A slow, sad poem weaving through to an end that is left revealed to the reader from the beginning. To read this book is like watching the waves on a lA slow, sad poem weaving through to an end that is left revealed to the reader from the beginning. To read this book is like watching the waves on a lonely beach, you know what will happen next, but it is beautiful to just sit and watch...
But, maybe it is best to let the book describe its own message? -
Yes; such is the payment exacted for the Promethean fire. You must not only endure, you must even love and respect, the sorrow and the doubts and the self-questionings of which you have spoken: for they constitute the excess, the luxury, of life, and show themselves most when happiness is at its zenith, and has alloyed with it no gross desires. Such troubles are powerless to spring to birth amid life which is ordinary and everyday; they cannot touch the individual who is forced to endure hardship and want. That is why the bulk of the crowd goes on its way without ever experiencing the cloud of doubt, the pain of self-questioning. To him or to her, however, who voluntarily goes to meet those difficulties they become welcome guests, not a scourge....more
Written in the tried-and-tested and bestselling tradition of the Malcolm Gladwell books and the Frekonomics clones, Dan Ariely's book too is an entertWritten in the tried-and-tested and bestselling tradition of the Malcolm Gladwell books and the Frekonomics clones, Dan Ariely's book too is an entertaining and counter-intuitive look at the world around us.
While I am getting more and more inured to this way of analysis of behavioral economics and physchology, these kinds of books are still hard to resist - that is because they do, no matter if they have now become an industry doling out similiar books by the dozens, still stretch our perspectives about the things we normally take for granted or think unworthy of a second thought. In that sense then, this book was "unputdownable" and "highly instructive".
One of my favorite passages from the book is as follows -
"I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competitions, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can't take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you "Can't Buy Me Love" and this also applies to the love of learning—you can't buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away.
So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it.
We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense."
This is in the same wavelength as some of my thoughts on education -
The point is not to have a vocation oriented educational system, but rather to have a Goal-Oriented one...
I think that the abstractness in what the students want to achieve is a problem arising directly from an abstract education.
A system which promotes and encourages students to fix goals in life early and then helps them in moving towards it and rewards them for moving towards it is my vision of Utopia in Education :) -
There will not be specific courses and subjects being taught in schools and universities but there will be Goal-oriented teams formed with advisors for them and they work together to learn, understand and develop themselves in any field or knowledge that is required to fulfill their stated goals...
I am hoping to convert this idea on education into a short story or incorporate it into my ongoing novel. So the book helped me crystallize that thought.
Sorry for the tangent. Getting back to the book, one more caveat - the author loses the plot a bit in the middle chapters. The beginning chapters about relativity and the power of zero were amusing and fun and the last two chapters on honesty is amazing, but the chapters in between was a bit of a drag.
Despite my mocking tone and slightly negative review, I will hurry to say that it is a very good purchase for anyone who enjoyed Gladwell's books or others of that genre, and also for marketeers and businessmen and maybe even for policy makers.
Despite sugar coating the book with the requirements of this genre/industry, Dan does raise some poignant questions about human nature and consumer behavior that is worth pondering over. In the final analysis then, I enjoyed the book and will read it again, and hence, four stars....more
The first half is written by Thoreau, the accomplished philosopher and soars much above my humble powers of comprehension; the second half is written The first half is written by Thoreau, the accomplished philosopher and soars much above my humble powers of comprehension; the second half is written by Thoreau, the amateur naturalist and swims much below my capacity for interest.
After reading about the influence the book had on Gandhi, I had attempted reading Walden many (roughly four) times before and each time had to give up before the tenth page due to the onrush of new ideas that enveloped me. I put away the book each time with lots of food for thought and always hoped to finish it one day.
Now after finally finishing the book, while I was elated and elevated by the book, I just wish that Thoreau had stuck to telling about the affairs of men and their degraded ways of living and about his alternate views. Maybe even a detailed account of his days and how it affected him would have been fine but when he decided to write whole chapters about how to do bean cultivation and how to measure the depth of a pond with rudimentary methods and theorizing about the reason for the unusual depth of walden and about the habits of wild hens, sadly, I lost interest. I trudged through the last chapters and managed to finish it out of a sense of obligation built up over years of awe about the book.
The concluding chapter, to an extent, rewarded me for my persistence and toil. In this final chapter, he comes back to the real purpose of the book: to drill home a simple idea - "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings."
This I think was the core philosophy of the book - if you pursue the ideal direction/vision you have of how your life should be, and not how convention dictates it should be, then you will find success and satisfaction on a scale unimaginable through those conventional routes or to those conventional minds.
I will of course be re-reading the book at some point and thankfully I will know which parts to skip without any remorse....more
A big project was started in the post-war world to let countries grow and prosper and compete without using wars to do The World is Not Flat
Precis:
A big project was started in the post-war world to let countries grow and prosper and compete without using wars to do so. That was the project of globalization. A sub- or lead-project under that was the European Union. Friedman’s famous book was the recent victory cry for the Globalization Project, a chest-thumping if ever there was one!
However, any keen observer would by now have concluded that the project was riddled with flaws. But that is not to say that the vision itself was flawed. It might be a better argument to say that the flaws are more from the project being not fully carried-through than from the fact of its existence, as Stieglitz had argued eloquently in his critiques.
In the video lecture below I use the crisis in the Eurozone to draw out some of the fundamental reasons why globalization has been winding along roads that lead nowhere, for quite some time. The concentrated nature of the Eurozone crisis and the fact that it is a rich-country problem, with all the proportional additional limelight allows us to see in that microcosm what half-baked globalization has done to the haves and have-nots among the nations of the world. And by examining that, it is hoped that we might also see that the solutions to globalization is perhaps not less but more of the dosage, undiluted.
Please help me improve by sharing feedback! :)
Caveat: The rest of this review wont make much sense without first watching the video�
Detail:
A single global market and complete economic integration would mean that the countries would be too tied in with each other to ever even consider further internecine warfare. Surely no one would be daft enough to compromise their own interest so badly. Solving the problems of a war-ridden world by uniting it through trade. That was right up the alley suggested by Adam Smith in his civilizing process. Maybe trade and interdependence will get the world to behave. That was the hope of the globalizing project that replaced mercantilist philosophy that preceded it. And if any part of the world had to race to be civilized, it had to be Europe whom Gandhi had ‘burn’ed famously with his quip. Hence the European Project was to be the front-runner, the trail-blazer, the avant-garde, etc.
The video above is a lecture/discussion, wherein I argue that this European project was conceived as a roadmap to a fully integrated union that will replicate a US of A in Europe; and how the EU compromised on the tougher but necessary requirements of such a project and tried to get by with stop-gap solutions like convergence criteria and the like, which, in its turn, were not enforced. All this has led to a scenario which could derail not only the micro experiment (EU), but the macro experiment (Globalization) as well.
The European consolidation project rushed into first economic and then a monetary union while never slowing down to implement any integrated Fiscal controls/transfers. This is also the case with much of the thrust of the globalization project with its emphasis on open trade and liberalizing capital flows across borders.
