Great Books Archives - Page 12 of 26

The Dull Lives We Lead

“It was not in his nature to be superlative in anything; unless indeed, he was superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity.”

That is how George Eliot describes the protagonist in her novella, The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton.

Eliot’s first published work of fiction is a tale of a curate of a small church in England in the mid-19^th century. Reverend Barton is indeed a thoroughly undistinguished man who leads a rather conventional life. He muddles through life; people talk about him. The moment of high drama happens 90% of the way through the story when his wife dies. End of story.

Given that there is not much of a plot, what happens in the book? We are introduced to very many people about town. Crisp one paragraph descriptions which read like they were written for an assignment in a college English Course: “Imagine a dinner party and provide one paragraph descriptions of everyone at the table.” Amos Barton would have received an A on that assignment.

Pity the poor reviewer of Amos Barton. What does one say about a book in which nothing of any importance or drama happens to a character of no importance? In one of the many asides to a reader in the story, Eliot gives this helpful advice:

As it is, you can, if you please, decline to pursue my story farther; and you will easily find reading more to your taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing, have appeared only within the last season.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Still here? Good. Because for those of you willing to tarry a bit with Eliot’s tale, there is a lesson. It begins with this question: why do you want heroic tales of heroic individuals doing heroic things in heroic times?

For not having a lofty imagination, as you perceive, and being unable to invent thrilling incidents for your amusement, my only merit must lie in the truth with which I represent to you the humble experience of an ordinary fellow-mortal. I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles—to win your tears for real sorrow: sorrow such as may live next door to you—such as walks neither in rags nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel.

A book about an ordinary fellow-mortal? Quelle horreur! Imagine trying to have a discussion about a book like this with a couple of really brainy former students! What is there to discuss? The ordinariness of it all? It is impossible not to channel dear Mrs Farthingale!

The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,—a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favourably many years ago. “An utterly uninteresting character!” I think I hear a lady reader exclaim—Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a “character.”

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp.

Therein lies the deep challenge of a book about an insignificant life. Think about your neighbors or the people with whom you work or go to school or church. Ask yourself this: do they have interesting lives? Take the most average person you know and imagine a novel of that life. Would you want to read a novel about that life? The honest answer is “Of course not.”

The real lives of real people are boring. Yes, there may be episodes which in a skilled novelist’s hands could come to life and make a thrilling story, but the actual lives of people are rarely that exciting. People are born, some good and bad things happen, and then they die. Do we care?

Think this is melodramatic? Well then, consider Facebook (if you are old) or Instagram (if you are young). What kind of lives do people live on your preferred social media platform? We all know the answer. Everyone else leads a glamorous life online. There are a zillion stories out there about the inferiority complexes afflicting teenagers because their lives just don’t measure up. There are a zillion more stories about how people’s self-worth hinges on the number of likes on the latest post. Not the average number of likes, mind you, just the likes on the last post. What have you done to impress the world lately?

Know what is worse? Other people on your social media platform are leading impressive lives. You feel this. So, you try to impress everyone else with your own happy and fun-filled and interesting life. Ah, but secretly you know this:

Thank heaven, then, that a little illusion is left to us, to enable us to be useful and agreeable—that we don’t know exactly what our friends think of us—that the world is not made of looking-glass, to show us just the figure we are making, and just what is going on behind our backs! By the help of dear friendly illusion, we are able to dream that we are charming and our faces wear a becoming air of self-possession; we are able to dream that other men admire our talents—and our benignity is undisturbed; we are able to dream that we are doing much good—and we do a little.

And before you go feeling sorry for all those who self-esteem is crushed on an hourly basis, consider this: imagine a new social media platform that will be nothing but the boring detail of completely average people. No fancy pictures or amusing stories. No celebrities. Just stores about the mundane details of mundane lives. Interested in being on that platform? How much time would you spend reading these stories?

By the way, want to read Amos Barton? Click on the image of the book at the top of this post and you can buy it at Amazon. It’s a dull story about a dull life. You aren’t even tempted to buy this book, are you? The lives of regular people just aren’t that interesting. Think about what that says about us.

Philosophizing With a Hammer

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”
Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?
Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?
And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?
And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you one day create with me?
For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.
Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze—harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.
This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard!

With that, Nietzsche closes his book, Twilight of the Idols or, How One Philosophizes With a Hammer. It is quite natural for someone to wonder about the content of a book. After all, if you are choosing which philosophy book to read, you might be interested in knowing the subject of the books you are contemplating. This book has a fairly simple subject matter. The topic is “Nietzsche’s Ego.”

