Brexit: What happened?

A journalist explains it

By Rolf Dumke

I have enjoyed British novelist Ian McEwan’s excellent novels Amsterdam and Saturday and others because of their ironic, satirical portraits of British society. And now, in a February 1 article in The Guardian (“Brexit, the most pointless, masochistic ambition in our country’s history, is done”), McEwan tries to disperse the fog of nationalistic populism, or “populist stardust” that has confused debate on Brexit in the UK. In the attempt, he enumerates more than enough reasons to convince me that Brexit was a huge mistake, but how Brexit nevertheless happened remains open to discussion.

Goines On: Library due notice

Click image for more vignettes

The local library’s due notice was addressed to Goines as “Dr. Goines,” at sight of which he grinned, pleased that he seemed to be highly regarded locally, at least in book circles. “Please note,” the notice said, “the due date on the following items…Machines like me: and people like you / Ian McEwan.”

Correspondence: Wight ring

Freshwater, Isle of Wight

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

Every morning I ask my wife, “Has Trump resigned yet?” and she sadly shakes her head and replies, “No such news.” Moristotle, I know from your right-wing blog and the many ingratiating things you have said about President Trump that you are one of the still tens of millions of American voters who support him. But for the love of God in whom you also ardently believe, PLEASE STOP ENCOURAGING TRUMP. He must be made to accept that he no longer has the love and support of anyone but a handful of awkward individuals – in his own family, perhaps, and among those almost as bad as himself on his staff and in his Cabinet – if they didn’t abandon him the day he betrayed them. Moristotle, if you stop supporting Trump and encourage your right-wing friends to stop as well, maybe this can be turned around, and my wife can give me good news for a change.

Book Review: Nutshell (a novel)

By Moristotle

With a whoop and a slap of my thigh, I finished Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Nutshell, its final act an ingenious, but inevitable turn of plot. What a read! I highly recommend Nutshell, for all those who like their fiction with a flair for invention – in language as well as in setting and narrative voice – and for informed comment on culture, politics, psychology…and, in this case, forensic investigation. For Nutshell involves a murder.

Second reading of Atonement

When you read Ian McEwan's 2001 novel, Atonement, the first time, you don't realize what the atonement in question is, and discovering it is a delightful literary experience [emphasis on literary]. But there's also delight in a second reading, for you can spot the many allusions in Part One to what you now know won't be revealed until Part Three.

Word games

Robert Conquest
(b. 1917)

So far, I've had three suggestions for the final line of Wednesday's limerick,

There once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
    So this elderly menace
    Took steamship to Venice....
________________________________

all from my old college friend Jon:

We did it in a bed and said "Oh, yes."
And all that was required was togas.
Straight sex, rats, does not rhyme with Stoke Poges.

I like these, but I'm disapponted by Oh, yes's and togas's failing to include a rhyme for "Stoke" and "poke," and, of course, the clever third line repeats the given first line.
    Jon's first two suggestions are easy to adjust:

Where he did it in bed and said [choke] "Oh, yes!"
Where they managed the deed in bloke togas.

(I think togas came in men's and women's styles!)
    I don't expect to find "the solution" later in Hitchens's book, but in reading on I found something even better, more about word games, of which, we have to admit, writing limericks is one:

