I will write a more full review of this book, which prompted so many thoughts. It’s a slow burn and inevitably there were plot developments I surmisedI will write a more full review of this book, which prompted so many thoughts. It’s a slow burn and inevitably there were plot developments I surmised well in advance, though I didn’t anticipate where it ultimately would go.
It is about the nature of consciousness, intelligence (especially emotional intelligence) and the authenticity of relationships. It is also, deeply and disturbingly, about how these fundamental aspects of the “human� condition relate to late capitalism and consumer culture. It is somewhat more obliquely about surrogacy, mimesis and slavery. Think of Klara as a house slave and the novel takes on another sense altogether.
The title foregrounds the relationship between Klara and the Sun, which is surprising and perhaps the hardest for a Western reader to reconcile. My first thoughts were of Plato and of the myth of Icarus. Neither of which, I think, are what Ishiguro had in mind. Rather, the Sun is both practical (Klara is solar-powered) and mystical, a focus of divinity, an entity to whom supplication can be made. Which approaches the usual debates about AI from the seemingly quaint angle of humanity’s supposedly privileged relationship to God.
If the divinity hears and answers the prayers of an artificial being, how can we not see that being as a person in its sacred implications?...more
A wandering rumination on the role of shadow (and an aesthetics of intentionality clouded visibility) in Japanese aesthetics. Originally published in A wandering rumination on the role of shadow (and an aesthetics of intentionality clouded visibility) in Japanese aesthetics. Originally published in the 1930s, Tanizaki is neither an enthusiast for post-Meiji restoration nor truly an atavist. There is a strong attitude of nostalgia throughout and lament that much that was beautiful in Japan and that made Japanese aesthetics work is being lost as the nation is flooded in light in the Western fashion. And yet it is not an anti-Western screed; Tanizaki accepts the benefits of Western progress. The result, sadly, is fatalistic. One gets a glimpse of the sadness that must have driven many young men to devote themselves to the imperial project in the coming years.
Oh yes, and the section comparing Western and Japanese toilets is fantastic....more
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyon“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.� A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,� rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength� that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.�
There’s an enormous variety, not only in how each of us deals with grief, but in how each of us deals with different griefs. Reading YOMT about 4 months after the death of my wife, Annie, at the age of 47, after a 6-year battle with brain cancer, I find these insights from Joan Didion on the mark for me about some elusive aspects of my own grief.
Didion was confronting the death of her husband who had been, not only a life partner but also a fellow writer whose work and imagination wove through her own. Grief for someone that integral to one’s life, as Annie was to mine, is not a trauma that heals, but rather an existential abyss. One deals with it the way people in London or Sarajevo learned to live in a state of siege and continued to make meals and do laundry.
It’s not only that one hurts; it’s that one must rediscover a self with which one can identify. To suddenly be decades older but without such an integral other is to suddenly become someone unrecognizable. So, if one is to live the rest of this life, as one must, one must learn to identify with this stranger that one has become. That, I think, is what Didion means by the underlying and persistent meaninglessness.
Another useful distinction Didion makes, which maybe helps further to explain why this is something more complicated than a pain that dulls over time or a malady one gets over, is between Grief and Mourning.
Grief consists of all the involuntary reactions that tend to wash over you in waves� the sudden crying jags triggered randomly, the numbness, the “cognitive deficits� as Didion describes them drawing on the clinical literature, the pervasive vulnerability. Grief is a force that happens to you, acts upon you. It’s not fun, of course, and yet there’s something strangely comforting and sustaining about being carried through the first weeks and months after the death by such waves that are so much greater than oneself.
Mourning, in contrast, Didion describes as the long uneasy process of actively confronting a permanent absence in one’s life. There is no roadmap for such Mourning and it sets in, for Didion anyhow, when the waves of Grief subside to reveal the broken landscape of one’s former life.
