#37: My Struggle, Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle is a six-volume autobiographical novel by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. It was written between 2008 and 2011 and is being translated into English at the rate of about one volume a year.

To read My Struggle is to share the author’s life as it unspools across the page. You are in his head as he remembers events from his life. The various episodes sprawl across 50, 100, or 200 pages. There is nothing extraordinary about these narrative segments, except that they are never marshaled toward a tidy conclusion. They are a kind of texture or fabric, a state of mind.

Since reading the first volume I have been thinking a bit about the experience of sharing an author’s life in this way. And it made me think of…dogs.

Some people are dog people. Two of my three siblings have hardly ever been without a dog throughout their adult lives. My third sibling and I, on the other hand, are not dog people. I like dogs, but then I imagine standing in a cold rain with a bag on my hand.

I imagine that a large part of the attraction, for many dog people, is to have a certain kind of sympathetic companion consciousness—specifically a silent one. You can talk to a dog, you can adjust your mood to match your dog’s, or even change your dog’s mood to match yours. You can be kind or cruel, or both by turns. You are not alone when you are with a dog, but you will never be contradicted or criticized. Your consciousness stands unchallenged.

Reading biographies is a bit like owning a dog. Or rather, it’s a bit like being a dog. Especially with autobiographies. In this case you, as the reader, are on the silent, receiving end in the relationship. You attach yourself to the master personality, you share its emotions, experience what feels to you like a kind of companionship—but the dialog is strictly one-way. You can’t participate in the action the way a dog can, but you can understand more. You know you don’t have to love the subject/author, but most of the time, you sort of do, because you’re traveling along with him or her, silent and constant.

If you’re the kind of person who mostly reads to gain information or to learn as much about the world as possible, My Struggle might not be the right book for you, because Knausgaard has not had an especially eventful life. He’s in his mid 40s, and I don’t think he’s ever lived outside of Scandinavia—I can’t be entirely sure, because I’ve only read volume one so far. He’s been married twice, has three kids, and hasn’t done anything else worthy of note other than to write books.

So why am I so completely hooked? I think it’s because Knausgaard’s life harmonizes with mine—his circumstances, his attitudes, his fears, his talents, and his faults—all are comparable to mine. Comparable in the literal sense of “capable of being compared.” (“His talents?” you say? “What have you written, sir, other than this blog? “Nothing much. But a failed talent is a talent nonetheless. A little more intelligence, a little more dedication, a little more spiritual depth, and who knows?—you could be reading my autobiographical saga.)

Volume Two will be out in paperback in a few weeks, and I’ll be reporting back after I read it.

#36: The Human Comedy (selected stories), by Honoré de Balzac

Balzac was a maximalist. He is supposed to have written 90 novels before expiring at the age of 51. (One wonders how rigorously the term “novel” is defined for purposes of this census—for example, would the longish short stories in this volume be counted as novels?) Most of his work dealt with an interrelated constellation of characters and situations, and is known collectively as The Human Comedy. To write at such a pace is like keeping a huge fire going. You can’t be terribly choosy about fuel and you can’t really think twice about throwing whatever is at hand right onto the pyre. If Balzac were alive today he might be the “show runner” for some hour-long cable series, like Mad Men or Breaking Bad—that’s the person who runs the whole affair, writes and directs some of the scripts and keeps all the balls in the air. Except Balzac would probably try to write and direct the majority of the scripts himself. It would be a great show because the man had a kind of a crazy talent—he could play the different levels of society like a keyboard, from derelicts and pimps on up to princes and generals. He could do intimacy, and he could do sweeping panoramas—one of the stories in this volume, titled Adieu, depicts a scene from Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, in all of its magnificent horror. Never mind le mot juste, Balzac was about les mots, touts.