I already knew in principle that word games, like limericks and acrostics and acronyms and crosswords, are good training in and of themselves. I could not then guess at the harvest of such marvels that lay ahead....[p. 130]
    I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, they can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. Martin [Amis, son of Kingsley] was—is—a genius at this sort of thing. It arose—arises—from his willingness to devote real time to the pitiless search for the apt resonance....[p. 164]
    Something of the same was true of the "Friday lunch" that has now become the potential stuff of a new "Bloomsbury" legend...There was never the intention or design that it become a "set" or a "circle," and of course if there had been any such intention, the thing would have been abortive. The Friday lunch began to simply "occur" in the mid-1970s, and persisted into the early 1980s, and is now cemented in place in several memoirs and biographies. Let me try and tell you something of how it was.
    It began, largely at Martin's initiation, as a sort of end-of-the-week clearinghouse for gossip and jokes, based on the then-proximity of various literary magazines and newspapers. Reliable founding attendees included the Australian poets Clive James and Peter Porter, Craig Raine (T.S. Eliot's successor as poetry editor at Faber and Faber), the Observer's literary editor Terry Kilmartin (the re-translator of Scott Moncrieff's version of Marcel Proust, and the only man alive trusted by Gore Vidal to edit his copy without further permission), the cartoonist and rake and dandy Mark Boxer, whose illustrations then graced (for once the word is quite apt) all the best bookcovers as well as the Time's op-ed page. Among those bookcovers were the dozen volumes of Anthony Powell's masterwork [A Dance to the Music of Time] and among Mark's aesthetic and social verdicts the one I remember being delivered with the most authority was his decided and long-meditated conclusion that: "It's the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less [sic] than three times."...The critic Russell Davies, the then-rising novelists Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Robert Conquest when they were in England, Kingsley when he wasn't otherwise engaged with yet more lavish and extensive lunches, and your humble servant help to complete this dramatis personae....[pp. 168-169]
    ...but Robert Conquest, the king of the limerick [emphasis mine]...always thought that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well....
    Simple "versified filth"—Amis senior's crushing condemnation of most popular limericks—was not allowed.
    Indeed insistence upon the capacious subtleties of the limerick was something of a hallmark. Once again Conquest takes the palm: his condensation of the "Seven Ages of Man" shows how much force can be packed into the deceptively slight five-line frame. Thus:

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
    Then fucks, and then fights
    Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

This is not the only example of Conquest's genius for compression. The history of the Bolshevik "experiment" in five lines? Barely a problem:

There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
    That's a lot to have done in
    But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in. [pp. 173-174]

There's probably another blog entry to come of this. I see that on p. 435, the index entry for "word games" also gives reference to pp. 264-266.

I used to think that my limerick, "No End in Sight" (November 26, 2006):

Religious war burns on and beleaguers
Iraq's Sunni and Shiite besiegers,
    But it brings no relief
    From dogmatic belief
But for stone-dead dogmatic believers.

was pretty darn good, and maybe it isn't bad, but it compresses far less into itself than either of the examples from Conquest.

Review readers unanimous

Readers across America (or along a portion of the eastern seaboard, at any rate) seem to agree with me about Walter Kirn's April 18 review of Ian McEwan's latest novel. At least, all four letters to the editor printed in this mornings New York Times Book Review criticize his review sharply.
    From Pennsylvania, Ms. Robinson and her husband spent a weekend reading Solar and laughing. He called it a "delicious romp." She says, "The novel we find so smart and hilarious bears no resemblance to the one Walter Kirn described...."
    The author of the letter from New York "was seriously taken aback by Walter Kirn's review...The tone was so venomous and vitriolic, it read as if a personal vendetta were taking place on the front page...."
    In Virginia, the letter writer was thankful that she'd already read Solar because Kirn "relentlessly...exposed significant plot turns...that extend well into the book's heart."
    The writer from Massachusetts says she has "been reading book reviews for 48 years, and I don't recall another quite as hate-filled as his."

Jealousy on Kirn's part was what I posited; nothing in these letters is inconsistent with that.

Walter Kirn up in the air!

I'm concurrently reading Walter Kirn's 2001 novel, Up in the Air, and enjoying it no less than I'm enjoying Ian McEwan's Solar. Up in the Air is a romp, though a story much different from that told by the George Clooney movie (much darker, yet funnier), and a novel much different from McEwan's (its dark action concentrated into a tiny fraction of the decade taken by the tragicomic action of Solar).
    With what dismay, then, did I read this morning, in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Kirn's front-page review of Solar, which is about as total a dump-on of another writer's work as a reviewer writes. It opens:

According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad—so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed—that they’re actually rather good. Solar, the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good—so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off—that it’s actually quite bad...There’s so little wrong with it that there’s nothing particularly right about it, either.

    Fortunately for the discerning reader, the illogic of "so good it's bad" undermines Kirn's position from the get-go. But Walter Kirn's standing, both as novelist and as "a regular contributor to the Book Review," will browbeat the unwary into thinking that there might be something to his quasi-logical argument, so maybe they should just skip Solar. So much the worse for them.
    Kirn more or less writes off the boot room, which I blogged about the other day: It

devolves [emphasis mine] into a model Hobbesian jungle as the supposedly liberal junket­eers steal the best gear for themselves, placing their own survival before the group’s and putting the lie to man’s altruistic posturing.