It was understood from the beginning that this was going to be an issue, but it was hoped that it could be worked around. Imposing any sort of fiscal control was too anathema to be considered. It could easily be argued that any move in that direction would nip the project in the bud, with the nationalistic European Governments running away from any suggestion that dilutes sovereignty as much.
An Overdose of Fiscal Discipline
This meant that a lot of fiscal discipline was attempted, not by direct control but indirectly in the form of membership criteria. The focus on such fiscal rules had been justified by two beliefs:
1. That, inside a single currency union with a common exchange rate, monetary policy, interlinked interest rates and market integrated enough to cause contagion concerns, the fiscally irresponsible were less likely to be castigated by markets that might otherwise loose confidence and move away from investing in countries/currencies in danger of running into problems of high inflation or debt.
2. That such a country that got into trouble would not be able to devalue currency or adopt lose money policies, and would also not enjoy the sorts of automatic transfers that operate in federal countries. Then the only real option to absorb a shock would be greater borrowing by the government at the reduced interest rates available to them from market being lax�
Clearly,Ìýfocusing on debt-to-GDP figures and enforcing strict limits seemedÌýthe best way to overcome the problems of an EMU that is not a Federal union.
Plenty of Gaps in Financial Regulation
However, some of the gaps as far as Banking and Financial system was concerned was ignored for too long in all this concern for Fiscal discipline. The new unified market and banking system under the ECB that was being created could not be said to have any sort of full fledged monetary policy capacity since the ECB was not even given overall responsibility for bank supervision, which stayed at national level, an arrangement that has since been deemed unsatisfactory, with the planned “banking union� giving supervision of most large European banks to the ECB. It also had no obligation to act as the system’s lender of last resort nor was there any sort of deposit-insurance system that was instituted. Without a Central Bank’s capacity to conjure money out of thin air, the system was left with no one with the capacity and obligation to protect the banking system, the depositors and the sovereigns - a huge potential problem once it took over the operation of monetary policy from national central banks. Without these basic functions and powers how can a central bank truly regulate. What mechanism can it have?
Moreover, the ECB’s one-size-fits-all interest rates (and exchange rates) is a one-size-fits-none arrangement - at the same time is might be too low for Germany and other strong economies and too high for weak Mediterranean countries like Greece with debt problems, or, at other times too low for overheating countries like Greece, but too high for Germany. The German domination over the ECB also meant that loose money policy, especially radical measures like a dose of American-style quantitative easing, was mostly anathema.
Enforcement? What is that?
Then to add on to these problems came laxity in enforcement: the fiscal criteria encapsulated in not-so-bad-ass sounding schemes like the “excessive deficit procedure,", stability and growth pact, etc. However, from the very beginning the rules against excessive deficits and public-debt levels were interpreted flexibly. And once Germany and France colluded to block any official rebuke or sanctions for letting their budget deficits rise above the Maastricht ceiling of 3% of GDP and rendered it toothless, the gutting of the Fiscal requirement were complete. From then on, so the story goes, all semblance of fiscal discipline was abandoned.
All this meant that problems were only waiting to happen. And the relaxed entry of some of the mediterranean countries (one does not say no to Plato! :) ) helped precipitate this very fast.
Greece: The Petri-Dish Case
The circumstances that led to the Greek crisis, via the good pre-2008 times, and the way it was handled/botched is used as an example to show up some of these flaws and deficiencies and to highlight what needs to be done to make EU a success.
The Blame Game
It is argued that the blame should be placed on both:
1. those who created such a death trap of a currency union, to begin with, followed by the reckless borrowers and the irresponsible lenders of the first decade of EMU
2. the lax policy response later from the ECB, IMF and the stronger nations of the EU who could have limited the fallout but failed to act decisively.
It is true that theÌý deficit countries used the low interest rates unproductively and profligately. Not to mention the fact that the complacent financial markets utterly failed in their allocation of credit and calculations of risk. Getting markets to impose discipline on governments had been one reason for enshrining the no-bail-out rule and forbidding the ECB from monetizing government debt. But this plan didn’t take into account the irrationality of markets flush with overconfidence and easy money in the pre-2008 global economy
Discipline the Markets!
Greece was plainly bankrupt. Its debt should have been cut early and decisively rather than late and messily, thereby giving private creditors the chance to dump Greek bonds. The losses would thus fall on those that lent the money to uncreditworthy countries.
This would have hurt the bad lenders early and made them more wary of speculation (contaminated by plenty of moral hazard!). It is important to enforce discipline on the rogue elements of the markets first if you expect markets to enforce discipline on the sovereigns, whether it be in the local pond of the European bond market or the larger international waters where the sharky portfolio investors hunt.
The Austerity Question
And finally, the bail-outs (of the lenders more than the borrowers in many ways) made the mistake of enforcing procyclcical austerity measures only worsening the recessionary impact of the economic cycle and plunging Greece further into the debt trap. With no functional monetary policy and toothless fiscal policy (once lending capacity was compromised), Greece had no options but to keep accepting the loans and the conditions.
The Dark Future of Grexit
After this, a few future options for Greece are discussed including the specter of Grexit.
Even if it may seem so today, it unlikely that the EU’s single market would survive the domino-effect-led implosion, and it would probably be followed by capital controls, trade barriers and, possibly, a return to world of mercantilism!
Avoiding the Doomsday; Preventing Radicalism
How to avoid such a scenario? It would require straightening the accountability and safety in the financial system, as is already in the works with talks of a “banking union. But what is also needed are the basics of a federal budgeting process that provides public goods and redistributes income between rich and poor citizens (and states). The EU has a tiny budget, no power of taxation and no powers to borrow. And the eurozone has no budget at all, even a modest one, that could make transfers when countries suffer a downturn in the form of unemployment insurances, etc.
This would protect countries hit by the flaws of EU to escape the worst of the problems that afflict its citizens such as high unemployment. This would then allow protection against the kind of civil unrest that took place in Greece. Besides, it would also prevent the easy radicalization of politics that happen in countries where the citizens have to endure clear and present hardship even as neighboring nationals seem to living in prosperity. Slow growth and high unemployment have been radicalizing politics and intensifying rejection of both national and European politicians. So the next crisis may well be political. Anti-EU, anti-immigrant and anti-establishment parties of all colors are on the rise. Only a EU-level budget to protect the losers of “globalization� can help fight this tendency that can easily lead to protectionism across the weaker economies and thus soon among the stronger economies.
Intrusive Economics
Instead of these steps, the “economic governance� created in recent years is a soup of incomprehensible jargon: six-pack, two-pack, fiscal compact, Euro Plus Pact, European semester, annual growth survey, excessive deficit procedure, macroeconomic imbalances procedure, “contractual arrangements� for reform, and much more.
All this amounts to an unprecedented intrusion by an unaccountable EU bureaucracy that satisfies nobody!