He was not squeamish about reaching for the lurid and the spectacular, either. One story, Sarrasine, deals with a man who falls in love with a singer who is revealed to be a castrato. (I first encountered Sarrasine long ago in Roland Barthes’ brilliant critical exercise, S/Z. ) Another, the aforementioned Adieu, depicts a woman who loses her mind after enduring great hardship. She regains it on the story’s final page under extraordinary circumstances—and then expires on the spot. In another, a woman enters a convent after her lover rejects her. The convent is on a stony island in the Mediterranean, and in the final scene the lover mounts an assault up the cliffs to the convent to claim her. Alas, she too has just expired from the intensity of it all, but he takes her away anyway, presumably leaving the other nuns to assume that she has been miraculously called up into heaven.

It isn’t all quite so over the top, but it is unfailingly extravagant and entertaining. I have read a couple of Balzac’s novels, and they were not nearly as lurid—perhaps the public expected short stories to be fantastic in those days—Balzac was a contemporary of Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps as well the people selecting tales for this volume went for more sensational tales.

Since beginning this blog I have had some less than satisfactory encounters with 19th century works—I’ve been kind of underwhelmed by George Eliot, Dickens, and George Meredith. Balzac—no problem.

#35: The First World War, by John Keegan

History fans love the Civil War. Publishers feed the demand with an endless stream of volumes that minutely examine the careers of individual generals, or individual battles, or sometimes even individual generals at individual battles. Grown men devote their spare time to reliving it, right down to the itchy uniforms and the vile food.

Hardly anybody today can name the heroes or villains of the First World War. Its major battles have an almost convulsive quality, its soldiers could almost be white blood cells or army ants flying into battle and dying by the millions for no apparent reason. The essential realities that everyone knows are few: trenches, barbed wire, death.

The war was a global affliction, and after it ended, the world was a gloomier, more dangerous place. Resentments lingered. The fond notion nourished throughout the 19th century, that mankind was becoming more civilized, less warlike, less irrational, never quite recovered. The war left the world damaged, broken, an open wound that bred infections like Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler.

There were massive, monstrous battles in the First World War—the Somme, Verdun, Ypres. They all followed the same script:

1. Attacking army bombards enemy position.
2. Attacking army follows up bombardment with infantry attack, swarming out of its trenches and overrunning enemy trenches.
3. Infantry attack gains ground, makes a breakthrough—sometimes a few hundred yards, sometimes a few dozen miles.
4. Defending army rallies reinforcements, converges on the breakthrough.
5. Defending army repulses attacking army, lines reform, new trenches are dug.

In the interim, a couple of hundred thousand soldiers died. This scenario played itself out over and over again. After a few years of this, the soldiers stopped cooperating. The entire French army pretty much took 1917 off, though they rallied in 1918 to repulse the final, desperate German assault. The Russian empire collapsed entirely, giving us the world’s first communist state. The Austrians, well, they had the best uniforms, one for each of the ten nationalities that made up Franz Josef’s conglomerate empire. Not much of a resumé in battle, however.

The most interesting events were at the fringes—after 1917, Russian and Central Asia were wide open, with Bolsheviks, anti-Bolsheviks, allied forces, and captured Austro-Hungarian forces all in play. The Austro-Hungarian forces, once the central leadership collapsed, quickly transformed themselves into nationalist forces and generally switched sides and threw in their lot with England and France. An army of 40000 Czech soldiers declared their alliance with the western forces, but declined to engage with German armies in the east. Instead, finding themselves now behind enemy lines, they decided to get on the Trans Siberian Railroad, travel five thousand miles to the Pacific Coast, take ship there, and come around the globe to fight on the western front. For a time they controlled the entire Trans Siberian Railroad, making it difficult for actual Russian armies to get at each other. They didn’t reach the Pacific until September 1920, almost two years after the war ended. Their plan seems very wise in retrospect.

John Keegan’s The First World War is a serviceable volume. He does what he can with the material. In the aggregate, this was an unmemorable war, proof that mankind needs little incentive to manufacture its own misery on a colossal scale. For individual soldiers going into battle on an individual day, it was the same as any other war. Some died, others were maimed, physically or mentally. Did it matter much to them whether or not this was a “good war”? Happy 100th birthday, World War I.