Why does it "devolve"? It doesn't. Kirn's just miffed. His underlying complaint about Solar may be that expressed in his paragraph:

There’s little that’s lifelike about Solar, despite its relentless pretensions to relevance. The story is structured like a crossword puzzle, in rows and columns of little empty boxes that McEwan helps us fill in by providing witty riddles whose solutions flatter our intelligence. The process feels pleasantly antic and cerebral, but in time its premeditated quality becomes preposterously artificial, as do its swerves into heady slapstick humor.

As a reader of the book, I find none of this justified. To say that Solar is "structured like a crossword puzzle" is just silly. "Premediated...preposterously artificial" suggests a formula for summing up Kirn's review: Preposterous! Whatever McEwan might have published, I suspect that Kirn had premeditated to put it down, however artificial the logic of his put-down would have to be.

I think there's a clue to Kirn's pique in his statement:

What makes Solar such a noble nullity is that it answers these challenges so easily, with such a quotient of stress-free mastery that they feel less like challenges than like problems in a literary exam the author has devised as a means of proving his own prowess. This may be Beard’s story, but it’s McEwan’s vehicle, constructed to let him pull all the showy turns of the major contemporary novelist and ambitious public intellectual: personalizing the political, politicizing the personal and poeticizing everything else.

    The clues, I mean, are so easily, major contemporary novelist, and ambitious public intellectual. Kirn appears to have been suffering a serious case of jealousy!

The boot room

In Ian McEwan's latest novel, Solar, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard is invited to the North Pole.

The party would comprise twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change...There were no lecturing duties—Beard's presence would be sufficient—and the foundation would bear all his expenses, while the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.
    ...
    It turned out that Beard was the only scientist among a committed band of artists. The entire world and all its follies, one of which was to warm up the planet, was to their south, which seemed to be in every direction....
    ...
    From the second day, the disorder in the boot room was noticeable, even to Beard. [pp. 46, 47, 62, 75]

This boot room, which McEwan introduces so innocently, so unremarkably, attracts more of a Nobel Prize winner's attention than we might expect:

    He suspected that he never wore the same boots on consecutive days. Even though he wrapped his goggles...in his inner balaclava on the third day, they were gone by the fourth, and the balaclava was on the floor, soaking up water...He was not a communally spirited person, but there were certain decencies he took for granted—in himself, and therefore in others. He always put his stuff on and below the same peg, number seventeen, and was disappointed to note that others had trouble observing such simple procedures. Gloves were a particular problem, for it was impossible to go outside without them. As a precaution, he stuffed his inside his boots, along with the glove liners. The next day the boots were gone. [p. 75]

    And the week long Beard observes the artists' idealistic

demonstrations, like prayers, like totem-pole dances...fashioned to deflect the course of catastrophe.
  Such was the music and magic of ship-bound climate-change talk. Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall we had learned to call a bulkhead, the boot room continued to deteriorate. By midweek four helmets were missing, along with three of the heavy snowmobile suits and many smaller items. It was no longer possible for more than two thirds of the company to be outside at the same time...Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs.

Then McEwan reveals his hand, why the boot room has been such a focus, to serve as a symbol:

Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin. Even harder to impose order once the room was strewn with backpacks and stuff bags and supermarket plastic bags half filled with extra gloves and scarves and chocolate bars. No one, he thought, admiring his own generosity, had behaved badly; everyone, in the immediate circumstances, wanting to get out on the ice, had been entirely rational in "discovering" his or her missing balaclava or glove in an unexpected spot. It was perverse or cynical of him to take pleasure in the thought, but he could not help himself. How were they to save the earth—assuming it needed saving, which he doubted—when it was so much larger than the boot room? [emphasis mine, pp. 79, 80]

We've all been there, though some of us died in the crash

...Now the driver's line of gaze had to deviate a whole ninety degrees from the road to engage with his passenger, sometimes for seconds on end, during which time, by Beard's calculation, they traveled several hundred meters. You don't have to look at me to talk to me, he wanted to say as he watched the traffic ahead, trying to predict the moment when he might seize the wheel. But even Beard found it difficult to criticize a man who was giving him a lift—his host, in effect. Rather die or spend a life as a morose quadriplegic than be impolite. [p. 36, Solar, by Ian McEwan, 2010]

Beard is the same Michael Beard I introduced in my report of reading a short story, presumably from the novel, that appeared in the December 7 issue of The New Yorker Magazine.