Just as in the case of globalization, the nations on the periphery are more and more afraid that the run of the core economic system is being run by the in-countries and their institutions: that increasingly the European Union and the euro zone are deciding matters without sufficient democratic control. As the eurozone (or the western world with respect to globalization) integrates further and more intrusively, it is running into a huge potential row about the legitimacy and democratic accountability of its actions. Indeed, it is this, rather than the financial markets, that could pose one of the biggest risks to the EU’s future. As we can see the same concerns are present if we examine the international institutions such as WTO, IMF and the United Nations. The intrusions are inevitable and lack of democratic control only precipitates fear and distrust from the out-group countries, which happen to be most of the world!
The eurozone’s financial system was sufficiently integrated to spread contagion, but not integrated enough to provide resilience. It has no central budget or other means of absorbing asymmetric shocks that hit one or two countries disproportionately. Hence, when the crisis hit, the euro zone had no means of giving assistance to countries that got into trouble.
A bit of imagination should suffice to see how each of these conditions of integrated markets, contagion and no resilience applies to the globalized international markets as well. Greece paid a disproportionate price of the US� regulatorial slackness and the 2008 crisis, so did many others across the globe. There was no system to make sure that they were protected in some manner. The markets are irrational and the international institutional system is built on a willful ignorance of this fact. We cannot have true globalization with only markets running it, just like couldn’t have had any sort of true democracy if it was merely laissez-faire that guaranteed it.
Global Federalism�?
The eurozone and the globalizing world should look to the United States and ask itself: why does the prospect of default by one state not call into question the existence of the dollar? The short answer is that the United States is a single federal country, while the euro zone is a much looser confederation of sovereign countries who are willing to contaminate one another, but not willing to help one another out.
Europe’s real folly and the folly of the globalization project as a whole was not to look for the gains from opening up of trade, financial integration, exchange-rate stability and economic efficiency, even if they might have been overstated. The madness was to believe that these benefits could be obtained on the cheap, without the political constraints, economic flexibility, financial transfers and risk-sharing mechanisms of genuine integrated markets, i.e., federations.
Clearly the answer is in some sort of Federalism, not only for the Eurozone, but also for the world? And it is worth building, and fast!
After all, Europe’s (and globalization’s) malaise is not one that time alone can heal. Delay is likely to make things worse, not better. Even if the the financial panic is kept in abeyance, the economic and political crises may well deepen. Right now the political momentum is towards fragmentation, not integration. Unless the euro zone (and by extending the argument the globalized world economy) is redesigned with greater determination, in particular through greater risk-sharing, it is unlikely to recover economic vitality. And unless the euro (and globalization) can be shown to deliver prosperity and well-being, public support for the EU Project (and the Globalization Project) will inexorably ebb away.
The eurozone crisis has the potential to destroy the European project. Something of great value may thus be lost through carelessness or timidity.
The Grecian Prod
But on the other hand it also has the potential to prod Europe and the broader world into quickened action to make sure that economic integration is attended by fiscal safety-nets and fast reductions in the accumulating democratic deficit with respect to the institutions that govern that economic integration.
The hope is that this realization and the prod for quicker action can be had from the high profile case of Greece where most of the flaws and the urgent reforms have been highlighted. Hopefully Europe will stop finding its way gradually like a blind man stumbling form one wrong turn and crisis to another before stumbling on the right room and instead sit down and chart out a roadmap for the destination it really wants to reach.
The steps to this are laid out as first having a system of transfer in place, via ECB first by making it a lender of last resort and then moving to a more integrated fiscal union and eventually a political union by the gradual addition of democratic accountability. A dreamy euro-federalist vision is thus put forth, and it is hoped that it does not bring forth much derision from the realist among the viewers!
All this can thus be connected back to the idea of globalization with a hope that eventually we might achieve similar results for the world as a whole. In short, the euro-federalist dream is extended to include another dreamy hope that the nation state system that was propagated by Europe, will hopefully be transcended by the same Europe. The EU experiment has much significance it the grander scheme of things on how the world will look like a century or so from now and the best sort of effort has to be made to make it work, even at the cost of some sovereignty or pride.
The World is Not Flat
And, one last thing: Before someone asks, “Why review this book for discussing all this?�, let me answer:
Friedman argued that the world is flat � because of Globalization.
However this whole argument would indicate that the world is not flat, because Globalization is not complete, it is not even past the first leg of the race. And the flattening of the world wont happen unless we aim for real globalization, unless the race is fully run, all the hurdles jumped.
The world needs a lot more flattening to even out the very rough edges � the edges that cut all too easily. This is because flatness is not based on merely economic or trade considerations. It has to be based on democratic accountability, when clearly the international organizations are going to have an ever more intrusive role in national matters.
If not the opposite would result � the nations would reject the international organizations and challenge their legitimacy. And the whole project depends on this legitimacy not being challenged. It could be that occasional prosperity might dampen the force of these questions, but in an integrated world crises will surely be more common and so will contagion, and then the only thing that can save the institutions and the whole globalized system is accountability and true democratic legitimacy. Globalization has to be built on democratization and not merely on ships or aviation fuel.
That then was a bloated summary of a video which is in fact much simpler and non-technical. Again, pls do watch the video and let me know if it was fun. :)...more
He had just finished his thirty-fourth reading of the play. The unsaid hate, the unseen events, the half-imagined wrongs; Satanic Verses: A Composition
He had just finished his thirty-fourth reading of the play. The unsaid hate, the unseen events, the half-imagined wrongs; they tormented him. What could cause such evil to manifest, he just could not figure. He loved him too much to believe the simple explanation.
And then the idea starts growing on him - to explore the growth of evil just as Shakespeare showed, explored the tragic culmination of it. And because you show the growth, it can no longer be a tragedy, no, no it has to be a comedy. A tragicomedy. Yes. And he set to it. He painted Othello as an Indian actor, worshiped and adored and off on a mad canter to get his Ice Queen, his Desdemona. On his way he meets him - the poor man trying to forget his own roots and desperately reinventing himself, his Iago.
Yes Iago too was once a man. What twists of fate made him evil incarnate? He sets out his prime motif: The question that’s asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is, the nature of evil, how it’s born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral possession of a many-sided human soul.
Wait a minute, he blinks at his notes, if Iago is evil incarnate, does that not also mean that he is Satan incarnate? Chamcha then is Satan incarnate? Then Othello has to be God? A little bit more corruptible maybe? Let us make him the angel Gibreel, he decided. As an aside, as the angel, he can slip into that reality in his dreams and reenact the story (history?) of Prophet Mohammad in inflammatory fashion, maybe talk about the 'Satanic Verses' since his Satan can't help but gloat over his little jokes. Why not call the novel so too, except that it would mean something else - the verses that the real Satan of the story, Iago, sings in Othello's ear. He knows that this might be cause for misunderstanding, might ruffle a few feathers, but it is just a digression, the real story is beyond that - it is not the Event Horizon. But he can't help himself. He never could keep a story simple.