#35: Voltaire in Love, by Nancy Mitford

Voltaire falls within the “three fact” range of my knowledge—that is, I knew roughly three things about him before I read this book. Lived near Geneva, wrote Candide, a satire of naïve optimism, and was a defender of human rights. Much of my store of knowledge is in the three-fact category: Alexander the Great: conquered the world from Greece to India in the 3rd century B.C., died young, was gay. Or How about … The Dreyfus Affair: French military officer, anti-semitism, Zola involved (“J’accuse”). I could go on.

I guess I can also admit to also knowing that Voltaire was the personifying genius of the French Enlightenment, much as Samuel Johnson was the personifying genius of the English Enlightenment. But 300 years and a language puts Voltaire at a significant remove, and though I wish I could have learned enough French to explore a bit of 18th century French literature on my own, I’m pretty sure at this point that that’s never going to happen. So, when all else fails: popular history.

Nancy Mitford is a fascinating character in her own right, one of a trio of aristocratic British sisters who all made some sort of mark on the world in the mid 20th century. (Unity Mitford was a devoted Nazi who moved to Germany and had intimate suppers with the Fuhrer.) Nancy was a novelist turned biographer who, while living in France in the 1950s, managed to make a living writing biographies of such luminaries of the Ancien Régime as Louis XIV and Madame Pompadour. The image I had of Voltaire is of a dandy in a shiny powder blue coat with a white periwig and rouged cheeks. Probably I am conflating Voltaire with Candide in this image, but I was surprised to find that Mitford’s Voltaire was a pretty close match with my notions of an 18th century French intellectual: vain, supercilious, given to feuds and disputes, and promiscuous. These people went at it like cats! Voltaire had an assortment of enemies. Who has enemies anymore? Such an extravagance! Voltaire was all about extravagance.

I like biographies, but conventional biographies can be a bit oppressive due to the inevitable arc of an eminent life: obscurity, followed by fame and accomplishment, followed by decline and extinction. I must admit to sometimes flipping to the final pages of biographies when I’m browsing in bookstores to take in the deathbed scene. It’s typically about 10-15 pages from the end. (Has anyone ever anthologized deathbed scenes? Maybe it would be considered bad taste?) So yeah, biographies are like suitcases—you can pack different things into them, but they always have the same shape.

Which is why I like one-off biographies. Partial biographies, group biographies, whatever gets you away from the bell curve. Voltaire in Love is both a partial biography, covering primarily a 15-year swath of Voltaire’s life, and a joint biography, covering as well his sometime lover and close associate, Émilie, the marquise du Châtelet.

They were both geniuses, though not of the exact same type. He was a playwright, poet, and satirist. A very public intellectual. He could not live anyplace for very long without improvising some sort of a theater and producing amateur productions of his own works. This may sound insufferable, but they were usually good plays and it was the 18th century—the alternatives were embroidery and card games.

Émilie had a more mathematical mind. She translated the works of Isaac Newton and championed his theories in France, where they had to compete with an earlier cosmology, formulated by Descartes and based on “vortices.” If you suppose this to have been a slam dunk for Émilie, you would be wrong, especially in light of the fact that the leading minds of the time were skeptical that a woman could teach them anything about such weighty topics.