Synchronicity?

Yesterday I published an entry on intellectual property. This morning I read yesterday's newspaper and discovered that Ian McEwan has published a new novel, Solar, a portion of which I had read (and commented on back in December). A couple of sentences from Hephzibah Anderson's review (on Bloomberg News):

The story pivots on a freak accident that catapults a tubby physicist, Michael Beard, to the forefront of the race to find a sustainable energy source. Pursuing this worthy goal in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change, the balding British boffin will clock thousands of miles and resort to intellectual property theft and worse. [my emphasis]

Isn't this just a coincidence? Or is it a Jungian synchronicity? A synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.
    Or some emblem of divinity saying something like "God is watching over you"? In my manic excitement during Youie summer, I took all of the innumerable coincidences I was noticing as just such emblems. (There didn't seem to be anything of any more precise significance that they could possibly mean.) Coincidences have provided many a man and woman an assurance that life is not a matter simply of chance.

How could it be a coincidence [they ask themselves] that I could publish "Intellectual property" the very day that the personally most interesting book review in the local newspaper should use that phrase, and not just casually but by way of characterizing the pivot of the book! This cries out with significance!

Uh, yeah, but what significance? Remember that Carl Jung espoused the procedures of I Ching [The Book of Changes], a "system of divination" in which the adept meditates on potential meanings of chance juxtapositions.

Any juxtaposition can be used creatively to find hidden significance. We can, for example, open a book (any book, a dictionary, say, though a Christian might favor the Bible or a Muslim the Qur'an) and place our finger down at random on a verse. If we then read the verse (or the definition) with the expectation that something of personal import will be suggested, then it is highly probable that something will indeed come to mind.
    Note, though, that this works for almost any occasion. But we don't do it on just any occasion: it takes something like a striking coincidence to push us in that direction.
    Nevertheless, what might I make of this "intellectual property" coincidence? Do I have a valuable intellectual property in Moristotle that I am giving away free on Blogspot? Or should I focus on Michael Beard's theft, mentioned in the book review? Beware, Moristotle, quit including overlong quotations in your blog from the intellectual property of others!

The kugel remains

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein apparently isn't in Ian McEwan's league, as I hopefully suggested on January 13 that she might be. I'm not much enjoying her 2000 novel, Properties of Light, and the review I just read of her newest, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, doesn't inspire me to read it. In the review ("Prove It," in the January 31 New York Times Book Review), its author, Liesl Schillinger, writes:

...Goldstein's lofty psycho-religio-philosophical subtext, or rather metatext, doesn't gray her roman à clef about love, Jewish cultural identity, and academic infighting. She sews her philosophical inquiry to the material of everyday life...All the same, the stitches that join Goldstein's men, women, and themes show more in this novel than they do in her others....
    In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Goldstein shows that philosophers and scholars may construct as many proofs or disproofs of divinity as they like. But to people of faith such questions remain as inarguable as the persistence of kugel. [emphasis mine]
    [An] "Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values," [a character who Schillinger says could have been based on Yale's emeritus professor Harold Bloom], or someone uncannily like him, [proposes to a graduate student that he write his dissertation on] the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal of cholent (bean and potato stew) and kugel (pudding)....[p. 10]

Sorry if my January 13 post got you all excited.

And me. Still, though, reviewers often mislead us. I'll browse the book when I find a library that has it. Anyway, the novel is said to come

with an appendix that lists and refutes 36 arguments for the existence of God...To taste their rigor, sample No. 20, the Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance, which travels from Premise 1 ("In a million years, nothing that happens now will matter") to Premise 4 ("It is intolerable...that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter") to Premise 8 ("God exists"). [Goldstein] dismisses this argument as "the fallacy of wishful thinking."

