#75: Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

This gigantic, intricately plotted novel revolves around a court case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which originated in an attempt to determine the proper heirs to an estate. We come to understand that this law case is a kind of black hole that absorbs the life force and sanity of all those who invest their time and energy in it. Dickens certainly had a sizeable axe to grind regarding the British legal system in the 19th century; presumably he sought to rally supporters to the cause of judicial reform. Two centuries and an ocean away, this aspect of the author’s mission is no longer compelling, but the weird destructive force at the center of Bleak House retains a definite metaphysical fascination. Dickens wisely steers clear of legal details, presenting Jarndyce and Jarndyce exclusively in terms of the psychological effects it has on people. In other words, we don’t see the case directly—we see it reflected in the people it concerns. In this regard it bears comparison to the mind-destroying force at the center of a much different gigantic novel—Infinite Jest. Parties to Jarndyce and Jarndyce who understand that the only safe policy is to ignore it completely go on to lead meaningful lives. Esther Summerson, a ward of the court, and John Jarndyce, a wealthy man who takes Esther into his household and makes her is housekeeper (and later, for a time, his fiancée), are among the ones who are wise enough to take this course. Richard Carstone, another ward, along with the elderly Miss Flite and a Mr. Gridley, are among the unfortunates who invest time and energy in the case. Their fate is madness, death, or both. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is like a medusa—to look at it straight on, to engage with it, is fatal.

Bleak House presents several dozen characters, great and small. Each has a role to play in moving the massive and intricate plot forward. This is much less confusing than it might be because Dickens invests each character with a distinctive characteristic, be it a catch phrase, a physical detail, or a mannerism. It also helps that the great majority of the minor characters are quite peculiar—grotesque even. Thus we get Mr. Turveydrop, the dancing master, whose only occupation and concern is his “deportment”—that is, his appearance and his manners. His son now gives all the lessons, leaving the senior Turveydrop free to pose before the world, like an oversized peacock. Then there is Phil Squod, a rather disheveled but goodhearted former seaman who, due to an unfortunate series of accidents, is disabled to the extent that he must navigate the world by sidling along walls and then pitching out into a room once he is near is destination, much like a ship tacking into the wind. Just reading about him induces a faint sense of vertigo.

As different sets of characters are brought together in a series of intricately plotted encounters, the reader gradually discover the secret at the heart of the novel, which has to do with a child abandoned at birth. Mother and child move separately through the story, at first unaware of each other; Dickens lets the reader guess the solution to mystery just a few hundred pages into the story—and a few hundred pages before it is “officially” revealed. The mother in question, Lady Dedlock, is the wife of a prominent aristocrat. She is a regal and heretofore unimpeachable presence; she fears that public knowledge of the child she bore out of wedlock would destroy her reputation, her marriage, and her husband’s position as the scion of an ancient and illustrious family. The extent to which this fear is warranted is difficult to know—Victorian England was not famous for its tolerance of such improprieties. Nevertheless, when Sir Dedlock does finally learn of the matter, we are glad to find that his only concern is for the well being of his wife.

I was watching Game of Thrones at the same time as I was reading Bleak House, and I could not help comparing them in my mind. One point of comparison is the way both works are able to keep such large casts of characters, and such complicated plots, moving so smoothly forward. Another is the notion that both are prime examples of the maximalist entertainment of their times, works that met their audiences in regular installments over months and years and whose success was a matter of great public interest. Game of Thrones throws hundreds or even thousands of people, millions of dollars, dragons, explosions, sex, incest, torture, just about everything it can at its audience. Which is not to say that the underlying story (which was, after all, created by a single individual with a word processor) isn’t compelling. Dickens had only pen and paper to work with. But he in his own way throws everything in his arsenal into his work: fantastically weird characters, a far-flung web of intrigue, good and evil in extreme manifestations. One character spontaneously combusts about halfway through the book. An additional parallel: both stories have at their centers a matter of concealed parentage. How this parentage is discovered, how its revelation is anticipated, and how it actually occurs are matters at the core of both works.

Dickens also deploys a command of language that frequently amazed me. Here, for example, is a passage where he describes how the great world responds to the news that a man has spontaneously burst into flame, leaving just a small pile of greasy ashes in his wake:

Out of the court, and a long way out of it, there is considerable excitement too; for men of science and philosophy come to look, and carriages set down doctors at the corner who arrive with the same intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable gases and phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined. Some of these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence for such deaths, reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown, on English Medical Jurisprudence; and likewise of the Italian case of the Countess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one Bianchini, prebendary of Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so, and was occasionally heard of in his time as having gleams of reason in him; and also of the testimony of Messrs Foderè and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who would investigate the subject; and further, of the corroborative testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon once upon a time, who had the unpoliteness to live in a house where such a case occurred, and even to write an account of it; —still they regard the late Mr. Krook’s obstinacy, in going out of the world by any such by-way, as wholly unjustified and personally offensive.

A quick Internet search reveals that readers questioned Dickens’ inclusion of this bizarre incident; he responded by stating that “he had studied the topic [of spontaneous combustion] seriously and had found there are about 30 cases on record, of which the most famous is that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi described in 1731.” Who needs dragons?

Bleak House has aged well in most respects. The world still loves a great villain, and Bleak House provides a couple of prime examples: one is the inexorable, secretive lawyer Tulkinghorn, who discovers Lady Dedlock’s secret and tortures her by threatening to reveal it. Another is the nasty old Mr. Smallweed, a moneylender who is so physically decrepit that he must be carried everywhere in a chair and then periodically “shaken up” like an understuffed pillow when he settles to the bottom of his chair. Smallweed masks his ferocious rapacity behind a veneer of unctuous courtesy; he pretends that it is “his friend in the city” who is demanding immediate repayment of what his debtor had assumed to be a long-term loan. “You’ll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear,” comments one such debtor.

“My dear friend!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace him. “Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money—he might!”

That Smallweed is able to so “squeeze” his clients this way is particularly galling considering that any one of them could easily squeeze the life out of his decrepit frame with one hand.

