem to care. They scrutinize for a living.

He doesn't pull his punches, does he? What a wonderful book this is.

John Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016, 272 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.