Which one would you imagine would have a way with money? Turns out it was Voltaire:

Voltaire was now very rich. His fortune came neither from his books, which were too often pirated, nor from his plays, whose royalties he always gave to the actors, but from astute business dealings. He would exert himself to any extent, he would rise from a sick bed and travel across France, if he saw a good profit to be made. He had no wish for money troubles in addition to all his others and used to say that a man should live to work but not work to live. On one occasion, by a simple calculation which others had overlooked, he discovered that whoever bought up a certain percentage of a public lottery would win, in prizes, much more than the money laid out. He raised enough cash to do this. The minister of finance was furious when he realized what had happened, and tried to bring a lawsuit, but he had no case against Voltaire who was perfectly in order. On another occasion he went the whole way to Lorraine from Paris to subscribe to a State loan which seemed very advantageous. When he arrived in Nancy, ill and shaken by the journey, he discovered that only native Lorrainers were eligible. He made such a song and dance that the authorities allowed his subscription on the tenuous grounds that his name, Arouet, was the same as that of the Prince de Beauvau’s castle near Nancy, Haroué. This investment trebled in a few months.

He could have been on CNBC! Émilie by contrast was a gambler who could lose money as fast as Voltaire could make it.

Reading of their 15 years together induces a kind of exhaustion. So many quarrels, affairs, letters, recriminations, reconciliations, and alliances. People come and go, suppers are consumed at all hours, carriages break down, tears are shed, it never stops.

#34: Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon

In 1974 I traded a friend my copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz for her recently purchased paperback copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. It was big book with a cool cover and a great blurb from Geoffrey Wolfe of the San Francisco Examiner on the back cover: “I've been turning pages day and night, watching my fingers go ink-black, bleeding from paper cuts, reading Gravity's Rainbow. Forests have gone to the blade to make paper for this novel. Don't mourn the trees; read the book.”

I read Gravity’s Rainbow and found it to be almost as challenging as Ulysses. But like Ulysses it was often funny and profound and thrilling. I became a Pynchon devotee. I read V and The Crying of Lot 49. Then I read them all again. Occasionally I would meet up with another acolyte. Our author, like other mystical beings, could not be photographed or interviewed. No one knew where or how he lived.

Pynchon didn’t publish another book for almost 20 years, but since 1990 he has published a new novel every five years or so. I have bought them all and read them with trepidation—could they possibly live up to my expectations? James Joyce never really came back down to earth after Ulysses—he took 20 years to write a final book that seemed to be just 700 pages of puns and wordplay, and then he died. No retreat there. But Pynchon has plied his trade, writing books that don’t always look like they were intended to be masterpieces, and has forced me to rethink this whole pedestal thing.

Pynchon’s books are not strongly plotted—the characters are full of passionate intensity, but we as readers are never really quite sure what they’re up to or where they’re headed. These books are not aerodynamic, they should not be able to stay in the air, and yet most of them do, because they are weirdly buoyant, filled with a kind of vague mystery, an air of profundity that we can never quite track to its source. This essence is most powerful in early books like V and Gravity’s Rainbow. In the later books it is fainter and sometimes seems to be missing altogether. Against the Day in particular is disappointing, a great zeppelin of a book that never quite gets off the ground—the fact that it is in part about a troupe of balloon aerialists notwithstanding. Or, to use a different metaphor, the monster is stitched together and raised up onto the ramparts, but the vivifying lighting never strikes.

So, then, what of Bleeding Edge? Pynchon is now almost 80, so this may well be his last book (though I wouldn’t bet on it). It is in some ways a typical Pynchon novel: the slangy diction, the way the dialog is actually repartee, where everybody tends to speak in the same sort of hip, knowing way. At the center is Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her two sons. Maxine is vivid and likeable, but the large cast of friends, relations, clients, and professional contacts that move through the novel are generally less distinct. They appear and disappear, but by the time they reappear we’ve forgotten who they are. I discovered a wikipedia page that listed the characters and their roles, and for a while I would consult that whenever I encountered a name that I’d forgotten. A more careful reader might have made more of an effort to remember these names, but a more careful writer might have made more of an effort to introduce them in a way that would make them memorable—you know, backstory. Bleeding Edge is conspicuously lacking in chronological perspective.

After a while I stopped consulting the wikipedia list because I began to realize that it didn’t really matter that much where the various characters fit into the plot. The action would continue, hints would be dropped, conspiracies suggested, and the book was no less enjoyable because I couldn’t remember who Heidi was, or how Misha and Grisha were connected to Rocky Slagiatt.