An analogy for this stage of the post-death experience might be New Orleans post-Katrina or the coasts of Banda Aceh and Phuket after the 2003 tsunami. Devastations that left death tolls, destroyed lives and deep scars, followed by arduous rebuilding. And to the outside world, the destroyed cities eventually got back to “normal� but to those who knew them, they had changed forever. ...more
After reading the recent Alexander translation, I read this, the classic Pope translation of the Iliad, for the sake of the contrast. Whereas AlexandeAfter reading the recent Alexander translation, I read this, the classic Pope translation of the Iliad, for the sake of the contrast. Whereas Alexander’s translation is spare, dutiful even pious in its close adherence to the language and imagery of its source, Pope was unapologetic in creating a new work from the Iliad. Whereas Alexander demonstrates that English can accommodate the Iliad, Pope uses the Iliad to contribute to the building of an English literature. Like Dryden’s Aeneid, like the King James Bible, Pope’s Iliad is a performance starring the English language itself.
That said, I must admit that to a modern reader, Pope’s florid linguistic acrobatics, playing out in strict, unrelenting pentameter, does seem overblown. It does all get a bit tedious.
But the point was to have an English language Iliad that stands on its own. Pope claims Homer for the language of Shakespeare, and to really appreciate his achievement, one must recall that it reigned as the pre-eminent translation of the Iliad throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the age of empire. During the period in which the British played a leading role in inventing Western civilization as an integrated tradition that begins with Homer, Pope’s version was what most Britons would have known.
My copy, as it turns out, was gifted in 1838 with an inscription by a tutor to his student upon completing Greek language examinations. One imagines young gentlemen of privilege, like this student, mapping their lives in the service of Empire with Pope’s Iliad as a pillar of their education and a point of reference. When wars in India, in Africa, in Europe� put such young men in mind of Homer, any scraps of language that came to mind would likely have been from Pope.
During our Revolutionary (and Civil) Wars, one imagines men on both sides of the terrible conflict recalling stirring lines of Pope’s Homer.
And Pope’s translation is well-suited to the Age of Empire. It is, subtly and not so subtly, a Christianized text (Pope himself invoked frequent comparisons to Milton). It is more bellicose and less tragic than most of our twentieth century versions. The pentameter maintains a heroic tone throughout, and there are times when one might be fooled into thinking this is some lost Edda or something akin to the Song of Roland. The Greeks shine throughout and the underlying absurdity of the war is overshadowed by the grandness of heroic exploits.
It is, to use a preferred term of the era, sublime. And herein lies its beauty, its terrific force, and, to we moderns for whom all war is outrage and glory a painted pig, its grotesquerie....more
Alexander’s translation is faithful to its source, eschewing any regular meter or poetic license in favor of staying true to Homer’s line counts and iAlexander’s translation is faithful to its source, eschewing any regular meter or poetic license in favor of staying true to Homer’s line counts and imagery. Some may imagine this is the least one could expect from a good translation, but it is a rarity in translations of the Iliad. The great translators of the past century—Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles—all take considerable liberties, privileging various metrical approaches and poetic styles over strict accuracy, fashioning images and metaphors that appear nowhere in Homer and even making substantial cuts. Alexander Pope’s unique translation (which I plan on reading next) maintains rhyming iambic pentameter throughout—a feat that could not have been accomplished with textual fidelity as the foremost value.
Overall, I found Alexander’s approach revelatory. Like the Sistene Chapel after centuries of grime had been scrubbed off, the Iliad appears in Alexander’s version sharp, relentless, and a bit garish. The effect is sometimes austere—Alexander will mercilessly translate a word or phrase consistently each time it appears, which lays bare the repetitiveness of the original, even as one gets an especially strong sense of the formulaic patterns that show Homer’s roots in oral performance.
As best as I can recall, this is my third reading of the Iliad in its entirety.
The first time, I was 17, and reading E.V. Rieu’s unremarkable version, which was, for much of the mid to late 20th century, the standard Penguin paperback edition. I remember reading it on the train from Poughkeepsie to Philadelphia, where I was joining a friend for the Jewish High Holidays (which are, of course, all about reckoning with mortality). It was 1989 and the Cold War was just drawing to a close. What impressed me most in this first reading of the Iliad was the rhythm—warfare presented as a poetic tide of fortunes straining back and forth, men (whether they be beloved of the gods or no) reduced to instruments of this shattering force.