Ah, now something beyond mere Othello is taking shape is it not? If Iago is Satan, then surely it is in character to enjoy with consummate pleasure the sight of his own jealousy consuming himself - the green-eyed monster that feeds on itself. So Satan decides to narrate the story of one of his incarnations? Or rather, possessions? The questions that are to run his plot are flowing freely now. How an ordinary man when in contact with an angel inevitably had to transform into Lucifer himself. How can one exist without the other. They meet and the spiral ensues and Iago mutates and agitates and like a cancerous growth his strange fate builds until he turns his wrath square on his angel, his Othello. And how can he then not try to destroy what he is not, what he can not be. There is the moment before evil, then the moment of, then the time after; and each subsequent stride becomes progressively easier. But what about before and after the madness? It surely must be an ordinary life, with ordinary joys and pains. It is a cosmic drama, he concludes.
In the process, every insinuated implication in the play is to be played out in this story - Cassio does sleep with Iago's wife, Iago is madly lustful of Desdemona, Othello is a deserving victim of directed revenge for very real ills and Iago needs no invented or unbelievable reasons for his actions. He is justified. It was inevitable.
Salman Rushdie sets down his pen.
He has vindicated Iago, many a literature lover's favorite character.
I happened to see the new movie based on this book and it has prompted me to indulge in a little bit of speculation about on an old f Ender’s Questions
I happened to see the new movie based on this book and it has prompted me to indulge in a little bit of speculation about on an old favorite. Ender’s Game is quite an interesting book to think about.
(view spoiler)[It is built on a simple (simplistic even) premise: A truly great leader has to understand himself and his enemy. He has to have supreme empathy, enough to understand their every move. And if he is indeed great, he’ll then understand them as himself. How then can he kill?
Answer: He has to believe he is not killing. He has to be manipulated.
Ender’s Game thus asks its questions:
1. Can any leader who killed his enemy be considered really great?
2. Can the noble kill unless we make it a game? War has to be a game?
One twist I would have liked more than what transpired would have been if Ender had willingly let himself be deceived � that would have been closer to the real world.
This book poses some more interesting questions, more than just about the aims of war, but about the very conduct of war itself
In war we have to effect two things to ensure success:
1. Demonize the enemy for the soldiers.
2. Make the war itself a game for the leader.
Two levels of illusion are needed.
Of course, making a kid make these choices was probably to drive home the absurdity of the whole scenario.
+++++
About the movie itself:Ìý
The movie mostly glosses over the other ‘game� that Ender thinks is a game and is proven to be real. There are two games in the book, both sides of a war playing with the one person who could have stopped it.
One gets what they want. The other does not. The wrong party gets through to Ender.
Is it because the ‘buggers�/formics were trying to be too clever? What if they had let him know it was not a game?
At some point if either of the two illusions could have been broken, genocide could have been averted?
Ender is then supposed to go on to become one of the wisest figures in sci-fi canon. Wisdom came from being so throughly misled?
In not giving prominence to one entire half of the book, not to mention forgoing giving much of a role to the real Peter and Valentine, the movie does great disservice to the fine texture of the book. That said, the movie is better than what I had expected.
However, in making these two omissions (the game & the siblings), the script-writers has ensured that they will have their work cut out for them when those aspects come back with a vengeance in the sequels. (hide spoiler)]...more
The God Delusion - Why there almost certainly is no God?
I have been a big fan of Dawkins from the time I read The Selfish Gene. This book does nothingThe God Delusion - Why there almost certainly is no God?
I have been a big fan of Dawkins from the time I read The Selfish Gene. This book does nothing to damage that, even though it is not as logically cohesive as The Selfish Gene. The God Delusion is easier to argue with and maybe even win, if only in my mind. Dawkins argues mostly against the Christian God that created earth and knows nothing of the vast universe beyond. He remains silent about the God hypothesis that can arise from new physics and eastern cosmogonies.
I feel that while The Selfish Gene was a standalone book intended to convey a brilliant concept in a very articulate fashion to the general reader, The God Delusion is a more of a glorified pamphlet meant to be a handbook of reference for any atheist for the range of illogical, childish or even intelligent arguments that might be addressed to him. An atheist who reads and remembers a fair bit of The God Delusion will always be well equipped to blunt any argument against his position.
But this huge strength of the book is also its major flaw that demotes it much below the Selfish gene in my opinion. The Selfish gene is a must-read book that I would thrust in the hand of anyone I like - because I want them to learn from it, raise their consciousness or because I want to have a wonderful discussion with them. In contrast, the God Delusion is a book I would thrust in exasperation at someone with whom I am tired of arguing and would rather prefer them to go through Dawkins' exhaustive repudiation of most arguments. That is the difference. The book would be useful if I want to convince someone or If I wanted to win an argument. But what if neither was ever my objective? It gives me no intrinsic value that is not situational. But then, perhaps I was never one of the intended audience of the book; the purpose of this book, is not to explain science. It is rather, as he tells us, “to raise consciousness".
He also spends a lot of time debunking obvious fallacies and beliefs purely because they are prevalent. It might be important to show how silly they are, but I frankly was impatient to get on with it and not spend time on such obvious facts. Most of the arguments in the book are ones that I could have come up with too if I had sat down and though about it. True, Dawkins has made my job easier, but what if I am comfortable with not having the God Delusion and with the fact that a lot of people have? What if the formula of zeitgeist that Dawkins proposes about what is moral is applicable to religions too? After all, the religion of today is far from what it was in the 1900s. maybe religion too will evolve and become more and more liberal. The only genuinely useful sections in the book for me were the intriguing discussion on morals and that wonderful last chapter on model building. If only the rest of the book was as memorable.
I have a few other peeves with the book too - It condemns anyone who understand religion and science and takes the informed decision to be an agnostic. This condemnation by Dawkins of agnostics is perhaps my single biggest point of difference with Dawkins.
I have no problems with the debunking of the God Hypothesis as Dawkins defines 'God'. But, his atheism goes into exactly those realms which he accuses religious fundamentalists to be going in.
He gives an example of a Priest who says that even though he has moments of reservation about the existence of a God, he keeps such doubts to himself and extols God's virtues purely so that the common man is not mislead into doubt. Dawkins condemns this as intellectual and moral cowardice.
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Then later, in a section titled 'Why there almost certainly is no God', he freely acknowledges that "most probably" God does not exist and then classifies himself as an agnostic leaning heavily towards atheism. Then he says that such agnostics should refrain from calling themselves agnostics as it will cause damage to the common people who want to support atheism. Is this not the same intellectual and moral cowardice? If you cannot in your own logic call yourself a full blown atheist, do not do that just to prove a point or to support a pet theory. If there 'almost certainly' is no god, then it is 'almost certainly' a 'delusion' to say that pure atheism is fully reasonable too.
Dawkins makes an appeal to closely define the meaning of the word "God". But then, not matter how you define it, as long as the basis is in irrationality, the same principle is being attacked. And hence to say I believe in Science as the ultimate answer when it has so far been unsuccessful in furnishing one is just to substitute the term "Science" for "God".
Of course I understand the value of people like Dawkins being there to be the vanguard for this change. And there is a real need for a spokesperson for the atheists when the other party has so many very vocal ones. But that does not mean that he should call for educated agnostics to brand themselves as atheists just to add religious fervor to the brand. All that is still no reason to call for making atheism an organized religion too. agree with all the points and the logical arguments of The God Delusion but I disagree with the spirit of the book which seems to convey that religion is the enemy for us to combat by organizing ourselves.
