Goines On: “Nemesis” meets its nemesis

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Goines’ friend Mark asked him whether he’d read Lord Jim or Nemesis. Goines recognized Lord Jim as a novel by Joseph Conrad, and he thought he had read it, but he couldn’t remember what it was about. Of Nemesis he had no recollection. A shallow Google search revealed a novel by Isaac Asimov, which surprised Goines, because he didn’t think Mark read sci-fi. A slightly deeper search revealed a novel by Agatha Christie. Funny, Mark didn’t read detective fiction either.

Book Review: Philip Roth Unbound

The Nobel Prize and various and sundry matters

By Jonathan Price

Philip Roth died a month ago. And it is a great loss though little surprise since he was 85 and had intentionally retired from writing six years ago and not given a farewell tour. His prominence is perhaps indicated by several articles the next day in the main section of the New York Times¹ marking his death, and a two-day retrospective of his interviews with Terry Gross on Fresh Air² (culled from seven interviews over the past, say, 25 years).

The dangling cigarette

As part of a discussion about Unitarian Universalism, a friend of many years told me recently that

It seems to me that religion implies by definition an assumption of the existence of a supreme being (or beings). The principles listed on the Unitarian Universalist website seem to be moral principles. I do not disagree with them but they are not "religious principles," because they are not based on religion. You are quite right in questioning their basis and the Unitarian Universalists' apparently exclusive reliance on the Jewish/Christian tradition. The reality is that in some sense the various world religions hold to these general principles.
    I disagree, though, with the view of your Muslim friends that Islam is "more about love and mercy than about killing infidels." Contrast the practice of Christ and his disciples to that of Mohammed and his disciples.
    If one concludes that God exists, the essential argument for Christianity is that no other religion or person has established standards for human behavior which approach the idea of goodness embodied in its concept of God. Certainly not Islam, which promises a paradise with delectable virgins for those martyred in their efforts to fight the infidel (you and me).

I agree with my friend about Islam, despite what a few justifiably defensive Muslims have told me. They may think that Islam is "more about love and justice than about killing infidels," but it seems to me (from my partial reading of the Qur'an) that it's "about love and justice as well as about killing infidels," with the relative numbers of constructive and destructive passages to be determined by objective textual analysis (by anyone who thinks it's worth the trouble).
    Rudolf Otto, in his 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy (which was assigned for a religion course I took at Yale), argued as my friend does that Christianity is the best religion. I observe, though, that each adherent argues the same about his own religion, Muslims insistently about Islam, for example—however wrongheaded those indoctrinated into Christianity might judge that.

This parochialism is one of the many indicators I have for writing religion off altogether. If God were what religions claim, then it seems to me that they'd have all "come together by now and love one another" (to paraphrase a lyric inspired by the Beatles). But it's obvious that religions are wishful enterprises, culture-bound, maddeningly tenacious in their hold over adherents.
    I ran across an image this morning in Philip Roth's 2008 novel, Indignation, that seems an apt symbol for people's being in thrall to their religion:

...at age fifty, after enjoying a lifetime of robust good health, this sturdy little man [the narrator's father] began to develop the persistent racking cough that, troubling as it was to my mother, did not stop him from keeping a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth all day long. [emphasis mine; p. 3]

    Religion to its adherents seems to me to be like that lit cigarette to the narrator's father. What is religion's grip on people? Not even the unanswerable sociological argument (put by Bertrand Russell in Why I Am Not a Christian) that if a Christian had been raised by Muslims he'd be a Muslim (and a Muslim raised by Christians would be a Christian) can shake a Christian (or a Muslim) from his religion. Does the addiction to religion involve a virus that incapacitates rationality?

Round-the-clock negotiation

From Philip Roth's third Nathan Zuckerman novel, The Anatomy Lesson (1983):

[Dr. Kotler was saying to Nathan: I'm also] studying Holy Scriptures. Delving into all the translations. Amazing what's in there. Yet the writing I don't like. The Jews in the Bible were always involved in highly dramatic moments, but they never learned to write good drama. Not like the Greeks, in my estimation. The Greeks heard a sneeze and they took off. The sneezer becomes the hero, the one who reported the sneeze becomes the messenger, the ones who overheard the sneeze, they became the chorus. Lots of pity, lots of terror, lots of cliff-hanging and suspense. You don't get that with the Jews in the Bible. There it's all round-the-clock negotiation with God. [p. 337 in the 2007 Library of America edition of Zuckerman Bound: 1979-1985]

Don't worry, be happy?