That has to be fun.

Seriously, though, it's true. We humans, thrown here as we are, with our artistic consciousnesses, our imaginations, how we do rail against that and other intolerabilities. The intolerability that really bad people won't be punished (beyond what minor pains of conscience they may succeed in feeling before they die). The intolerability that our parents' bodies lie in cold graves back in our hometowns, that our bodies will lie somewhere too, someday, if we don't try to ensure that they will be cremated.
    Can our sadness at these intolerabilities be all we need to know of why religion has such a tight grip on some of us?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

To my probably deserved embarrassment, I'd never heard of Rebecca Goldstein. But I've heard of her now, from my intellectual alter ego Sam Harris, in an email from samharris.org:

New Novel about the New Atheism: Rebecca Goldstein's, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God
"So extravagantly witty and smart that it's making everything else I've read recently seem drab."
    —Ron Charles, Senior Editor at The Washington Post Book Review

"Comic and supremely witty, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is both a satire of the academic world and a feast of philosophical and religious ideas."
    —Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams [an excellent work, which I have read; by the way, Lightman is on the MIT faculty, along with Goldstein's husband, linguist Steven Pinker]

"You do not have to perpetrate an act of faith to confront the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is faith itself that consists of nothing. Rebecca Goldstein, on the other hand, is quite something."
    —Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great [ditto]

"Rebecca Newberger Goldstein does it all. She has written a hilarious novel about people's existential agonies, a page-turner about the intellectual mysteries that obsess them. The characters in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God explore the great moral issues of our day in a novel that is deeply moving and a joy to read."
    —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated [not yet]

    I get from these recommendations the same thrill that I got from the ad I saw (in 2005?) in The New York Times Book Review for Harris's book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I knew it would speak to me on my own wavelength.

And the list of Goldstein's publications is intellectually provocative. From a research university's online library catalog:

Goldstein, Rebecca, 1950-
Betraying Spinoza : the renegade Jew who gave us modernity
    New York : Nextbook : Schocken, c2006. [Spinoza!]
The dark sister
    New York, NY : Viking, 1991. [according to Wikipedia, "a postmodern fictionalization of family and professional issues in the life of William James"]
Incompleteness : the proof and paradox of Kurt Gödel
    New York : W.W. Norton, c2005. [a filched book about Gödel's incompleteness theorem graced my summer of 1965]
The late-summer passion of a woman of mind
    New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c1989.
Mazel
    New York : Viking, 1995.
The mind-body problem : a novel
    New York : Random House, c1983. [don't you worry about this too?]
Properties of light : a novel of love, betrayal and quantum physics
    Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2000. [let me know if you can explain quantum physics to me]
Strange attractors
    New York : Viking, 1993.

An Ian McEwan-class novelist? I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation, having this morning requested Properties of Light from my local library.
    36 Arguments for the Existence of God sounds like some excellent "talk about faith," possibly of the sort Russ Douthat had in mind in his op-ed piece, "Let's Talk about Faith", in Sunday's New York Times:

When liberal democracy was forged, in the wake of Western Europe’s religious wars, this sort of peaceful theological debate is exactly what it promised to deliver. And the differences between religions are worth debating. Theology has consequences: It shapes lives, families, nations, cultures, wars; it can change people, save them from themselves, and sometimes warp or even destroy them.

The "right spouse"?

A sentence from Ian McEwan's short story about Michael Beard's courtship of Maisie Farmer deflates both the romance of that "poetic" courtship and the romantic assumption of Friday's post on how we know we chose "the right spouse":

He [Michael] was to count that misty, sunny November afternoon, along the Cherwell river by the Rainbow Bridge, as the point at which the first of his marriages began. [Emphasis mine] [from "The Use of Poetry," in today's issue of The New Yorker]

    E. B. White might have married someone other than Katherine Angell and, with luck, have found as good an indicator that that was the right one as "tooth twine" had been that it was Katherine. And I....
    And you.

McEwan's story of Michael Beard's first courtship is too good to be Beard's whole story. One hopes that "The Use of Poetry" is the opening chapter of "his novel Solar," which The New Yorker's notes on contributors promise "is due out in the spring."
    A clue that it might be is that the Michael Beard character is interested in photons (a basic unit of light) and decades later will win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Just the sort of delicious story that Ian McEwan has been setting before us for three decades.