The key thing is that Bleeding Edge *is* enjoyable. Characters may come and go like guests on a talk show, but it’s the best talk show you’ve ever seen—so what if you can’t quite place most of them? The book is set is 2001/2, in the months before and just after the 9/11 disaster. It is positively awash in pop culture references, cemented into its time and place. Just within a few pages I encountered references to Jennifer Aniston, Ace Ventura, and Tiger Woods; Pynchon even essays a Christopher Walken impression:

Maxine is drawn to the spare beroom by a voice from the TV set there, speaking with a graceful derangement of emphasis, almost familiar—“I respect your…experience and intimacy with the course but…I think for this hole a…five-iron would be…inappropriate…” and sure enough, here’s Christopher Walken, starring in The Chi Chi Rodriguez Story.

One of the running jokes in the book is the offerings of a cable channel that shows only ridiculous and implausible biopics, including The Anton Chekhov Story, starring Edward Norton, with Peter Sarsgaard as Stanislavski, or Leonardo Di Caprio in The Fatty Arbuckle Story. Pynchon has always had a zany sense of humor, but it’s intriguiging to see it aimed at our zeitgeist—or rather at the 2001 edition of our zeitgeist. Strange that an author who works so hard to stay out of the glare of popular culture should be so utterly familiar with it. It’s as though he is taunting us in some way—“You can’t see me, but I can sure see you.”

Pynchon directs assorted satirical barbs at the cultural pretentions of upper-middle class New Yorkers. But he also paints the landscape in loving detail—if Maxine visits a restaurant, we read in a digression that is is a vestige of a grittier, 1970s New York, and then get to read about several other establishments of similar vintage that are no longer around. As a one-time New Yorker, I loved these details—yes, 72nd and Broadway is indeed the most dangerous intersection in the city. Pynchon may not be making himself available in the flesh to answer our questions, but Bleeding Edge is a kind of confession of love for the city where he has lived for the past couple of decades. It memorializes the place, even as it deplores its surrender to money and corporate homogenization.

Somewhat less persuasive is Pynchon’s depiction of the software industry. This is not for lack of effort:

According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonmous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.

“Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.”

Uh, OK. Whatever. There is much in a similar vein about cryptography, and I would not dare to challenge the author’s ability to grasp the nuances of this field. As someone who has made his living as a technical writer for the past couple of decades, I tend to see the software industry from a less glamorous perspective—keeping a mundane piece of business software working correctly requires endless hours of tedious labor by hundreds of people. I can’t blame Pynchon for trying to make software seem more glamorous, but nor can I feel the same jolt of recognition and surprise that I feel when I read his descriptions of life in NYC.

Pynchon depicts “the deep web” as some sort of alternate universe, a dreamspace of infinite possibilities. It’s “cyberspace” circa 1992, a hypothetical utopia that you don’t really hear that much about anymore. The web most of us know in 2014 is a alternately a realm of commerce and the place where privacy dies. One name that does not appear anywhere in Bleeding Edge is google—the book is set in the instant before that transformation occurred. So perhaps this is an historical novel after all.

I don’t imaging anyone would ever call Bleeding Edge a great book—I wouldn’t in any case. But it’s a convivial book and a warm one. To bring Ulysses into the discussion again, it’s a bit reminiscent of the last three chapters of that book, the Nostos, which is Greek for homecoming. At the center of both books is a family reunited—in Bleeding Edge, Maxine’s wandering husband Horst is gradually moving back into her home during the course of the novel. We know, somehow, that we are closer to the author than we have ever been before. We feel his contentedness along with his rage and his despair. In spite of all the darker forces at work, Bleeding Edge is a celebration.

#33: Light Years, by James Salter

James Salter is 85, and just published his first novel in 30 years. The reviews were intriguing, so I found a used copy of earlier work: Light Years, published in 1975.