Dickens’ noble characters, on the other hand, have not aged quite as well. Sometime between 1850 and today we’ve lost our taste for excessively humble, virtuous heroes and heroines. Esther Summerson, who is in fact the daughter of Lady Dedlock, and through whose eyes much of the story is told, could give lessons in saintliness:

When my guardian left me, I turned my face away upon my couch, and prayed to be forgiven if I, surrounded by such blessings, had magnified to myself the little trial I had to undergo. The childish prayer of that old birthday, when I had aspired to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted, and to do good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could, came back into my mind with a reproachful sense of all the happiness I had since enjoyed, and all the affectionate hearts that had been turned towards me. If I were weak now, what had I profited by those mercies? I repeated the old childish prayer in its old childish words, and found that its old peace had not departed from it.

In Esther’s defense, she was raised as an orphan in the household of a rather miserable old hag, so she comes by her self-effacement honestly. At least she is ultimately spared the cringe-inducing prospect of marriage to her much older “guardian” Mr. Jarndyce. He has proposed awkwardly to her, asking in a letter if she will be “the mistress of Bleak House”; their mutual emotions run the gamut from respect to gratitude to, uh, admiration and trust. He calls her by such nicknames as “little woman” and “Dame Durden.” I don’t expect fifty shades of anything much from Dickens, but still. Fortunately in the final chapters, Jarndyce relinquishes his claim on Esther and hands her off to the younger, more virile Mr. Woodcourt. (Without first running the idea past Esther herself, it should be noted.) Perhaps Dickens’ original readers would have understood his mind and his world well enough to know that the Jarndyce/Summerson match was not meant to be. I knew that it was awkward and peculiar, but I didn’t understand Dickens and his time well enough to be confident that he wouldn’t go ahead with it.

#74: Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari

This is a strange book and for a while I didn’t know what to make of it. The early chapters describe how one of many species of early man (genus: Homo) outcompeted and likely exterminated numerous other human species, including Homo neanderthalensis. But up until about 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was just another Homo species, climbing trees and hunting with spears. Then something Harari calls the Cognitive Revolution happened. Harari believes that the Cognitive Revolution was triggered by a genetic mutation that enabled humans to use language for new conceptual purposes. He uses a provocative word to describe this new capability:

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, “Careful! A lion!” Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, “The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.” This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

Harari throws many of the hallmarks of our species into the category of “fictions”: religion, the use of money, social hierarchies, “tribal spirits, nations, limited liability companies, human rights,” and just about all the concepts that we use to live our lives. It’s a bold and daring way to hold a mirror up to our world, and I liked the way it made me think. So human rights “don’t really exist”? I don't think Harari is seeking to undercut these concepts, he’s just asking us to recognize that they exist by convention: we have to agree on such concepts for them to have validity. They are abstractions held in common.

Harari then goes on to describe a second great revolution in human history: the Agricultural Revolution. This one I’d heard a bit about before, but maybe not in the context of the “broad sweep of human history.” With agriculture, humans could give up nomadic living and collect in larger groups than ever before—i.e., cities. This led to more complex and formal social hierarchies, occupational specialization, and ultimately, writing, which was first used to track inventories of products and to record exchanges and debts. In the end, though, was it really an improvement for humanity? Harari thinks not.

The third (and final) revolution that Harari addresses is the Scientific Revolution. Again, this is not unfamiliar ground, but a summary of the latest thinking on this revolution, along with some of the usual provocative speculation, promised to be interesting.

But along the way something began to unsettle me about the way Harari was describing our species. The same boldness that impressed me in his discussion of the Cognitive Revolution began to seem a bit unrestrained, a bit ex cathedra. At one point he writes enthusiastically about the possibility of human immortality (or something close to it):

A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).

Those “serious scholars” show up a few more times in the book, usually called on to testify to some piece of astonishing speculation. (I guess Harari wants us to keep in mind that he’s not talking about facetious scholars, who tend to pull our collective legs from time to time.) I tend to think that death is of a piece with birth and sex—that if you want to get rid of the former, you might eventually have to get rid of the others. Death—a key part of the process that causes new individuals to replace old ones—is kind of a key to evolution. I remember reading the third (less famous) part of Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver encounters the struldbrugs, a race of people who live forever but are listless and inert. The implication (for me, at least) is that life would lose meaning if people became a-mortal.

But to get back to Sapiens, it’s one thing for Harari to offer packaged summations of the early phases of human life, it’s quite another for him to tie the world around him and the world to come into such tidy packages. He never pulls back on his tone of certainty.

I was a bit baffled by this passage:

In traditional agricultural economies long-distance trade and foreign investment were sideshows. Consequently, peace brought little profit, aside from avoiding the costs of war. If, say, in 1400 England and France were at peace, the French did not have to pay heavy war taxes and to suffer destructive English invasions, but otherwise it did not benefit their wallets.

It wasn’t clear to me that Harari knew that in the year 1400, France and England were about two-thirds of the way through something we call the Hundred Years War, which involved copious heavy war taxes and destructive English invasions. Probably he did know, in which case I assume we are to understand this as a counter-factual hypothetical. And his point—that modern wars interrupt trade patterns where long-ago historical wars didn’t—is clear enough. But it’s sloppily made, and is “lack of cost” really such a different thing than “benefit”? I recently read a book that dealt in part with the Hundred Years War, and I certainly got the impression that the people who lived in France and England in 1400 would very much have preferred that their respective countries not be at war. I can’t imagine their situation would have been that much worse had the war interrupted extensive trade between the two nations.

Many of Harari’s pronouncements are what you might call “debatable,” though I suppose the debates would almost always be interesting. I got through the later sections of Sapiens by imagining that the book was a high-level brief prepared for the government of an alien civilization that wanted to know something about the dominant species on Planet Earth. In such a light, Harari’s done a commendable job, and if he oversimplifies or speculates recklessly on certain points, that can be written off as a consequence of his extremely high-level perspective.

Ultimately, I found Sapiens to be a cold book. Harari wants to purge himself of prejudices and assumptions about humanity. In places this approach works brilliantly—yes, civil rights are fictions, in that they don’t exist unless we agree that they exist. The word “fiction” drives the point home, even if it does seem to place him (and us?) outside the worthiness, the necessity, of that concept. And yes, to take another example, perhaps Nazism was a religion, in the sense that it was an ideological framework that explained to its adherents who they were and where they were going. But for all their faults, it doesn’t seem quite right to lump more conventional religions with Nazism. The aliens might see it that way, but we have more at stake.