I had not yet read Simone Weil, which I did eight years later while reading the Iliad a second time, this time Fagles� version. Reading Weil, and being in graduate school, my second reading of the Iliad was all about Hector, defender of a civilization and last bulwark against a genocide. At that time, I could not conceive of having an ounce of sympathy for the Greeks and their inhuman death god, Achilles. If my first reading was that of a young man of draft age thinking about war at a moment touted (by Fukuyama anyhow) as the End of History, my second reading came in a time of genocidal violence in East Timor, Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Over two decades passed before my next reading. I became middle-aged, had kids, experienced my share of life’s joys and tragedies, and finally, in 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, read the Iliad again.
More than anything, reading the Iliad in Alexander’s version, at this age of my life and in this time, I realize how much I had previously read AGAINST the Iliad. Because this time, without the poetic embellishment and license of other translations, I found myself focusing much more on what happens in the story. And from this, rather obvious perspective, focusing on the plot, I found it difficult to avoid the fact that the telling of the Iliad overwhelmingly favors the Greeks over the Trojans.
The Greeks are unquestionably the superior force. And the best of the Greeks are unquestionably better than the best of the Trojans. Time and time again, we see the Greek heroes—Diomedes, Ajax, Odysseus, Menelaus, Agamemnon—even without Achilles, routing the Trojans, and striking fear even into the best of the Trojans. The tides of battle go back and forth, it’s true. But whenever a principal Greek faces a principal Trojan, the Greek wins and the Trojan either dies or escapes through a divine intervention that is difficult not to see as ignoble and embarrassing.
Very early on, the troops all lay down their arms to let Paris and Menelaus fight it out, with all spoils to the victor and an immediate end to the war. Paris loses, but Aphrodite whisks him away before Menelaus can kill him. Then a Trojan ignobly breaks the truce by striking Menelaus with a cheap shot from his bow. The Trojans use bows and arrows (ranged attacks) much more than do the Greeks, it seems-- a preference for keeping a distance that is taunted more than once in the Iliad.
Later, it is the best of the Trojans, Hector, who challenges any Greek to face him. Although we are told that the Greeks respect and fear Hector, nevertheless, a half dozen Greeks volunteer. Because the Greeks are brave. One is picked at random. It turns out to be Ajax, and he wins. Hector, like Paris, is saved from death by being whisked away by a god. Hector, for all his supposed prowess, never in the Iliad, wins a fight against one of the principal Greek characters. His victims are always merely lists of names, nobody of significance. Even when he faces Patroclus, supposedly his greatest victory, it is Apollo, bearing the aegis, who personally cracks open the armor of Achilles. Then another Trojan, a minor character, gets in the death blow. And only then, third in line, does Hector manage to deliver a mortal blow to Patroclus—a point with which Patroclus taunts Hector even as he dies. Hector, we are told, is like a god and the best of the Trojans. But he is shown neither as a great leader, a warrior who can beat the best of the Greeks, nor as particularly insightful on any matter. His demise, running around the walls of Troy ultimately to be killed by Achilles, is pitiful. And there is considerable pathos in Hector dying for Troy. And yet the Iliad does little to encourage us to see Hector as any more than a plaything of the forces of war.
There are numerous less iconic moments in the Iliad in which one of the Greek heroes defeats a Trojan, and the Trojan begs for mercy, offering up their parents� wealth as ransom for sparing their lives. The Greeks are never seen debasing themselves thus. They always face death stoically. Their heroes, even when overwhelmed and routed by the Trojans, turn from battle reluctantly. The Greeks lament repeatedly, and apparently with justice, that all the Trojan gains are the result of divine intervention. If not for such interference, Troy would have fallen years ago.
At the darkest moment for the Greeks, in book 13, Poseidon taunts them with apparent justice, “O shame! This is a great wonder I see with my eyes, a terrible thing, which I never thought would be accomplished—that Trojans reach our ships—Trojans, who just before were like skittish deer, which flittering through the woods are so much food for jackals, leopards, wolves, useless, incapable of defense, nor is there fire of fighting in them. So the Trojans in time before used to be unwilling to stand face-to-face against Achaean might or strength of had, not even for a little while[.]�
All this said, it would be anathema to any modern sensibility that gives credence to human rights to celebrate this Greek superiority. However a reader may be encouraged to side with the Greeks, it is still true that they are a conquering army bent on genocide, plunder and enslavement of non-combatants. The theft of Helen, who, for this to make any sense, can only be viewed as Menelaus� property, justifies total war in the Iliad. The punishment for a thief (or, to put it in Greek terms, one who has violated the duties of the house guest) is not restricted to his person, but extends to the annihilation of his entire civilization. Likewise, we must recoil when the Greek heroes rebuke Trojan warriors begging for mercy and ransom, never accepting surrender, only doling out death.