That Nietzsche had a large ego is obvious to anyone who has ever read anything he wrote. That close of the book reprinted above, for example, is a passage from one of Nietzsche’s other books; after all, he is so brilliant, he might as well quote himself. This is the guy whose wrote an autobiographical book entitled Ecce Homo with four sections: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and “Why I Am Destiny.”

So, to say Twilight of the Idols is about Nietzsche’s Ego may seem a bit underdefined. All Nietzsche’s books put his ego on display. What makes this one different is that it is nothing other than a roundabout paean to Nietzsche’s genius. His last book published before he went insane (insert the usual joke that he was always insane), it is in one way just a summary of his previous books, but as he notes in one of the maxims which lead off the book, “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” No system here folks. Just Ego.

After 44 of the enigmatic aphorisms he loved so much, Nietzsche sets out to take down Socrates. One can see why Nietzsche needed to do this. Who is the wisest and most enjoyable philosopher of all? Nietzsche wants you to think of him, but, alas, you answered “Socrates.” So, what is “the problem of Socrates”?

Whenever authority still forms a part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons.

The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is no idiot: he makes one furious and helpless at the same time. The dialectician renders the intellect of his opponent powerless. Indeed? Is dialectic only a form of revenge in Socrates?

And there you have it. You might think that reasoned philosophical discourse is a good way to think about Truth. You buffoon. You have bought into the Greek lie that there is only one choice “either to perish or—to be absurdly rational.” You want “Reason-virtue-happiness”?

The most blinding daylight; rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts—all this too was a mere disease, another disease, and by no means a return to ‘virtue,’ to ‘health,’ to happiness.

With that Nietzsche is off on his usual themes, philosophizing with a hammer, not a stiletto. The message of the book is clearly written on every page: “I, Nietzsche, am right. All others are wrong.”

Beyond the fact that he is right, what is the philosophy he is summarizing here? This is where talking about Nietzsche always gets one into trouble. No matter what you write, it needs qualifications and elaboration. Nietzsche was not systematic; he explodes on the page in prose so wild, your jaw just gapes as you follow the wild ramblings. I want to say that Twilight of the Idols is not a good starting place for reading Nietzsche, but truth be told, there is no good starting place for reading Nietzsche. The art of reading Nietzsche is to dive in and go along for the ride until the shape of things begins to appear. While at times (or more accurately, while most of the time) he is totally incomprehensible, his prose is so carefree, it is an easy matter to just keep going looking for a place to stand.

Nietzsche doesn’t like the world in which you live, that world in which you believe there is a moral code, that you are a mere human who needs to care about human rights, that world in which the weak rule the strong. Nietzsche is screaming that you should liberate yourself from all such thoughts, that your trust of reason is simply denying your animal desires, that we should all rise up and live true human lives, that the strong should no longer be told to act like the weak, that the tarantulas have poisoned the society so that you no longer are willing to acknowledge your will to power and seize what you can. That description of Nietzsche is woefully incomplete and inaccurate.

Why read Nietzsche? When he is wrong, he is spectacularly wrong in ways that help make clear the important questions. But, he isn’t always wrong; sometimes he is right for the wrong reasons, which means he makes the Truth even clearer than it otherwise would be. A couple of examples. First:

Anti-natural morality—that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preached—turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts, now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, ‘God looks at the heart,’ it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life and posits God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch. Life has come to an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins….One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem.

Fascinatingly, that is about as good a description of the theology of Christian morality as could be written by any Christian theologian. Remove Nietzsche’s sneering tone and you are left with the statement that morality is a denial of human instincts and that the only way to examine the value of human life and thus the need for a moral code is to have a starting place outside of humanity. Without that standpoint outside of humanity, it is an unapproachable problem. This is exactly what Christians say: man is born with original sin, and the Law and Grace were both provided to allow man to lead a more properly human life, a life that runs counter to the sinful desires of the flesh, and that such a law is found only from outside humanity, in the revelation of God Himself. Nietzsche and the most devout Christian theologian ever agree that all attempts by humans to create a moral code independent of the existence of a God are doomed to fail because they are grounded on nothing.

A second example:

In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our ‘higher schools’ are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet ‘finished,’ or if he did not yet know the answer to the ‘main question’: which calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like ‘callings,’ precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of ‘finishing’: at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.

Here again, one does not have to agree with Nietzsche’s story of the slave revolt and the rise of the weak and the sickness of Western Civilization to see in that description one of the best explanations for the collapse of the liberal arts even in the liberal arts colleges.