#73: A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman would have us know that the second half of the fourteenth century was not the best of times in Europe. The bubonic plague first struck in 1350 and then reappeared every ten years or so thereafter. The initial episode eliminated about a third of the population of Europe. Incredibly, the plague is eventually upstaged in Tuchman’s book by the general bad behavior of the remaining population. It was a time of unending senseless violence and oppression. I had read A Distant Mirror many years ago and remembered being stunned by how swiftly and relentlessly the plague had cut down entire families, towns, and cities. But I hadn’t remembered the endless wars, feuds, battles, and campaigns that killed off many of the lucky survivors of the great pestilence. I think that must have been because the mayhem was so consistent, so widespread, so … ordinary. No individual or event stands out. Bad behavior is Tuchman’s great subject: people betraying, deceiving, and destroying each other. The plague stands out by contrast because it was not motivated by greed, treachery, or envy.

Ours is a more peaceful time because we have governments and laws that at least limit the amount of violence and brutality in the world. We may not feel that we live in the best of times, but consider how the great majority the world’s billions live their lives unmolested, with shelter and enough to eat. We have electricity and antibiotics. In the fourteenth century, Europe was transitioning to nation states, but was still controlled by royal families—and the Catholic Church. Thus you had various kings, dukes, popes, and cardinals plotting and making war against each other. To finance these campaigns, these worthies levied tax after tax on the merchant and peasant classes. The concentration of wealth was extreme, and much of it was put to use to ravage the very people who had funded it. Armies swarmed across the countryside, stealing the food of whatever towns and villages were in their path, and killing and raping many residents for good measure. In many ways, they treated their ostensible enemies better than they treated the townspeople who were unlucky enough to be in their way. High-ranking enemies were an economic resource who could be ransomed for substantial sums; many of them were likely blood relatives in any case and thus worthy of a certain deference.

Tuchman likes to give us lists, perhaps because this is the kind of information that makes up much of the documentary evidence that has survived for six centuries. Here is a short selection from a much longer inventory of the possessions of the Duc de Berry, a brother of the King of France and one of four such brother/dukes who controlled—or rather, owned—the majority of the country:

Berry was too absorbed in acquisition and art to be interested in war. He lived for possessions, not glory. He owned two residences in Paris, the Hôtel de Nesle and another near the Temple, and built or acquired a total of seventeen castles in his duchies of Berry and Auvergne. He filled them with clocks, coins, enamels, mosaics, marquetry, illuminated books, musical instruments, tapestries, statues, triptychs painted in bright scenes on dazzling gold ground bordered with gems, gold vessels and spoons, jeweled crosses and reliquaries, relics, and curios. He owned one of Charlemagne’s teeth, a piece of Elijah’s mantle, Christ’s cup from the Last Supper, drops of the Virgin’s milk, enough of her hairs and teeth to distribute as gifts, soil from various Biblical sites, a narwhal’s teeth, porcupine’s quills, the molar tooth of a giant, and enough gold-fringed vestments to robe all the canons of three cathedrals at one time. Agents kept him apprised of curiosities, and when one reported a “giant’s bones” dug up near Lyon in 1378, he at once authorized purchase. He kept live swans and bears representing his chosen device, a menagerie with apes and dromedaries, and rare fruit trees in his garden. He ate strawberries with crystal picks mounted in silver and gold, and read by candlelight from six carved ivory candle-holders.

It’s interesting to note how wealth in the fourteenth century took the form of discrete objects, rather than as a bank balance. When we read today that some software tycoon is worth a hundred billion dollars, it’s hard to relate that to what ordinary people have or to translate that into the objects that ordinary people want to buy: things like cars, houses, or boats. In this regard, Donald Trump, with his penchant for putting his name in gold at the top of buildings around the world, has more in common with the Duc de Berry than he does with Warren Buffet.

The underclasses who underwrote this extravagance were not unaware of how they were being exploited. There were frequent insurrections, against Berry and others like him. The people participating in these insurrections must have known that they would be slaughtered when they were put down, as they inevitably were. They participated because everything had been taken from them—there had nothing to put in the scales to balance their hatred. The Duc of Berry, at least, was less bloodthirsty than many of his peers: where they would set an example by burning or beheading defeated insurgents by the hundreds or thousands, he would spare the life of anyone who could afford to pay a hefty fine.

Berry is just one of a seemingly endless parade of bad people that Tuchman leads before us. An individual named Robert of Geneva provides a good illustration of fourteenth century realpolitik:

With the fury of a conqueror defied, Cardinal Robert determined to set an example by atrocity and found his occasion at Cesena, a town near the east coast between Ravenna and Rimini. When the Bretons who were quartered there seized supplies without paying for them, they provoked an armed rising of the citizens. Swearing clemency by a solemn oath on his cardinal’s hat, Cardinal Robert persuaded the men of Cesena to lay down their arms, and won their confidence by asking for fifty hostages and immediately releasing them as evidence of good will. Then summoning his mercenaries, … he ordered a general massacre “to exercise justice.” Meeting some demurral, he insisted, crying “Sangue et sangue!” (Blood and more blood), which was what he meant by justice. He was obeyed. For three days and nights beginning February 3, 1377, while the city gates were closed, the soldiers slaughtered. “All the squares were full of dead.” Trying to escape, hundreds drowned in the moats, thrust back by relentless swords. Women were seized for rape, ransom was placed on children, plunder succeeded the killing, works of art were ruined, handicrafts laid waste, “and what could not be carried away, they burned, made unfit for use, or spilled upon the ground.” The toll of the dead was between 2,500 and 5,000.

Robert of Geneva became known as the “Butcher of Cesena” and was later elected Pope Clement VII.