Suffice to say, by any reading, the Iliad is a disturbing foundation myth for our Western civilization. One that rewards multiple re-readings in different times of history and one’s life, and discussion from numerous perspectives....more
“Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form� the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its“Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form� the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does NOT kill, I.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it CAN kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, it’s effect is the same: it turns a man into stone. From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet� he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this� a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done.�
Weil wrote this in the summer and fall of 1940 and published it in Marseilles in December 1940 and January 1941, shortly after the fall of France to the Nazis. At a moment when existential threat seemed to hang over France, a moment of supreme uncertainty when so many felt powerless, Weil came up with one of the most influential interpretations of Homer’s Iliad in modern times. She called it a “poem of force,� in which the raw force of war strips away our humanity and leaves us in this radically exposed state, turns us, even while we still live, into things, into objects.
I first read this as a student in the 1990s, and came back to it again now, in March 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. I was drawn to it after thinking about some of the other, more obvious, plague literature we’ve been reading� Boccaccio, Camus, Sophocles.
The Iliad isn’t literally plague literature, but it is about a robust civilization (Troy) forced to shelter in place. Hector is a family man. He would much rather stay at home. However, he provides essential services. And when, inevitably, he faces Achilles, to defend his family, his city, his civilization, he realizes at once that he is not doing battle against another man, but against the god of Death.
When Hector runs from Achilles, it is not cowardice, but the fear of flesh confronted with raw force, a force that cannot be resisted, and which has already, before he is even dead, turned him into a thing, a corpse in waiting. The humanity, the vulnerability of Hector, defender of his civilization, when confronted with the inhuman force of Achilles is one of the most wrenching moments in Western literature. Our health workers and others on the front lines remind me of noble Hector....more
The volume is slim in both senses. The best I can say is that it often feels like listening to an archetypal eccentric grandmother. Which can be charmThe volume is slim in both senses. The best I can say is that it often feels like listening to an archetypal eccentric grandmother. Which can be charming.
Unfortunately, that voice includes substantial doses of self-satisfaction on the superior sense and sensibility of Swedes, of women, of the elderly. I’m sure for the right audience, whose identity I need not belabor, it all will seem like a refreshing bit of plain talk about how to have a healthy attitude toward death and one’s stuff.
The book is oddly light on distinct ideas and suggestions on its primary subject. Beyond urging generally that one take a long view and shed things over years if possible, and start easy with low stakes things, and try to give things to folk who want them, and don’t feel bad about keeping things you like� all fairly obvious, no?� the book doesn’t actually tell us much. The real purpose is just to admonish us all to face up to mortality and take a nice and easy approach to putting our affairs in order.
I was struck though by what seems a complete obliviousness by the author regarding her own privilege as she imparts these values. I mean really, how nice it must be to be so affluent, healthy and unencumbered that you can spend years fine-tuning your doughty, but casually cosmopolitan and international, lifestyle, sorting through your excess and placing certain things in carefully curated gift bags for certain carefully chosen people. To have the luxury of being so very deliberate and in control of it all.
How nice for Death to be such a gentlemanly houseguest or a traveling companion met up with each summer at a time share in the tropics. One to whom you say really you must come visit sometime, we have a guest cottage at the ready, and to whom you will eventually send a thank you note that you already took the time to compose, years in advance and with impeccable penmanship.
A bridge partner. A neighbor. A fellow burgher, like yourself.
Rather than a thug who does terrible deeds in plain sight. A charioteer dragging our heroes� corpses through the dust, round and round the city walls, trapping us in our own homes.
This book may be appreciated by those comforted by the thought that the author’s idealized, eccentric and quintessentially Scandinavian composure is an attitude any of us may choose rather than an extraordinary exception to the human condition brought by good fortune and sizable fortunes....more
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