Yesterday, I began to read Philip Roth’s 2007 novel, Exit Ghost, and today I read in “Don't Worry, Be Happy,” on Judith Warner's New York Times blog, “Domestic Disturbances”:

The excitement/disappointment cycle of the past two elections has taken a toll on many Democrats. Some have undergone a kind of progressive self-numbing. Their brains could register only so much outrage before they became desensitized and began to rewire themselves to adapt. Oliver Stone’s bizarrely inert new movie “W” exhibits just that kind of circuits-overloaded mental compromise.
    Philip Roth, on the other hand [emphasis mine], in last year’s novel Exit Ghost, painted a brilliant portrait of the fallout of too much political heartbreak. Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, a near shut-in, decides, post Bush v. Gore, (an election he describes as “perfectly calculated to quash the last shameful vestige of a law-abiding citizen’s naiveté”) to cut himself off from all awareness of politics, precisely in order to shut out any future glimmers of hope.
    “Having lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century,” Zuckerman says, “I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child – the emotions of a child and the pain of an adult.”

Like Nathan, I have damped my own emotions and don’t experience any of the euphoria that might otherwise accompany the highly probable prospect of a Democratic victory on November 4. I’m too shy of potential euphoria’s being dashed yet again, defensively steeling myself for the long-shot possibility of needing to practice another four years of adaptive stoicism.

But a friend of Warner’s advises her:

“You may as well enjoy the anticipation,” she said, “Because it may be all that you’ll get.”

Warner accepts this advice and recommends it for us:

...whatever happens, those of us who are tired of experiencing the “despising without remission” that Zuckerman was moved to flee in the Bush years are entitled now to a tiny moment of elation.
    And we’d better grab it.

I’m not sure my heart is up to it. It’s so scarred from these years of political desecration, I don’t think I’ll feel all that euphoric even if Obama and Biden win by a landslide. Domestic and international prospects are daunting. We’re not going to see dramatically better days for a very long while yet. Anything but stoicism seems naive.

Leo Tolstoy to Czar Nicholas I as [ ? ] to Bush

Non interludus

In his short novel Hadji Murat (written between 1896 and 1904), Leo Tolstoy portrayed not only the Chechen hero of the title, but also his nemesis the Czar:

"Well, what else?" [Nikolai] said [to his minister of war].
      "A courier from the Caucasus," said Chernyshov, and began to report what Vorontsov had written about Hadji Murat surrendering.
      "You don't say!" said Nikolai. "A good start."
      "Evidently the plan devised by Your Majesty is beginning to bear fruit," said Chernyshov.
      This praise of his strategic capabilities was especially pleasing to Nikolai, for although he took pride in his strategic capabilities, deep down in his heart he was conscious that he had none. And now he wanted to hear himself praised in greater detail.
      "How do you see it?"
      "The way I see it is that if we had long been following Your Majesty's plan, gradually, albeit slowly moving forward, cutting down the forests, destroying reserves, then the Caucasus would have been subdued long ago. I put Hadji Murat's surrender down to this alone. He realises that they can hold out no longer."
      "That's right," said Nikolai.
      Despite the fact that the plan for slow movement into enemy territory by means of the felling of forests and the destruction of provisions was the plan of Yermolov and Velyaminov, and the complete opposite of Nikolai's plan, whereby it was necessary to seize Shamil's residence at once and sack that nest of brigands, and whereby the Dargo expedition of 1845 had been undertaken, costing the lives of so many men—despite this, Nikolai ascribed the plan for slow movement, the systematic felling of forests, and the destruction of provisions to himself as well. It would have seemed that in order to believe that the plan for slow movement...was his plan, it was necessary to conceal the fact that he had absolutely insisted on the completely contradictory military undertaking of 1845. But he did not conceal this, and was proud both of that plan...and of the plan for slow movement forward, despite the fact that these two plans were clearly contradictory to one another. The constant clear, vile blatancy of the flattery of those around him had brought him to the point where he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer adapted his actions and words to reality, to logic, or even to simple good sense, but was absolutely certain that all his instructions, no matter how senseless, unjust, and mutually incompatible, became entirely sensible, just, and mutually compatible simply because it was he that gave them. [pp. 74-75]

– translated by Hugh Aplin

According to the translator's introduction, Tolstoy realized that "his depiction...of Nicholas I...made publication of Hadji Murat under the conditions of Russian censorship quite unthinkable." Though Philip Roth was able to publish his satire of Richard Nixon (Our Gang) during Nixon's term of office and any number of writers have already satirized Bush in print, I wonder who might be writing something about Bush (and about our political inertia) so troublingly unflattering that it can't be published yet, even in America.