Wading through these decades of massacres, plagues, mad kings and debauchery was one Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy and Count of Soissons. Coucy was one of the richest men in France, and possessor of a mighty fortress 50 miles north of Paris. Skilled as both a soldier and a diplomat, Coucy was present at many of the century’s key events. For Tuchman, he stands in contrast to the general dementia of the time. Coucy was no saint, but he was intelligent and practical, qualities scarcer in the 1300s than saintliness. Most of the assorted dukes, princes, and counts of the day still put great stock by notions of chivalry that eschewed planning, prudence, and strategy. To their minds, a lord should always be at the front of the attack, the first into battle. This led to a lot of dead and captured lords—the King of France was even captured on one occasion by the English. What do you do with a captured king? You hold him for a king’s ransom, of course. Funds were raised by—what else?—new taxes.

I have not read other books by Barbara Tuchman, but I infer that a consistent theme for her is ironic contempt for the foolishness of powerful men. In The Guns of August, she wrote about the leaders of early 20th century Europe who started the First World War for no good reason. Another of her books is titled, plainly enough, The March of Folly. I think I would enjoy any of her books because ironic contempt, when done well, is extremely entertaining. But I suspect that just about any century, including the current one, could be savaged in this manner. Folly is everywhere, and in every one. We might not even be able to guess all the things about our times that will earn the contempt of our distant offspring, though we could at least get the list started for them.

Maybe a century like the 14th is what it takes to send civilization off in a new direction. Energy was no longer flowing effectively through the old channels—crusade, chivalry, feudalism. Church. Within a hundred years of the end of this century, ships would be sailing new oceans and both the Renaissance and the Reformation would be underway. I don’t know enough to draw the lines that connect the dysfunctional 14th century to the European rebirth, but I’m sure it can be done, in fact, it probably has already been done by somebody.

#72: Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust

Reading Proust isn’t like reading anything else. It’s like having a roommate. And after reading the first three volumes of In Search of Lost Time last year, I was ready for a hiatus.

I wasn’t actually planning on reading the fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, just yet, but when I picked it up last month, I saw that Part 1 was just 45 pages long. (Part 2 was the remaining 700-odd pages.) So I thought I could commit to that much at least and then see how things were going. As it turns out, they were going fine and I read both parts straight through. So you could say that I’ve moved back in, if only provisionally.

I had come to expect Proust to be quite obscure on sexual matters, but in Part 1 we observe his narrator observing an interlude between Baron Palamède de Charlus, a member of the illustrious Guermantes family, and Jupien, a tailor who lives in the same building as the narrator. The narrator had been occupied with botanical matters, watching the courtyard through a staircase window, “peering through the shutters … at the Duchess’s little shrub and at the precious plant, exposed in the courtyard with that assertiveness with which mothers ‘bring out’ their marriageable offspring, and asking myself whether the unlikely insect would come, by a providential hazard, to visit the offered and neglected pistil. “ But his attention is diverted when he notices Charlus and Jupien retiring to the back of Jupien’s shop for their own variation on the mating act—“of course, here the word fertilisation must be understood in a moral sense, since in the physical sense the union of male with male is and must be sterile…”

We never do find out what became of the ‘precious plant,’ but Proust does a pretty amazing job of cross pollinating the notion of sex as a natural and spontaneous part of life in nature with the particular constraints and proclivities of homosexual love in early 20th century France. Without outing himself, he manages to make a very eloquent case for the rightness of gay love, which must have required more than a little courage 100 years ago.

It’s never easy to find concise quotes in Proust because his discussions tend to expand and ripen over several pages, but here’s a passage where he is discussing a marriage between a rather masculine woman and a rather feminine man:

It was said at the Ministry, without any suggestion of malice, that in their household it was the husband who wore the petticoats and the wife the trousers. Now there was more truth in this than was supposed. Mme de Vaugoubert really was a man. Whether she had always been one, or had grown to be as I now saw her, matters little, for in either case we are faced with one of the most touching miracles of nature which, in the latter alternative especially, makes the human kingdom resemble the kingdom of flowers. On the former hypothesis—if the future Mme de Vaugoubert had always been so heavily mannish—nature, by a fiendish and beneficent ruse, bestows on the girl the deceptive aspect of a man. And the youth who has no love for women and is seeking to be cured greets with joy this subterfuge of discovering a bride who reminds him of a market porter. In the alternative case, if the woman has not at first these masculine characteristics, she adopts them by degrees, to please her husband, and even unconsciously, by that sort of mimicry which makes certain flowers assume the appearance of the insects which they seek to attract. Her regret at not being loved, at not being a man, makes her mannish. Indeed, quite apart from the case that we are now considering, who has not remarked how often the most normal couples end by resembling each other, at times even exchanging qualities?

Proust, in his role as naturalist, goes on to provide examples of couples who have either exchanged their nominal gender characteristics, or merged their separate characteristics into a single exotic hybrid. I could almost hear David Attenborough.

Baron de Charlus is the presiding presence in Sodom and Gomorrah, and he is a remarkable creation. When we first met him in an earlier volume he seemed quite forbidding—he invited the narrator to his home after offering to be his guide to society but then, when he arrived, insulted and threatened him for no apparent reason. But by the present volume, the narrator has gained a better understanding of the baron’s changeable nature, and he has opportunities to observe him as he moves through society. For example, he observes the baron exchanging meaningful glances with other “inverts” at a society event, even as the gentleman maintains his ostentatious pretense of heterosexuality. When the Baron gets an eyeful of the attractive young sons of a certain Mme de Surgis, he engages her in conversation though she would not otherwise seem of sufficient social status to warrant his attention. The scene becomes comic as less perspicacious onlookers comment on the baron’s suave ability put the moves on an attractive woman, even as he maneuvers to keep the sons in his line of sight as he talks to Mme de Surgis. But nothing is ever quite so simple in Proust:

For if everyone was pleased to admire in her sons the regal bearing and the beautiful eyes of Mme de Surgis, the Baron could taste an inverse but no less keen pleasure in finding those charms combined in the mother, as in a portrait which does not in itself provoke desire, but feeds, with the aesthetic admiration that it does provoke, the desires that it awakens.