There are too many paradoxes and unknowns in nature which science is more and more throwing up its hands in utter confusion towards. What if the universe truly is 'queerer than we can suppose' as J. B. S. Haldane puts it? Dawkins manages to explain most phenomena with natural selection but dismisses the larger conundrums and paradoxes with the great sweeping idea called the 'Anthropic principle'. The Anthropic principle might be a good tool to stall an argument but is no authentic scientific theory as he pretends it to be. It would be the equivalent of saying that the clock is telling time correctly isn't it, so that explains its form and function and hence it needs no designer. I just paraphrased above the argument Dawkins uses to prove that atheism is absolutely valid. Well, unless we resort to such rhetoric devices, it is not. And in the 'belief spectrum' ranging from radical theism to complete atheism, the only position we can take without resorting to faith is one of doubt - agnosticism.
In conclusion, my opinion is that pure atheism is not possible under present scientific knowledge and that is why agnosticism is the only reasonable position to take - without slipping into blind belief in science after climbing out of blind belief in religion....more
Probably the best among Gladwell's books. He still stands true to his success mantra - "Gladwell - The Power of Inductive Reasoning." But, it was stil Probably the best among Gladwell's books. He still stands true to his success mantra - "Gladwell - The Power of Inductive Reasoning." But, it was still a well researched and informative book. Blink....more
I had started reading this in 2008 and had gotten along quite a bit before I stopped reading the book for s The Unbelievable Lightness of The Novel
I had started reading this in 2008 and had gotten along quite a bit before I stopped reading the book for some reason and then it was forgotten. Recently, I saw the book in a bookstore and realized that I hadn't finished it. I picked it up and started it all over again since I was not entirely sure where I had left off last time. I was sure however that I had not read more than, say, 30 pages or so.
I definitely could not remember reading it for a long period of time. I only remembered starting it and bits and pieces about infidelities and the russian occupation of the Czech. And so, I started reading it, sure that soon a page will come from where the story will be fresh and unread.
I was soon into the fiftieth page and was amazed that as I read each page, I could distinctly remember every scene, every philosophical argument, even the exact quotes and the sequence of events that was to come immediately after the scene I was reading- But I could never remember, try as I might, what was coming two pages further into the novel.
"This is what comes from reading serious books lightly and not giving them the attention they deserve," I chastised myself, angry at the thought that my habit of reading multiple books in parallel must have been the cause of this. I must, at the risk of appearing boastful, say that the reason this bothered so much was that I always used to take pride in being able to remember the books that I read almost verbatim and this experience of reading a book that I had read before with this sense of knowing and forgetting at the same time, the two sensations running circles around each other and teasing me was completely disorienting. I felt like I was on some surreal world where all that is to come was already known to me but was still being revealed one step out of tune with my time.
In any case, this continued, to my bewilderment well into the two hundredth page. Even now, I could not shake the constant expectation that the story was going to go into unread new territories just 2 or 3 pages ahead of where I was. Every line I read I could remember having read before and in spite of making this mistake through so many pages, I still could not but tell myself that this time, surely, I have reached the part where I must have last closed the book three years ago.
Thus I have now reached the last few pages of the book and am still trying to come to terms with what it was about this novel that made me forget it, even though I identified with the views of the author and was never bored with the plot. Was this an intentional effect or just an aberration? Will I have the same feeling if I picked up the book again a few years from today?
I also feel a slight anger towards the author for playing this trick on me, for leading me on into reading the entire book again, without giving me anything new which I had not received from the book on my first reading. Usually when I decide to read a book again, I do it with the knowledge that I will gain something new with this reading, but Kundera gave me none of that.
What I do appreciate about this reading experience is this: as is stated in the novel, anything that happens only once might as well have not happened at all - does it then apply that any novel that can be read only once, might as well have not been read at all?
Beethoven & The Art of The Sublime
To conclude, I will recount an argument from the book that in retrospect helps me explain the experience:
Kundera talks (yes, the book is full of Kundera ripping apart the 'Fourth Wall' and talking to the reader, to the characters and even to himself) about an anecdote on how Beethoven came to compose one of his best quartets due to inspiration from a silly joke he had shared with a friend.
So Beethoven turned a frivolous inspiration into a serious quartet, a joke into metaphysical truth. Yet oddly enough, the transformation fails to surprise us. We would have been shocked, on the other hand, if Beethoven had transformed the seriousness of his quartet into the trifling joke. First (as an unfinished sketch) would have come the great metaphysical truth and last (as a finished masterpiece)—the most frivolous of jokes!
I would like to think that Kundera achieved this reverse proposition with this novel and that explains how I felt about it. And, yes I finished reading the second last line of the book with the full awareness of what the last line of the novel was going to be....more
If it were not for being Zorro’s story, this would be considered quite classy literatur When Magical Realism Met Superheroes
Talk about an origin story.
If it were not for being Zorro’s story, this would be considered quite classy literature. Maybe it still is? I am not familiar with the critical reception.
It is finely detailed and expertly constructed, weaving history and legend seamlessly. Allende almost pulls it off, but the awareness of the ending seeps into the rest of the book, spoiling all the better moments. It might be an unavoidable thing and Allende deserves praise not blame for the attempt, but still� the awareness of a type of ‘non-literature� keeps intruding into the reading experience, trivializing it in so many subtle ways.
It is interesting to note how a "humanization" process is increasingly present in the recent wave of blockbusters about super heroes (Spiderman, Batman, now the entire Marvel universe). Critics, as Zizek says, rave about how these films move beyond the original flat comic-book characters and dwell in detail over the uncertainties, weaknesses, doubts, fears and anxieties of the supernatural hero, his struggle with his inner demons, his confrontation with his own dark side, and so forth, as if all this makes the commercial super-production somehow more “artistic.�
In real life, this humanization process undoubtedly reached its apogee in a recent North Korean press release which reported that, at the opening game on the country's first golf course, the beloved president Kim Jong-II excelled, finishing the entire game of 18 holes in 19 strikes. One can well imagine the reasoning of the propaganda bureaucrat: nobody was going to believe that Kim had managed a hole in-one every time, so, to make things realistic, let us concede that, just once, he needed two strikes to succeed.
The thing with origin stories though, is that everything in it will be understood from a reference point of the future; and hence it cannot escape cliches - if not in the telling, then in the understanding. The ‘why� of the origin makes this inescapable as all events have a tendency to be connected to one event - the classic ‘all roads leading to Rome�, a sort of prophesy-fulfillment type of plot. This becomes quickly the worst sort of genre-plotting, anathema to ‘literary readers� who need greater subtlety.
Of course this applies to biographies too, but they have the saving grace of being at least true-by-assertion. But origin stories, or fictional biographies for that matter with a known end point become unavoidably contrived. Allende does her best, but cannot sidestep her readers in the end.
Anyway, to the finely tuned fan, this is a new sort of delightful Magical Realism - as applied to superheroes, for chrisssakes!
What I want next is a Batman written by Pynchon....more
Impressive novel. Nobel Prize winner. And, exactly the amount of time one would need to read all the books on my Kindle.