And god was the word

My skeptical friend Ed wrote me overnight:

I don't know if you have noticed, but you seem to be talking more about God now that you don't believe than before.

Well, I pointed out to Ed, I had noticed something like that. In the footnote to my preceding post ("The GWB proof of the non-existence of god"), I had written:

And maybe I did "decide" to become an atheist, after all, because I considered the question carefully, qualitatively sifting and weighing the evidence. Obviously, I'm still trying to sort out the best way to think and talk about it. If I'm concerned about appearing to be obsessed about this, maybe I shouldn't be. It's just a natural process of thinking. [emphasis added]

But I also pointed out that I have definitely not been "talking more about God." I have not been talking "about god" at all, for there is no god to talk about—or to pray to or be aided, hindered, inspired, judged, forgiven, saved, or condemned by.
    What I have been talking a lot about is not believing in god and believing in no-god, which of course is quite different. I wouldn't trouble to comment on Ed's use of language (which was likely intentional, for the sake of irony), except for the fact that serious philosophical problems arise from misapprehending language.
    For example, the Gospel According to John opens thus:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What this can only, truly mean is that god is only a word¹. Theologians have for centuries tied themselves into knots trying to interpret it otherwise. Maybe if they'd noticed that John could have been dyslexic....

There are many reasons, psychological and social, for my dwelling on what I believe. My own dear mother was a devout believer, "rest her soul." But for her I would likely never have become as involved in religion as I did. All four of my sisters have been believers and many if not most of my aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. (Only two of my sisters survive, and one of my previously many aunts and uncles; "rest the souls," too of those departed.) I come from a religious background. Thus, "becoming" an atheist is very much to go my own way. I have had to endure many tsk-tsks and "I'm praying for you's." I've had to choose between keeping quiet or exposing myself. Obviously I haven't kept quiet, so I've had to deal with the reality that I've amazed and even offended people.
    More than half of the members of my commute van pool talk of going to church. At least the two drivers know that religious radio programs offend me. When I objected to their tuning them in, I told them that I'd signed up to commute, not to attend church. Some of them know that I read books by Ian McEwan and Richard Dawkins. But maybe not everyone had picked up on this: "What's that you're reading?" The Blind Watchmaker. "Is it a novel?"²
    Some of my neighbors are evangelical Christians. One of them has the email address, everyoneneedsjesus@...Now, that's evangelical!
    Etc.
    So, in addition to the "joyful sense of liberation that I feel as a result of [seeing religion for a sham]," I also have a sense of sadness at having made myself peculiar³ to a number of my relatives, possibly some of my friends, and perhaps one or two of my neighbors. But being somewhat estranged from them is a price I'm willing to pay for refusing to join them in their superstition. Centuries of clever Jewish, Christian, and Muslim apologetical book-keeping have not rendered the superstitious beliefs of the fearful ancient Israelites—that groveling, guilt-ridden, image-worshiping, animal-sacrificing, women-subjugating people—any less superstitious today.
_______________

1. As Christopher Hitchens writes in his 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (dedicated to Ian McEwan):

   [Kant] undid the ontological argument by challenging the simpleminded notion that if god can be conceived as an idea, or stated as a predicate, he must therefore possess the quality of existence. This traditional tripe is accidentally overthrown by Penelope Lively in her much-garlanded novel Moon Tiger. Describing her daughter Lisa as a "dull child," she nonetheless delights in the infant's dim but imaginative questions:

   "Are there dragons?" she asked. I said that there were not. "Have there ever been?" I said all the evidence was to the contrary. "But if there is a word dragon," she said, "then once there must have been dragons." [p. 265]

2. The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, explains how natural selection, acting over millions and millions of years, fashioned the human eye, bat echolocation, and other marvels of nature.
3. I recall a Pentecostal sermon that was preached at me over fifty years ago. The preacher told us that as Christians we were "peculiar," which he explained at length (in the way that such preachers loved to go on glossing words) to mean that we were "circled about" by people who were not like us. To be really circled about in our society today, be an atheist.

"It was once convenient to think biblically..."