Later in the book, the Baron has made himself the sponsor of an attractive young musician, Morel. Here the humor works on multiple levels. On one level, we see the Baron strenuously maintaining his heterosexual pretense, even as by this point literally everyone around him knows exactly what he is about. One another level, we see him trying to convince himself, and everyone else, that he is master of the situation, even as we easily see that Morel is a completely unscrupulous character who has the mighty Baron wrapped around his finger. Proust is able to expose the ridiculousness of de Charlus even as he displays a great deal of sympathy and even affection for him. This is, of course, exactly what Shakespeare did for Falstaff, except that Shakespeare did not put himself into the story as an occasional confidante of Sir John.

Surprisingly, Sodom and Gomorrah is pretty funny throughout. The narrator returns to the coastal resort of Balbec for the second half of the book, where at first he is haunted by the ghost of his grandmother, who was his companion on his first sojourn there and has since died. Eventually, though, he begins to go out into society, where he visits the Verdurins, who have rented a house in the country, and the Cambremers, who, as it happens, are the Verdurins’ landlords. Nominally, the Cambremers rank higher in society than the Verdurins, though Mme Verdurin is so fanatically devoted to nurturing her “salon” of mostly preposterous and second- or third-rate artists and intellectuals that by sheer energy she manages to repeatedly outmaneuver and upstage the Cambremers.

Here, amid a maze of allusions and asides, is Proust’s description of M. de Cambremer’s face:

M. de Cambremer bore little resemblance to the old Marquise [his mother]. He was, as she used affectionately to put it, “altogether on his father’s side.” For anyone who had only heard speak of him, or even of letters from him, of a lively and apt turn of phrase, his physical appearance was a surprise. No doubt you would grow accustomed to it. But his nose, in order to come and take up its crooked position above his mouth, had chosen perhaps the one oblique line, out of so many, that you would never have thought of tracing on his face, one that denoted a common stupidity, made even worse by the proximity of an apple-red Norman complexion. It is possible that M. de Cambremer’s eyes had preserved in their lids something of that Le Cotentin sky, so soft on those beautiful sunny days when the stroller is amused to see, halted beside the road, and to count in their hundreds, the shadows of the poplar trees, but those heavy, rheumy, badly drooping eyelids would have prevented intelligence itself from passing through. And so, disconcerted by the thinness of that blue gaze, you turned back to the big, crooked nose. By a transposition of the senses, M. de Cambremer looked at you with his nose. This nose of M. de Cambremer’s was not ugly but, rather, a little too beautiful, too strong, too vain of its own importance. Hooked, polished, shiny, spanking new, it was quite prepared to make up for the spiritual insufficiency of his gaze; unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ in which intelligence is revealed, the nose (whatever their intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussions of one feature on the others), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity exhibits itself the most strongly.

This nose is almost a character in its own right, a distant relation of the schnozz in Gogol’s story titled “The Nose” (what else?) and of the nose of the great leader in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

I don’t ever tire of Proust’s social observations; it’s when he’s discussing his own love life that I have trouble. Throughout Sodom and Gomorrah, he’s in a relationship with Albertine, the “seaside girl” he first met at Balbec in volume two. In some ways, their relationship has become cozy, and it gave me a certain satisfaction to see them snuggling together at one point in a railway car. But romance for Proust is always a matter of shadow boxing with himself, and he seems at times almost determined to find a reason to spurn Albertine. There is always a kind of void at the center of the narrator’s romantic obsessions: he sees his own emotions, and he sees the time and place of an encounter, but he does not or cannot even imagine the inner life of the other person. Here he is confronting Albertine after an acquaintance has suggested that she has been conducting a lesbian relationship with another of the seaside girls, Andrée:

Albertine, even before swearing to me that it was not true, expressed, like everyone upon learning that such things are being said about them, anger, concern, and, with regard to the unknown slanderer, a fierce curiosity to know who he was and a desire to be confronted with him so as to be able to confound him. But she assured me that she bore me, at least, no resentment. “If it had been true, I would have told you. But Andrée and I both loathe that sort of thing. We haven’t reached our age without seeing women with cropped hair who behave like men and do the things you mean, and nothing revolts us more.” Albertine merely gave me her word, a categorical word unsupported by proof. But this was precisely what was best calculated to calm me, jealousy belonging to that family of morbid doubts which are eliminated by the vigour of an affirmation far more surely than by its probability. It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials. We must be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves, that some are. It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it.

This is about the extent of the “Gomorrah” side of things in Sodom and Gomorrah. There’s something quite profound in the way that Proust follows this convoluted psychological thread, but along the way Albertine is left in the dust. She is a necessary catalyst for his meditation, but a closed book to him nonetheless. The last line of the book gives us this declaration (spoken to the narrator’s mother): “I absolutely must marry Albertine.” This after he has been considering breaking off the affair altogether. To say that the factors contributing to this decision are obscure is an understatement. No telling how the matter will turn out, but I’m not anticipating that he’ll follow through on this intention.

* * * *

At times when reading the earlier volumes of In Search of Lost Time, I’ve found it difficult to understand why Proust should rank with Joyce, Woolf, and the other high modernists. But Sodom and Gomorrah has made me a believer. This book is unsurpassed in its own peculiar way, language and thought are melded together such than neither can be thought of as separate from the other. This is why quoting Proust is so difficult. No idea or thought is discrete, everything flows along like a wave that changes but never quite resolves. Proust’s writing is quantum in the sense that it is made out of discrete bits: words and ideas, yet it appears to the reader as something indivisible.

Amid such imaginative force, it was astonishing at a single moment in the book to discover the author undisguised, sitting in his dark room. The glimpse is uncharacteristically brief:

I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness.

#71: The Long Ships, by Frans G. Bengtsson

The Long Ships is a great read—it’s like a great adventure movie, except that you get to know a lot about everyday life in 10th century Scandinavia. Reading this book immediately after reading The Odyssey, it belately dawned on me that both books are about sea-going adventurers in long-ago times.