Single Quote Review:
'I had to Impressive novel. Nobel Prize winner. And, exactly the amount of time one would need to read all the books on my Kindle.
Single Quote Review:
'I had to live for 20 years and write 4 books of apprenticeship to discover that . . . the story had to be told, simply, the way my grandparents told it'.
'I've never been really interested,' he said, 'in any idea which can't withstand many years of neglect'.
This review is now also available at The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM):
The words I am about to express:
They n
This review is now also available at The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM):
The words I am about to express:
They now have their own crowned goddess.
THE INFINITE CAPACITY FOR ILLUSION
Whither The Magic?
One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite novels. Which is why, when I started reading Love in the Time of Cholera, one of the things I noticed immediately was the lack of the subtle brand of magic that I had so enjoyed. I missed it and was on the lookout for it. I wanted it badly and went around every corner with the expectation of a cheerful reunion. But it was not to be.
As Pynchon says: the “realityâ€� of love and the possibility of its ultimate extinction become Love’s “indispensable driving forces,â€� whereas magic in all its guises and forms becomes peripheralized or “at least more thoughtfully deployed in the service of an expanded vision, matured, darker than before but no less clementâ€�.Ìý
Why this marginalization of the extraordinary? Why this deliberate move towards realism? Why no Magic?
I kept asking myself this as I read, and beyond. Was I to understand that it is because Love in itself is Magic? That was too cheesy, even for Márquez who never shies from telling me a cheesy sub-story if it needs to be told.
Or is it because Love in the Time of Cholera is to seen as the product of a more experienced author, who no longer needs the resources of magic realism and hyperbole to surprise the reader?
One thing was sure, Love in the Time of Cholera is not only about Love, even when it pervades every page. Indeed, it covers, through its characters� wide amorous and business interests, an entire era and all the social classes, spanning over fifty years of Latin American life, from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the first two or three of the twentieth.
Love in the Time of Cholera, while on a much smaller scale than One Hundred Years of Solitude, deals with the Colombian civil wars of this period and the violence left in its wake. Márquez however wants these historical and political concerns to be passed largely unnoticed by the reader. While One Hundred Years of Solitude disguises the political themes through the uses of myth, fantasy, hyperbole, and magic realism, Love in the Time of Cholera disguises them through its depiction of an eternal, sometimes exasperating, almost unrealistic love affair, one which flouts the conventions of every love story the reader might have come across.
Love in the Time of Cholera is often quite bleak due to this veering towards stark Realism, to this occasional historical invasion of the narrative. Much of this realism arises from Death and Decay - the central themes of the novel. However, Márquez does not completely give up on Idealism either. In fact he is neither an Idealistic or a Realistic author - he is just a supremely eloquent voice speaking from the vantage-point of his own old age and wisdom.
To me, Love in the Time of Cholera is a magnificently gloomy novel though Márquez’s masterful sorcery masks it well, with his verbal cascades of descriptions and his narrative’s seductiveness.
Márquez’s novels are almost invariably gloomy. They are apocalyptic. They are decadence distilled.
Then why the popularity? Why do we love them? Why are we uplifted? Is it because of Márquez’s enthusiastic exuberance?Ìý
I think it is because of the Quixotic Heroism of the people who populate these doomed worlds.
It is this heroism that veils the Apocalyptic forebodings that pack so densely like storm clouds throughout the firmament his novels.
After all, Consider how during the entire time he waits to talk to Fermina again (fifty-one years, nine months, and four days) Florentine Ariza is dauntless and never ever gives up even the slightest sliver of hope. Nothing could shake this man:
“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?� he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
“Forever,� he said.
The Heart of Darkness: Death & Decay
There is so much I would like to say about this amazing novel. There are so many themes that could be explored. But in this review I will try to focus on the Beginning and the Ending of this intricately structured novel, and try to tease out the the thread that explains the absence of Magic.
The whole novel is too broad a canvas to be explored in a review. For this, I limit myself to the broad themes of Death, Decay & Redemption, and allow the political, ecological, societal and personal aspects of these themes to play themselves out below the current, so to speak.
The Institutions of Love: Inventing Love
He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.
The theme of Juvenal’s love story is about the incompatibility of love and social convention, the conflict between desire and social life. It is quite easily the crucial conundrum the novel wants to solve - the 'other' to the novel's essence. Security, order, happiness - can these when added together in the right proportions provide an equation for Love?Ìý
For the sort of Love that can stop the decay that seems to have beset the entire world? Apparently not. It is not enough.
Through Juvenal’s invented Love, Márquez is not simply criticizing the institution of marriage, instead he is criticizing the very illusion that allows this - the illusion that the world and the worldly goods and pleasures can produce Love.
Instead Márquez wants to show that it is Love that can create (or recreate) the world.
Ultimately Love is love of Love itself, not merely the desire for its actual attainment or even the act of its fulfillment. Passion is its own object.
Pitted against such an impossible ideal, all convention or institutionalization obstructs love’s ultimate goal, which is to forestall death and decay.
The ultimate goal of Love is to save the world, to create it anew.
Gerontophobia & Ecocide: Destroying Love
So why is this world so much in need of saving?
The cosmic decline in Love seems to be the cause for alarm, the cause for the pervasive decay that invades the world of the novel:
Everything in this novel, from the environment, to the city, to the rebels, to the civil wars, to the people, to the pets are ancient - as if they were part of this earth from the very beginning, but everybody is in the throes of love. And everything ancient is also decaying, sliding slowly towards the final end of death - so is the sadness and the conventional love represented by Juvenal.
But it is not just about the human lives. Márquez writes as much about places as about people. This one is also about the death of a river, of a town, of a society� or murder, rather. Of Nature’s Old Age inflicted prematurely by youthful humanity.
This is the ecological sub-theme of the novel - It is the river, finally, the Great Magdalena (in Spanish, the �river of life�) that highlights this for us. The abundant nature that surrounds the town is caught in a process of irreversible decay. Alligators, manatees, monkeys, and birds disappear from the jungle; toward the end, the riverboats have difficulty finding enough wood for their boilers. While the political urgency of this topic is clear, cosmic decline in Love in the Time of Cholera has a different meaning and is linked to the theme of the interruption of love discussed before.
Paralleling the old age of his characters with the decay envisioned by this ecological wasteland (of their own making), Márquez is pointing out to us the true nature of Decay - of Humans and their self inflicted sufferings bringing the decay of old age upon themselves and upon the whole of nature.
This is the central tenet of the novel - Love in the Time of Decay.
However, there is more. And Márquezis not afraid to set this counter theme out in the very opening scene itself:
The Sweet Smell of Bitter Almonds
Counter to the dark theme of decay that is to be developed for most of the rest of the plot, early in the novel, an act of brave revolt against this inevitability establishes the counter-current against the steady march of decay.
Being a witness to the decay of love was the most unbearable to Saint-Amour, the Saint of Love?
What we see dramatized at the end of the book, however, is the possibility of genuine passion and romance in old age. There is a clear contrast between Saint-Amour’s suicide and the protracted love life of Florentino Ariza, but it is a contrast that conceals a profound affinity. Saint-Amour kills himself to preserve his body from decay, to fix its image, as it were, through death.