It begins with a very lyrical bird’s-eye description of a river on a winter’s day:

We dash the black river, its flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.

I love a book that begins with a gorgeous invocation. To this day I can almost quote the first sentence of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, which I first read 40 years ago:

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

Like Wolfe’s book, Salter’s scopes down to the story of a family. The camera zooms in, we see a stone house on the river’s bank, and a family living in the house: a father, a mother, and two daughters. It is 1958. They entertain, they shop, they celebrate holidays. We watch, as though through a window. They are stylish, educated, sophisticated, successful. The woman is alluring:

One wants to enter the aura surrounding her, to be accepted, to see her smile, to have her exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love.

She is a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner; the man seated next to her smiles. She knows what she is doing, that is the core of it; still, how could she know? Her acts are unrepeated. She does not perform. Her face is a face that electrifies—that sudden, exploding smile—and yet, she somehow gives nothing.

The narrator of this book would seem to be in love with this woman. We grow wary—it’s a bit over the top, like a high-gloss real-estate supplement. Also a bit sententious, like a Terence Malick movie. But the writing is glorious and even as we see Viri, the husband, and Nedra, the wife, moving elegantly through their lives, we see their secret discontents, too. Viri, an architect, makes a good living, but wants something more:

He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope? Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming.

And yet:

There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams…one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.

Nedra has a different discontent: she wants to be free, wants to blow up the whole arrangement and strike out on her own.

The sun was at its apogee. She was conscious, as if it were a moment of weightlessness, that her life, too, was at its apex; it was sacred, floating, ready to change direction for the final time.

“You know, I think about divorce,” she said. “and Viri is such a good father. He loves his children, so, but that isn’t what stops me. It isn’t all the legal business and argument, the arrangements that have to be made. The really depressing thing is the optimism of it all.”

And so we have this paradox: the narrator, not to mention all the other characters in the novel, look at Viri and Nedra as the perfect couple living the perfect life. But they do not see themselves from this perspective—they look out to the world for gratification. Each has an affair. For Viri it is an obsession with a younger woman, for Nedra an adventure, a matter of the senses.

But they are devoted parents, and the descriptions of what it feels like to be a parent are striking. Here is one:

[H]e reads to them, as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet. There are stories he has never heard of, and others he has known as a child, these stepping stones that are there for everyone. What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist, even in the imagination: princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. He is preparing them for this voyage.

Over 307 pages we follow Viri and Nedra, and also their friends. The travel, they divorce. Their children grow up and marry. Salter slips comfortably into their minds and then back out again, so we see what they see, but also what they don’t. In the process, he accomplishes what few writers can: he makes the ordinary seem remarkable.

They are in their late 20s when the book begins, and only in their late 40s when it ends. Yet by the end they seem ancient, exhausted, and they look back at their former lives, their heyday, just as their friends always have, and as we have, with envy and a kind of despair. They have lost the Eden that they never fully appreciated in the first place. That's how it is with Edens.

Salter has the reputation as a writer of ‘erotic” fiction because he is good at describing physical intimacy. But he also writes of death with the same skill—patiently, carefully, sensuously. There are three extended descriptions of death in Light Years. Each runs for about 10 pages. They are rather soft focus, I suppose, without agony or terror. We watch the characters fade and expire, in possession of themselves and more or less at peace, with a wistful appreciation of all that life has meant to them.

She died like her father, suddenly, in the fall of the year. As if leaving a concert during a passage she loved, as if giving up an hour before the light. Or so it seemed. She loved the autumn, she was a creature of blue, flawless days, the sun of their noons hot as the African coast, the chill of their nights immense and clear. As if smiling and acting quickly, as if off to a country, a room, an evening finer than ours.

It’s a lovely description. I could never quite surrender my reservations about Light Years, the suspicion that I was being seduced by all the gloss and glamour. But that won’t stop me from reading more James Salter books.