The Long Ships was more purely entertaining because its author understood the minds and expectations of 20th century readers. Frans G. Bengtsson was writing in Swedish in the early 1940s. His book is about the fictional life and experiences of an individual named Red Orm. Orm (the “Red” is just for formal occasions) grows up on a farm in what is now southern Sweden, but is shanghaied by a Viking raiding party and quickly earns the trust of the sailors and becomes a full-fledged member of the ship’s crew. He sails with them to Spain where they are captured by Moors and then serve as galley slaves for a couple of years. Orm has a knack for making the best of situations—his full moniker could easily be “Lucky Orm.” By taking advantage of his opportunities he works his way up to being a member of a high-ranking official’s private bodyguard. In this capacity he participates in a raid on the Spanish town of Santiago de Compostela, then in Christian hands, where he ultimately finds himself in possession of a boat, a crew of compatriots, and a very large bell taken from the town’s cathedral. Recognizing his opportunity, Orm and his compatriots abscond with the bell, sail north, and eventually present it as a gift to King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark. A little digging around on the web reveals that the high-ranking Moorish official was a real person (Almanzor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almanzor) and that he did in fact lead a raid to Santiago during which the cathedral’s bells were captured. They were then melted down to make lanterns for the Great Mosque of Cordoba. The historical record says nothing about a Viking crew making off with the largest bell, but you almost expect to discover that that happened too. That’s how deftly Bergtsson weaves the experiences of his fictional hero into the actual events of 10th century Europe.

Orm goes on to have several additional adventures that I will not summarize here. He is a shrewd and wily fellow—like Odysseus—but he is also just an average guy who makes the most of his opportunities. He falls in love (with one of King Harald’s daughter, as it happens), makes friends, and deals with people and situations as best he can. Bengtsson shares Orm’s thoughts and feelings with the reader, and as a result we feel as if we know him. So we root for him and experience his victories and defeats vicariously. Because that’s how novels work.

Thinking back on The Odyssey, we never have any opportunity to get so chummy with Odysseus. His author (who may have been but was probably not an individual named Homer) is as much an advocate for his hero as Bengtsson is of his, but he has no interest in humanizing him, making him seem like a regular guy. This is neither a defect nor a choice—Homer was writing before the kind of characterization that Bengtsson employs had been invented.

This is not to claim that The Long Ships is a better book than The Odyssey. It’s a bit like the difference between a fine antique and a high-end reproduction of a fine antique. The original item ultimately has greater value, but the knock-off is probably preferable for everyday use. Your enjoyment of the newer object is not complicated by a need to appreciate its originality or understand something of the circumstances in which it was created.

But as different as these two books are, there are also similarities. Both Odysseus and Orm live in worlds without formal laws or government. When dealing with adversaries, they rely entirely on their own resources.

Odysseus needs to rid his home of the 108 suitors who have grown accustomed to whiling away their days in his palace. He doesn’t have the option of obtaining an eviction notice or a restraining order; nor can he just evict them single-handedly.

Orm’s domestic crisis occurs when a renegade force attacks his homestead while he is away on an expedition, killing several of his associates and making off with his daughter and his livestock. Orm is fortunate that he returns to his home the very day after this attack. Like Odysseus, he gathers a group of trusted allies, and with them he plans to track down the assailants and recover what is rightfully his. He plans a three-pronged attack with the primary thrust coming from the enemy’s flank—like Odysseus, he must take care to not be predictable.

It’s very satisfying to imagine dealing with those who have offended or harmed us in such a way. Think of all the movies, starring John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, where circumstances conspire to leave the hero with no other option than to make his own justice, with copious violence. The difference is that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood live in worlds where there should be a legal authority they can appeal to; typically (and, for the sake of the story, fortuitously) these authorities are absent, or turn out to be corrupt or ineffectual. On some level the implication is that relying on laws, lawyers, and law enforcement is for weaker, lesser mortals. Doing what other people tell you to do, obeying the damn government, constraining your own rights and priorities to accommodate due process of law, well, to hell with that.

In the worlds of Odysseus and Red Orm, there are neither governments nor laws, at least not written laws. We admire them because they refuse to be intimidated, but also because they are stronger and smarter than their adversaries.

Who can say if there were really such contented Vikings as Red Orm? Or if their contentment would be like his. We might as well ask what kind of jokes Charlemagne would have liked. We know lots of things about long-ago people, but we don’t know their everyday attitudes or what their interpersonal relationships were like. Because that wasn’t the kind of thing that those people thought it was important to record for posterity. So maybe the best policy is just to read The Long Ships because it’s such a great adventure story, and not too much about exactly which century Orm belongs in.

#70: The Odyssey, by Homer. Translated by Emily Watson

The Odyssey and The Iliad were first set down on paper—or papyrus, or sheep intestine, or whatever it was—around 725 B.C., or, if you prefer the counterintuitive nomenclature, late in the 8th century B.C. But these works depict events that are supposed to have actually taken place about 400 years earlier. Though non-experts couldn’t distinguish the cultural norms of 8th century B.C. Greece from those of 12th century B.C. Greece, these were, as I learned from reading M.I. Finley’s The World of Odysseus, very different times. Homer was looking back on what he considered a purer, more exemplary time, much as Walter Scott was when he wrote about 12th century England in his 1820 novel Ivanhoe.

It's a wonder to me that we aren't more disoriented by the details of the story. Perhaps we're just able to ignore what doesn't make sense to us. Among the most valuable “gifts” that Odysseus and his fellow kings can confer on each other are women (because can you ever have too many?) and … tripods. The latter might put us in mind of photography, but originally these were devices for holding a pot over a fire. My guess is that they were valuable because they were made out of metal, a valuable resource in ancient Greece.

The version of The Odyssey that I read is a new translation by Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Though the translation is in verse (iambic pentameter), it was not a difficult book to read. Watson’s language is mostly straightforward and free of archaic words and phrases. Had Watson rendered Homer with a lot of formal, old-fashioned English we would intuitively understand that she was using archaic English to convey the idea that we are looking far into the past. But the linguistic conventions of 18th century England don’t really get us any closer to 8th century B.C. Greece. So for the most part, Watson sticks to words that are in the average person’s vocabulary. In one passage I was even surprised to find the word “babysit.”