Throughout the day Saturday (in Ian McEwan's 2005 novel), Henry Perowne continues to reflect on our post-Darwinian, post-9/11 world:

He turns the corner into Paddington Street and stops in front of the open-air display of fish on a steeply raked slab of white marble. He sees at a glance that everything he needs is here. Such abundance from the emptying seas. On the tiled floor by the open doorway, piled in two wooden crates like rusting industrial rejects, are the crabs and lobsters, and in the tangle of war-like body parts there is discernible movement. On their pincers they're wearing funereal black bands. It's fortunate for the fishmonger and his customers that sea creatures are not adapted to make use of sound waves and have no voice. Otherwise there'd be howling from those crates. Even the silence among the softly stirring crowd is troubling. He turns his gaze away, towards the bloodless white flesh, and eviscerated silver forms with their unaccusing stare, and the deepsea fish arranged in handy overlapping steaks of innocent pink, like cardboard pages of baby's first book. Naturally, Perowne the fly-fisherman has seen the recent literature: scores of polymodal nociceptor sites just like ours in the head and neck of rainbow trout. It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant peoples are our brothers and sisters, but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish. Perowne goes on catching and eating them, and though he'd never drop a live lobster into boiling water, he's prepared to order one in a restaurant. The trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be selective in your mercies. For all the discerning talk, it's the close at hand, the visible that exerts the overpowering force. And what you don't see....[pp. 184-185]

"The actual, not the magical..."

Brain surgeon Henry Perowne, in Ian McEwan's 2005 novel, Saturday, has, under his daughter Daisy's direction,

read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary...
    They had the virtue, at least, of representing a recognisable physical reality; which could not be said for the so-called magical realists she opted to study in her final year. What were these authors of reputation doing—grown men and women of the twentieth century—granting supernatural powers to their characters? He never made it all the way through a single one of those irksome confections. And written for adults, not children. In more than one, heroes and heroines were born with or sprouted wings—a symbol, in Daisy's term, of their liminality; naturally, learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration. Others were granted a magical sense of smell, or tumbled unharmed out of high-flying aircraft. One visionary [in McEwan's own novel A Child in Time] saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him.
    A man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains is bound to respect the material world, its limits, and what it can sustain—consciousness, no less. It isn't an article of faith with him, he knows it for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs. If that's worthy of awe, it also deserves curiosity; the actual, not the magical, should be the challenge. This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible. [pp. 95-97]

"If Perowne were inclined to religious feeling..."

The action of Ian McEwan's 2005 novel, Saturday, takes place on February 15, 2003—post 9/11 and pre-invasion of Iraq. Neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, after his very long Friday at work, awakes some hours before dawn, rises, and is surprised to find that

he doesn't feel tired, despite the hour or his recent labours, nor is his conscience troubled by any recent case. [p. 2]

Standing at the bedroom's

centre window, [he pulls] back the tall folding wooden shutters with care so as not to wake [his wife] Rosalind. [p. 2]

After several minutes at the window,

the elation is passing, and he's beginning to shiver...He turns from the window to reach behind him for a thick woolen dressing gown where it lies draped over a chair. Even as he turns, he's aware of some new element outside, in the square or in the trees, bright but colourless, smeared across his peripheral vision by the movement of his head. [p. 17]

After thinking first meteor, then comet, he moves to wake Rosalind to see it too:

He's moving toward the bed when he hears a low rumbling sound, gentle thunder gathering in volume, and stops to listen. It tells him everything. He looks back over his shoulder to the window for confirmation. Of course, a comet is so distant it's bound to appear stationary. Horrified, he returns to his position by the window. [p. 18-19]

His mind fills with memories and fantasies of being on board an airplane headed for a crash.