#32: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

In 1416, somewhere in southern Germany, an Italian scholar found a manuscript in the library of a monastery. Stephen Greenblatt makes a case that this find was a major inflection point (or “swerve”) in the history of western civilization. It’s a provocative claim, and for all I know it may be true. The scholar was Poggio Bracciolini, and he had come north with his employer, Pope John XXIII, to a church conference to decide who deserved to be Pope—there were three contenders. Poggio’s guy lost, which gave this busy administrator some free time to indulge his hobby—looking for ancient manuscripts in monastic libraries.

The “lost masterpiece” trope is irresistable—well, it is to me, and I suspect it is to a lot of people. I remember an episode from the novel Lost Horizon where someone plays an unknown work by Chopin on the piano. I remember Henry James’ The Aspern Papers where the protagonist is trying to lay hands on a lost manuscript by a famous deceased author. I avidly consume news about actual lost or withheld manuscripts by the likes of Kafka and Salinger.

In the case of The Swerve, not only is a manuscript found after being lost for over a thousand years, that manuscript turns out to be the wedge that drives open the Renaissance. Or at least one of the wedges. The manuscript is De rerum natura—On the Nature of Things—written by the Roman poet Lucretius in the first century BC. Lucretius was an adherent of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Epicurean philosophy starts with an hypothesis about the natural world:

[E]verything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructable building blocks, irreduceably small in size, unimaginably vast in number. The Greeks had a word for these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms.

From this hypothesis come some rather radical notions: if the universe is made out of physical stuff, then where are the gods who control the affairs of men, and where exactly do we go after we die? (Lucretius didn’t actually deny the existence of gods, he just denied that they had any interest in or influence on the affairs of men.) Epicurean philosophy is materialist—there is no point in accumulating karma points during our time on earth, because there is no heaven or hell where our account can be told. To quote Peggy Lee, “if that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing/Let’s break out booze and have a ball.“ The highest good is pleasure, not in the sense of indulgence, but in the sense of avoiding pain: both for ourselves and for others.

The early Church fathers found Epicureanism much more threatening than pagan religions, because they feared that without the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell, people would be inclined to dispense with order and authority:

Christian polemicists had to find a way to turn the current of mockery against Epicurus and his followers. Ridiculing the pagan pantheon did not work in this case, since Epicureanism eloquently dismantled the whole sacrificial worship of the gods and dismissed the ancient stories. What had to be done was to refashion the account of the founder Epicurus so that he appeared no longer as an apostle of moderation in the service of reasonable pleasure but instead as a Falstaffian figure of riotous excess. He was a fool, a pig, a madman. And his principal Roman disciple, Lucretius, had to be comparably made over.

But it was not enough to blacken the reputations of Epicurus and Lucretius, to repeat endlessly that they were stupid, swinishly self-indulgent, insane, and, finally, suicidal. It was not enough even, by this means, to suppress the reading of their works, to humiliate anyone who might express interest in them, to discourage copies from ever being made. Even more than the theory that the world consisted only of atoms and void, the main problem was the core ethical idea: that the highest good is the pursuit of pleasure and the diminution of pain. What had to be undertaken was the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural—the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures—seem like the enemy of the truth.

This is why today the word “Epicure” today connotes “a person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury.” Give the early Church fathers their due—they understood PR.

But this single acorn that Poggio Bracciolini planted in the fertile soil of early 15th-century Florence grew into a stout and flourishing tree. Among its fruits were Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Giordano Bruno, and Montaigne, among others. I’m reminded of Black Sea, by Neal Ascherson, only instead of charting an inspired course through the geography of a particular region, Greenblatt charts his course through time. It’s his talent to make the people and events that he connects to Lucretius seem essential and inevitable, a central narrative of western civilization. The skeptic in me wonders whether other, equally talented writers might not be able to detect other such sequences and make equivalent claims for them. But Greenblatt has an ace in the hole, that singular lynchpin, the last suriviving copy of a masterwork lost for a thousand years.