This approach worked for me, but by the same token I do not think I would enjoy a modern colloquial translation of, say, The Bible. I got to wondering why the two cases seemed so different. Though both The Bible and The Odyssey were composed in ancient languages, only the former is strongly associated with a particular translation—that is, the King James version. Most of us can quote various bits and recognize any number of passages from this translation. Along with Shakespeare, it is a foundation for eloquence and wisdom in the English language. You don’t have to be religious to be familiar with “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

The Odyssey, by contrast, comes down to us as stories—as content rather than form. Our families have not been hearing passages from The Odyssey every Sunday for the past several dozen generations. Both books are full of religion, but in the case of The Bible, that religion, though it continues to evolve and mutate, is still in force, whereas the religion of The Odyssey has been consigned to the cultural ghetto that we call “fantasy and science fiction.” We have trouble even thinking of it as a religion. (Interesting mental exercise: what if Zeus and Athena were now being declaimed by shady online preachers and cynical politicians, and Jesus was a "franchise" for comic books and Hollywood blockbusters?) It’s hard for us to feel the force and relevance of Zeus and his gang, to understand how the ancient Greeks regarded the gods in their pantheon as they went about the daily business, but there is nevertheless a pretty clear continuity from the Greeks, to the Romans, to Roman Catholicism, which retains a substantial amount of mythological specificity, with its virtual pantheon of angels, archangels, and saints, to idol-free modern Protestantism. But the name “Zeus” does not signify anything remotely similar to what the name “Jesus” does to modern readers. Which brings to mind one of the more interesting episodes of the original Star Trek series.

But back to the translation. I like that Emily Watson’s version is free of the cultural baggage of 30 centuries. It’s stark and immediate. After I’d finished reading the whole thing, I searched online and found that I could listen to Ian McKellen reading all 24 books of Robert Fagles’ prose translation. In the past I’ve tried comparing different translations of, for example, Russian novels, and there is usually a fair amount of wording in common between translations. That wasn’t the case this time. Entire sections were shuffled and rearranged, so that my eye had to run backward and forward over pages of Emily Watson’s translation to keep my place as I listened to McKellen’s declamations. Two words would become ten or vice-versa. Without any knowledge of ancient Greek, I can’t be sure which translation aligns better with the original: Watson might have taken liberties to get the words to fall into tidy metrical patterns; Fagles might have inflated the language to heighten the drama.

But my sympathies are with Watson. Her version feels leaner and more eloquent. If I’d come upon Fagles/McKellen first I’m sure I would have been quite happy with that version. It’s quite… passionate. But Fagles wants to be sure that we’re impressed and entertained--he wants to give us a ripping yarn. So he plugs in an amplifier: where Watson gives us “Calypso, the great goddess,” Fagles gives us “Calypso, the bewitching nymph, the lustrous goddess.” Watson’s “men” becomes Fagles’ “comrades,” and Watson’s “told” is Fagles’ “harangued.” Those examples are all from the first hundred lines of the poem.

One significant difference is that the term that Watson renders as “slave” Fagles renders as “housekeeper” or “attendant.” I can understand both decisions: Watson wants us to understand the nature of the relationship without any extenuation, while Fagles wants to normalize it, to make it seem as natural as it must have seemed at the time.

As for McKellen, I have reservations, though he is very lively. His reads everything in an atta-boy go get ‘em sort of tone that seems to pat the hero on the back at every opportunity. As though to warm the hero up for us.

Like all but the most serious scholars of ancient Greece, I am essentially just a literary tourist in the world of Odysseus—we can be entertained, instructed, and amazed by The Odyssey, but our understanding of much of what the author is trying to get across is limited.

We root for Odysseus because he is unambiguously the hero of the tale, though we are never exactly comfortable in his company. We want him to return home and reclaim his position as husband of Penelope and king of Ithaca. But maybe we raise an eyebrow when the author praises him as a “sacker of cities,” and we wonder whether it would really be necessary to kill all 108 “suitors” who have taken up residence in his palace while he has been away for 20 years. That's a lot of dead suitors.

The word “suitors” makes us think of candy and flowers, but the suitors that Odysseus must content with are not the dainty sort. They are competing to marry Odysseus’ wife Penelope and to inherit his estate, a delicate matter given that he might not be dead.

Everybody knows that The Odyssey is an adventure story, with monsters (the Cyclops), witches (Circe), angry gods, shipwrecks, whirlpools, and sirens that lure men to the deaths. But what everybody might not know is that all this action is packed into just four of The Odyssey’s 24 books. The early part of the tale deals with the journey undertaken by Odysseus’ son Telemachus to find out whether his father is still alive after 20 years. Other books deal with Odysseus’ sojourn with a people known as the Phaeacians and his efforts to persuade them to send him back to Ithaca on one of their ships. In fact, Odysseus's naval adventures are over once he sets foot back in Ithaca in book 13, just past the halfway point in the story. Over the course of the last 11 books, Odysseus very carefully sets about to reestablish himself in Ithaca. This involves identifying loyal allies, planning and carrying out the slaughter of the suitors, and reasserting his role as father, husband, and king.

Though we really don’t understand all the various protocols, restraints, and dangers that Odysseus faces in these efforts, the details are never less than interesting. Whenever he first encounters someone who once knew him back in the day, he chooses to disguise himself (with help from Athena), typically as an old beggar, in order to scope out the situation. At first this stratagem makes sense, but by the time of his last such encounter, with his father Laertes, he has already slain the suitors and reclaimed his throne. At this point the impersonation feels more like a personality quirk than a precaution.

But Homer has all along been lauding Odysseus as a liar, and it’s never just a matter of being cautious, though that’s always an ingredient. Odysseus may just be a guy who just enjoys deceiving people, whether it’s by building giant hollow wooden horses or by pretending to be a beggar. What’s next for Odysseus? One task that we know is on his list is to go steal livestock to replace the animals that have been consumed by the suitors:

I have to go on raids, to steal replacements
For all the sheep those swaggering suitors killed
And get the other Greeks to give me more
Until I fill my folds.

The good old days really are here again.

A modern writer would find ways to put us on more intimate terms with his hero. But a modern writer would have recourse to all sorts of literary and psychological resources with which to do this. We have no trouble understanding the many technological advances that have occurred in the past 3000 years—everything from the printing press to electricity to internal combustion engines to nuclear power. But there has been a parallel set of storytelling advances as well: different kinds of metaphors and styles of irony and humor, for example. Modern writers have learned how to put us inside the minds of their characters, something we as readers have become comfortable with. Homer could no more give us Odysseus’ “stream of consciousness” than he could send him home in an airplane. Emily Watson does a good job of resisting the temptation to “help” Homer by making Odysseus more like us.