It's already almost eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again, the unseen captives driven through the sky to the slaughter, at which time there gathered round the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel association. Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed...The plane emerges from the trees, crosses a gap, and disappears behind the Post Office Tower. If Perowne were inclined to religious feeling, to supernatural explanations, he could play with the idea that he's been summoned; that having woken in an unusual state of mind, and gone to the window for no reason, he should acknowledge a hidden order, an external intelligence which wants to show or tell him something of significance. But a city of its nature cultivates insomniacs; it is itself a sleepless entity whose wires never stop singing; among so many millions there are bound to be people staring out of windows when normally they would be asleep. And not the same people every night. That it should be him and not someone else is an arbitrary matter. A simple anthropic principle is involved. The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis. [pp. 21-24]

Later, when the family are up, at last the news informs them:

It's a cargo plane, a Russian Tupolev on a run from Riga to Birmingham. As it passed well to the east of London a fire broke out in one of the engines....[pp. 51-52]

"Into the region where the pineal lay..."

Saturday (2005) was the first of Ian McEwan's novels I read, sometime back in 2006, soon after it became available on the Library of Congress's "special media" for the visually handicapped. It didn't seem to have made that big an impression on me. Now, after having read seven of his other novels (including Black Dogs twice), I'm curious enough about why to read it again. I've been supposing that reading McEwan requires a special receptivity, something I had to develop through reading. That may be true, but I can't yet define it.

Before I picked the book up again, I couldn't even have told you that the main character was a neurosurgeon. But neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is, and in the very first pages McEwan describes Perowne's whirlwind Friday of surgeries, including a long operation on a young woman with a tumour (I'll follow the text's British spelling) "deep in the superior cerebellar vermis":

Andrea's operation lasted five hours and went well. She was placed in a sitting position, with her head-clamp bolted to a frame in front of her. Opening up the back of the head needed great care because of the vessels running close under the bone. Rodney leaned in at Perowne's side to irrigate the drilling and cauterise the bleeding with the bipolar. Finally it lay exposed, the tentorium—the tent—a pale delicate structure of beauty, like the little whirl of a veiled dancer, where the dura is gathered and parted again. Below it lay the cerebellum. By cutting away carefully, Perowne allowed gravity itself to draw the cerebellum down—no need for retractors—and it was possible to see deep into the region where the pineal lay, with the tumour extending in a vast red mass right in front of it. The astrocytoma was well defined and had only partially infiltrated surrounding tissue. Perowne was able to excise almost all of it without damaging any eloquent region. [p. 13]

The year 2006 was the tenth after my own five-hour brain operation in the region where the pineal lay. And my tumor lay even deeper than Andrea's, in the pineal itself. My neurosurgeon was able to remove only about 85% of mine. And there was enough damage to the eloquent region of my mid-brain to leave me—apparently permanently—unable to overlay left and right images closely enough for my brain to resolve them into one.

Maybe ten years had not been enough time away from my own brain's invasion for me to read about a brain surgeon and abide a lasting impression....

Interesting times

The ancient Chinese may have cautioned us to "avoid interesting times," but, as John Mortimer pointed out in his 2003 "last will and testament" (Where There's a Will), "there is nothing...to suggest that the times are likely to become less interesting." [p. 94]

Yes, these are interesting times. On page 13 of last Sunday's New York Times Book Review, for example, I see an advertisement for three books published by Houghton Mifflin, the first of which is Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, in recommendation of which Ian McEwan is quoted, "A magnificent book, lucid and wise." Interesting that I should not only currently be re-reading Dawkins's book (because it is lucid and wise) but also reading one after another of McEwan's novels.

And overleaf from the advertisement (on pages 14 and 15), I see reviews titled "Take It on Faith" (captioned "John Dilulio argues for government financing of social programs run by religious institutions") and "The Godless Delusion" ("A professor of philosophy thinks our era has been too quick to dismiss religious faith"). Hmm, interesting. I'm going to have to read these reviews....

It's interesting, too, to consider whether my recent dismissal of religious faith came as a result of my reading Dawkins and (before I took him up) Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and (again) Bertrand Russell, or my reading of these atheist authors proceeded from atheist tendencies of my own....

I think it was more the latter, for I remember reading another advertisement in the Book Review, sometime over a year ago, that described Harris's The End of Faith in terms that thrilled and excited me for revealing that there at last seemed to be an author who had articulated what I too was now thinking and feeling about religion. Indeed he had...and far more than that. He had read many books that I had not, looked at a lot of data I didn't even know existed. I had not only met a brother, but also met a teacher. And in Hitchens and Dawkins I met two more teachers, Dawkins the most mind-opening of them all.