Love and decay, then, constitute the double focus of this novel, the former being present in countless ways throughout.
Love in The Time of Cholera: The Post-Apocalyptic Paradise
� his mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera.
Every page of this novel is rammed full of love, beyond the capacity of any reader to fully comprehend. Love is in the air like Malaria; and in the water, like Cholera - its infections are inescapable!
All aspects of love are covered in exquisite detail - from teenage love to old age; from sexual to rapine to platonic; from formal courtship to marital to unconsummated; to unrequited love to the excesses of suicide and adultery; from the mundane normalcy of love to the incestuous abnormalities.
The reader has to consider carefully in the midst of this overwhelming abundance and variety the treatment that Márquez gives to love in this novel. Love in the novel is not the purely romantic love -carefree, easy flowing, spontaneous, and idealized.
Instead, the novel’s great affirmation of romance, is in the face not just of a hostile or prosaic world, but of the darker side of romance itself.
It is Operatic, Quixotic & Dionysian Love that is celebrated. It is Love as the Second Coming!
Sailing The River of Love: The Voyage of Re-Birth
Youth, Love, Old Age & Death - The Four Unknowns. This should have been the order of Life.
However, in this world of Márquez, the only ages that can hope to be able love/live seem to the Young and the Old. In between lies the desert - the only time we are allowed to live - when not capable of love. It is a paradox on which the very survival of this fictional universe seems to depend on.
Love and Life cannot coexist then - The solution is to give up the life they know for Love. To take the ultimate leap of faith.
So hoist a yellow flag on the Ship of your Life (Second Fidelity) and sail on the Great Magdalena (in Spanish, the �river of life�) in a State of Emergency! Let Love in the Time of Cholera be the entirety of the River of Life. Love should now destroy that earlier Life instead, just as Cholera can squeeze it out. And then be reborn, afresh.
The novel ends with the central characters challenging their entire social world and the very conditions of their existence by their grand romantic gesture, by their final, and what seems like eternal, trip on the Magdalena river. This is the necessary reaction to the decay that is fast on the route to complete extinction, to death.
Love and Cholera will both go extinct otherwise, rooted out by Life.
Love is shown as the redeeming force that saves both humanity, nature, culture and history. It appears as a divine force that defies everything. As if in biblical terms, the novel seems to assert that it is not yet too late to stop the end of humanity and to reach out for grace and happiness.
Most importantly, never allow the Yellow Flag to be questioned. Sustain the ardor. Maintain the symptoms of Cholera/Love. The pestilence is to be maintained at all costs! Only then will the world let you sail on.
Of course, the novel ends with the reader wondering if Fermina and Florentino will ever be able to come ashore and exercise their second chance.
We are left to question this act for ourselves: How do we save the world? By Escape into an Unrealistic Fantasy? Or is love more real? The answer, at least inside Márquez’s world is quite clear.
This final triumph is exquisitely multi-layered. Fermina and Florentino will remain isolated from the real contagion of their earlier Life by allowing their Love to be disguised as Cholera.
They are not rejecting the world, they are allowing the world to reject them instead.
The quarantine is really against love, the sickness that society will not, can not tolerate, the sickness that society fear as much as a deadly epidemic, the sickness that the society fears will wipe it out.
Instead it is that very sickness, which is recognized by conventional society as its biggest scourge, that saves the characters from extinction, along with the manatees, the alligators, and the monkeys.
It is Love that saves all in the end - at least we are left to imagine that possibility. Now, in this Post-Apocalyptic Paradise, age is of no consequence; Life has been transmuted and preserved by Love, like Saint-Amour’s Love by death.
Life has been reborn in the Second Coming of Love!
Love, in short, will always be in the time of cholera, under the Yellow Flag’s protection.
THE INFINITE CAPACITY FOR ILLUSION: The Will to Lyricism
So, now we can come back to the question we started with - of the Absence of Magic.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the apocalypse came in spite of Magic, in Love in the Time of Cholera, redemption comes despite its absence!
Unlike the death that starts off One Hundred Years of Solitude, here that death, the suicide, is ultimately sublimated into love - and decay is arrested in its unreality!
In fact reality has instead been reinvented in their own terms, where previous reality was rejected outright.
The capacity for illusion is magic enough to save the world, and our souls. This Infinite Capacity for Illusion can bring on the required apocalypse and we can live as if the Kingdom of Heaven/Cholera was already here on earth, under that banner of protection!
In the summer of 1884, four English sailors were stranded at sea in a small lifeboat in the South Atlantic, over a thousand miles from land. Their ship, the Mignonette, had gone down in a storm, and they had escaped to the lifeboat, with only two cans of preserved turnips and no fresh water. Thomas Dudley was the captain, Edwin Stephens was the first mate, and Edmund Brooks was a sailor—“all men of excellent character,� according to newspaper accounts.
The fourth member of the crew was the cabin boy, Richard Parker, age seventeen. He was an orphan, on his first long voyage at sea. He had signed up against the advice of his friends, “in the hopefulness of youthful ambition,� thinking the journey would make a man of him. Sadly, it was not to be.
From the lifeboat, the four stranded sailors watched the horizon, hoping a ship might pass and rescue them. For the first three days, they ate small rations of turnips. On the fourth day, they caught a turtle. They subsisted on the turtle and the remaining turnips for the next few days. And then for eight days, they ate nothing.
By now Parker, the cabin boy, was lying in the corner of the lifeboat. He had drunk seawater, against the advice of the others, and become ill. He appeared to be dying. On the nineteenth day of their ordeal, Dudley, the captain, suggested drawing lots to determine who would die so that the others might live. But Brooks refused, and no lots were drawn.
The next day came, and still no ship was in sight. Dudley told Brooks to avert his gaze and motioned to Stephens that Parker had to be killed. Dudley offered a prayer, told the boy his time had come, and then killed him with a penknife, stabbing him in the jugular vein. Brooks emerged from his conscientious objection to share in the gruesome bounty. For four days, the three men fed on the body and blood of the cabin boy.
And then help came. Dudley describes their rescue in his diary, with staggering euphemism: “On the 24th day, as we were having our breakfast,� a ship appeared at last. The three survivors were picked up. Upon their return to England, they were arrested and tried. Brooks turned state’s witness. Dudley and Stephens went to trial. They freely confessed that they had killed and eaten Parker. They claimed they had done so out of necessity.
Warning: This review might contain spoilers even outside the hidden 'spoiler alert' regions. I honestly am not capable of dis
On Romancing The Devil
Warning: This review might contain spoilers even outside the hidden 'spoiler alert' regions. I honestly am not capable of discriminating.
The book is not about the murder or about who did it, those things were very apparent before half the book was completed - the narrator taking special pains to spoil all suspense for his readers at the very beginning (harkening back to the days of greek drama and - according to whom, the effect of a story, even aÌýwhodunnit, was not in epic suspense about what was going to happen next, but in those great scenes of lyrical rhetorics in which the passion and dialectic of the protagonists reached heights of eloquence. Everything was to portend pathos, not action, which was always there only as a container for the pathos, to give it form).