#69: Behave, by Robert Sapolsky

Robert Sapolsky writes like the experienced teacher he is—he’s knowledgeable, affable, and precise, at once informal and all business. In the acknowledgements we read that he worked up the material for this book in a “small seminar that I taught a few times.” According to Wikipedia, Sapolsky “is currently a professor of biology, and professor of neurology and neurological sciences and, by courtesy, neurosurgery, at Stanford University. In addition, he is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya.”

I knew of Sapolsky from reading one of his earlier books, A Primate’s Memoir (2002). That book was both a summary of his experiences studying wild baboons in Kenya for many years, and also an account of his experiences living and traveling in Africa. I liked the way it combined science writing with a more general assessment of how the world is. I liked it so much that I gave copies to a couple of people—including my mother. When I asked her how she liked it, she wanted to know why I would think she would like a book about monkeys. My bad—she’s not fond of monkeys, apparently. I didn’t see any point in suggesting that baboons are a lot like people in many ways—ways that tend not to be flattering to our sense of being civilized, reasonable beings.

Sapolsky’s latest book, Behave, is another matter altogether, a daunting tome of over 700 pages. After finishing Behave, I retain my high opinion of its author, though I did have that “school’s out” sense of liberation when I got to the last page. Sapolsky aims high. His goal is to identify and describe—encompass—every factor that can influence a human being’s behavior, from discrete physical elements like neurotransmitters and hormones, on up through genes and evolution to such purely nonmaterial factors as empathy, language, and religion. He makes a convincing case that it’s most often the interaction between multiple factors that counts the most, just as it’s ecosystems, and not individual species, that matter most when you’re talking about sustaining natural environments on earth. The problem for me is that I think he was more determined to make an airtight case, backing up his assertions with copious evidence and citations, than he was to write a great book. I accept that, though I’d have preferred a great book.

The challenge in trying to understand human behavior is that there is no easy way to be objective, to stand outside ourselves, just as you can’t really describe an airplane while you’re flying in it. Sapolsky has one effective strategy for gaining a measure of objectivity—he knows of many cases where animals, typically primates, demonstrate behaviors that we think of as typically human. For example, there’s “stress-induced displacement aggression”:

Shock a rat and it’s glucocorticoid levels and blood pressure rise; with enough shocks, it’s at risk for a ‘stress’ ulcer. Various things can buffer the rat during shocks—running on a wheel, eating, gnawing on wood. But a particular effective buffer is for the rat to bite another rat. … Among baboons, for example, nearly half of aggression is this type—a high ranking male loses a fight and chases a subadult male, who promptly bites a female, who then lunges at an infant.

And then, to drive the point home:

Humans excel at stress-induced displacement aggression—consider how economic downturns increase rates of spousal and child abuse. Or consider a study of family violence and pro football. If the local team unexpectedly loses, spousal/partner violence increases 10 percent soon afterward.

Sapolsky looks hard to find the bright side. In discussing whether it might ever be possible for humans to become less aggressive and warlike, he tells of a particular troop of baboons that he once observed. The more aggressive males in this troop took to visiting a garbage dump behind a hotel, and, as a result of eating tainted meat, came down with tuberculosis and died. Without its most aggressive males, the troop became more cooperative and tolerant. Even after new males arrived to replace the casualties, this mellower behavior persisted. Sapolsky isn’t suggesting that baboons can become a more peaceful species. Their typical level of aggression is an appropriate adaptation to their environment. But he notes that “if baboons unexpectedly show this much social plasticity, so can we. Anyone who says that our worst behaviors are inevitable knows too little about primates, including us.”

Behave is full of studies—that is, Sapolsky tells us how people behaved when subjected to behavior studies by social scientists. For example, he cites one study that found that the percent of court cases where judges rule in favor of defendants drops from 65% first thing in the morning to 0% just before lunch, when judges are hungry and subject to “mental depletion.” After lunch, the rate of favorable rulings returns to 65%. This study was published in the authoritative and eminent “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.” Undoubtedly there is something to the finding. And yet—0%? If hunger and fatigue can affect us to this extent, how do we ever make it to 2:00 p..m. without all hell breaking loose?

Sapolsky’s standard practice is to describe experiments in which subjects are asked to do something or react to a situation while having their brain activity monitored. Sapolsky then tells us which areas of the brain were active and from that draws conclusions. For example, if the amygdala lights up, it indicates that the subject’s more primitive mind, having to do with fear and aggression, is involved. Whereas if neurons fire in the prefrontal cortex, it correlates with the rational mind, where tolerance and self-control originate. I kept imagining a kind of control room with a huge transparent three-dimensional model of the human brain, with different colored lights flashing in different areas. Sapolsky is rarely if ever skeptical about such studies. But how authentic can your behavior be when you’re hooked up to a brain scanner? Here’s a representative paragraph:

Enough is known about the neurobiology of religiosity that there’s even a journal called Religion, Brain, and Behavior. Reciting a familiar prayer activates a mesolimbic dopaminergic system. Improvising one activates regions associated with Theory of Mind, as you try to understand a deity’s perspective (“God wants me to be humble in addition to grateful; better make sure I mention that”). Moreover, more activation of this Theory of Mind network correlates with a more personified image of a deity. Believing that someone is faith healing deactivates the (cognitive) dlPFD, suspending disbelief. And performing a familiar ritual activates cortical regions associated with habit and reflexive evaluation.

Reading such passages made me edgy. (I think my amygdala must have been firing.) I have no grounds to dispute any of the findings, but I’m just not comfortable with such a mechanical perspective on human behavior. At some point, it becomes reductive. And it makes me worry about where such intricate knowledge of the brain might lead, what kinds of drugs and therapies might result.

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

That’s Hamlet, in Act 3 scene 2. So Behave was clearly not the ideal book for me. But I can’t say I didn’t learn a lot from it. For example, if I’m ever arraigned before a judge at 11:30 a.m., I’ll be sure to ask for an injunction. But I’ll bring a sandwich for the judge just in case.