This was probably done so that the typical clue-seekingÌýaspects of a mystery does not detract his reader fromÌýaddressingÌýthe real, the painful questions littered all across his treatise, almost with indecent abandon. (view spoiler)[After all, we were shown by DostoevskyÌývarying degrees of foreshadowings of every event that eventually became turning points in the plot - starting with the numerous leading comments of the narratorÌýincludingÌýthe one in the opening paragraph, Zosima's prediction of suffering for and apology to Dimitri and Smerdyakov's not so subtle clues to Ivan among many others. And do not forget that DostoyevskyÌýeven gave us the alternate route that Mitya could have taken in the ZosimaÌýnarrativeÌý- the parallels in that story are too numerous to list out here. (hide spoiler)]
No, this story is not about the murder, or about the murderer, or about his motivations, or around the suspense surrounding his final fate. The story is about the reaction - it was all about the jury.
Many theories abound about how the Karamazov family represents Russia/humanity/all characters but the reality is that they represent individualities; while it is that terribleÌýfacelessÌýjury, always addressed to and never addressed by, that represents humanity. The job of the country, the society, of the whole human race is to judge, to determine the fate ofÌýindividualsÌýbased on the stories that they construct, literally out of thin air, out of the small pieces of a life that they can only ever observe. The best character sketches, fictional orÌýotherwiseÌýcan only ever be the minutest portion of a real character - but from that tiniest of slivers we build thisÌýambiguousÌýthing called ‘characterâ€�, as if such a thing can possibly exist for a creature asÌýfickle-mindedÌýand forgetful ofÌýhimselfÌýas man.
Character of a man is the greatest myth,ÌýpropagatedÌýbest byÌýnovelists, as no story can proceed without a ‘constantâ€� man who behave with some level ofÌýpredictabilityÌýor with predictableÌýunpredictability, but real life is the result of adding a minimum of three more ‘unpredictableâ€� as adjectives to that earlier description, to come close to describing even the simplest and most boring idiot alive. But yet we construct stories, to understand, to predict, to know how to behave, we even make up stories aboutÌýourselvesÌýso that we may have an illusion of control over who we are - so that we do not melt into theÌýamorphousÌýproteanÌýmass that is the rest of humanity - my storyÌýseparatesÌýme from all of them.
I construct, therefore I am.
These are the romances that DostoevskyÌýwieldsÌýhis best work against and the trial is a trial of reason, of reality pitted against the overwhelmingÌýcircumstantialÌýevidence inÌýfavorÌýof romance, of the myth of character, of individuality, of cause and effect, of there being anything predictable when such a wild variable as a human mind is part of the equation, how can such an equation be anything but ‘indeterminateâ€� (toÌýborrow Dostoevsky’s own expression)?
That was the grand trial, theÌýinquisitionÌýof reason.
But how can theÌýdefenseÌýstand up inÌýfavorÌýof reality without explaining to the jury (to humanity) why they see things not as they are, that they have made up a story that is perfect but is never real as no story can ever be - as no cause canÌýreallyÌýcause aÌýdefiniteÌýeffect when human beings areÌýinvolved? You have to tell a story to convince the jury. You have to tell a story to defend the fact that stories do not exist. A story now, about stories. Or multiple stories to show how all stories are false if only one can be allowed to be true. The only other option is that all are true,Ìýsimultaneously. By proving which you include your own story in that ‘self-consumingâ€� super-set and doom your own argument. There is the irresolvable conflict of the trial, of the story, of the novel, of life.
You cannot discredit the myth of the story without the help of a story as the jury thatÌýjudgesÌýcannot understand, cannot comprehend any realityÌýoutsideÌýof a story, human beings cannot think outside their romances. They will continue to exist as prisoners to their own stories. That is why it is a comedy and not a tragedy, as no one died and no one killed and it remains akin to aÌýsphinx setting us a riddle which he cannot solve himself.ÌýBut,ÌýjudgmentÌýhad to beÌýpassedÌýas the story was told.
One story among many.
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An expanded review might follow and will try to address some of the big themes of the book, enumerated below:
1) On Fatherhood - The second big theme of the book. Possibly the real theme, the above only being my own story...
2) On Crime & the Efficacy of PunishmentÌý- °¿²ÔÌýhow men will always rise to be worthy of their punishment/mercy;ÌýOn suffering and salvation and on how no judgement can be stronger, more effective or more damning/redemptive than moral self-judgement;ÌýOn how Ivan’s ecclesiastical courts eventually would have behaved - would they have behaved as predicted by him in his prose poem and let christ go, unlike the real court? So, in the end his alternate vision of Satan’s court is what was really shown by the current judicial apparitions? But in the fable who was it that really forgave theÌýinquisitorÌýor the inquisitee? And in theÌýoverallÌýstory too, who forgives whom in the end? Christ or Humanity, Satan or Church, Dimitri or Russia?
3) On Collateral DamageÌý- inflicted by the main story on side stories, on how the small side stories are over shadowed, no murdered by the main one and without any risk of conviction.
4) On the Institution of Religion- On morality and the question of theÌýnecessityÌýof religion; On the basis for faith; On the implications of faith/lack of faith to the story one tells about oneself; On how Philip Pullman took the easy way out by expandingÌýDostoevsky’s story for his widely acclaimed novel; On the enormous burden of free will; On theÌýdependenceÌýof men on the security of miracles that is the source of all hell and of all action.
5) On the Characters - On how DostoevskyÌýtook the cream of his best-conceived characters from the universe of his creation, from across all his best works to populate his magnum opus, his story about stories, to trace out their path with the ultimate illusion of realism, with the ultimate ambition and to show/realize how it should always, always fall apart; On how he reflected the whole universe in a small lake and created a novel about all novels, disproving and affirming them simultaneously, murdering its own parents in its own fulfillment; On how they might haveÌýtheirÌýHamlets, but we have our Karamazov's.
6) On Hope & Redemption - On how ultimately Zosima's world view trumps the cynical aspects that dominated the book; On how Zosima predicted it all at the veryÌýbeginningÌýand apologized to Dimitri on behalf of all mankind - ‘taking everyone’s sin uponÌýhimselfâ€�, thus creating an inverted reflection of the christ figure, its image playing on both Dimitri and on Zosima for that split second and then passing on to AlyoshaÌýuntilÌýfinally projected back to Dimitri, in the ultimate paradox, where he becomes at last a christ figure and a buddha figure, exemplifying self-knowledge andÌýenlightenmentÌýthrough true suffering; On how even the Karamazov name can be inspiring and be cause for cheers even though it represents the worst (best?) ofÌýhumanity;ÌýOn The Sermon at the Stone.
7) °¿²ÔÌýNihilismÌý- On the absurdity of life and trying to explain it. But oh wait, this is what I talked of in paragraph length already.
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PS. By the way, when you read this, keep your ears tuned towards the end - for somewhere in the distance you might hear the laugh of the GrandÌýInquisitorÌýechoing faintly....more
Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that peo Single Quote Review:
Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?
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