To read Nietzsche is to experience the thrill of watching the guy with the hard hammer smash everything in his sight. Reading Nietzsche is work; he never even tries to make his ideas clear to the reader. But reading Nietzsche is fun if you give up the attempt to finish reading him, if you start by saying, “I am only a beginner, a child, reading Nietzsche;” then you find therein whatever you find therein.

Going Home

“Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers—things utterly without value? Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.”

What is housekeeping? Indeed, what is a home? Given the title, it is not a surprise that Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is a reflection on that question.

The book is curious in a way. It is a novel with characters and a plot and a noticeable beginning, middle, and end. But, you’d never notice that while you are reading it. Sure, you notice the people and that there are things happening, but the reading experience is akin to being immersed in a sleepy timeless realm where nothing really changes. You just watch the events pass by as if you were a stowaway on a railroad car, hearing the steady drumbeat of the engine, but you aren’t really coming from or going anywhere in particular.

What is housekeeping? The narrator Ruthie has a sister, Lucille who knows. Housekeeping is most definitely not what is going on in their home. Adult caretakers move through their lives but the house itself, which may seem solid, is decaying around them.

An example. The children, who never knew their father, are further bereft when their mother commits suicide. They are cared for by a grandmother, a widow, who then too dies. A couple of great aunts come along, but they too soon leave when Sylvie, their aunt, shows up to watch them. Sylvie likes to eat in the dark, so in the summer they would have dinner at 11. A typical meal:

The table would be set with watermelon pickles and meats, apples and jelly doughnuts and shoestring potatoes, a block of pre-sliced cheese, a bottle of milk, a bottle of catsup and raisin bread in a stack. Sylvie liked cold food, sardines aswim in oil, little fruit pies in paper envelopes.

The house itself is like that dinner. Whatever happens to be there is there. The turning point in Lucille’s life comes one evening when she suddenly turns on the light in the kitchen.

We saw that we ate from plates that came in detergent boxes, and we drank from jelly glasses. (Sylvie had put her mother’s china in boxes and stacked them in the corner by the stove—in case, she said, we should ever need it.) Lucille had startled us all, flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes, the two cupboard doors which had come unhinged are were propped against the boxes of china….Everywhere the paint was chipped and marred. A great shadow of soot loomed up the wall and across the ceiling above the stove, and the stove pipe and the cupboard tops were thickly felted with dust. Most dispiriting, perhaps, was the curtain on Lucille’s side of the table, which had been half consumed by fire once when a birthday cake had been set too close to it. Sylvie had beaten out the flames with a back issue of Good Housekeeping, but she had never replaced the curtain.

The back issue of Good Housekeeping is all you really need to get the picture. It is not long before Lucille, just entering her teenage years, decides to move in with a friend and build a normal life in a house which is kept according to conventional norms, a house where Good Housekeeping is more likely to be read than used to beat out a fire.

What does it mean to keep a house, to build a home? You know the answer to that. Housekeeping is bringing order to a disordered world. Housekeeping is establishing normality amongst chaos. Housekeeping means your door is a gateway where you leave the messy world outside and enter a world which is kept. Lucille grows up to realize that she longs for that kept house and she moves out of her childhood house in order to find it.

The narrator Ruthie is given every opportunity to follow Lucille into that world of tidy homes. She does not. Why? It is not inertia. It slowly dawns on the reader as the story moves by that Ruthie sees something essential: she is not at home in this world. It is not that the physical house in which she lives is not her home. There are no locations on earth which are home.

Ruthie is a fugitive and a vagabond in the world. Ruthie is Cain.

Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be reconciliation and return.

Housekeeping is a reminder to all of us that this world is not our home. We trace our lives mourning by mourning. The state of Ruthie’s childhood home is merely an emblem of the sadness and decay that make up her existence. Yet Ruthie does not despair; she never despairs. She realizes that her life is rootless and thus never pretends she has roots.

Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand.

It sounds from this description that Housekeeping is a novel of despair and sadness, but it is not. It is a beautifully written tale of prophecy: “So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.” We begin in a garden. We end in a garden. And in between we are restless wanderers. What then is life? We are just seeing the fragments.

Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion—that everything must finally be made comprehensible—then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. Or why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that out thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, in not to be knit up finally?

Robinson is echoing Eliot: “Surely the great poet is, among other things, one who not merely restores a tradition which has been in abeyance, but one who in his poetry re-twines as many straying strands of tradition as possible.”

Housekeeping tells us that we are merely vagrants and wanderers on this earth. It also tells us, however, that the law of completion is real, that everything must finally be made comprehensible, that the strands will be knit again into a pattern, and that when that pattern is complete and order and beauty are established, it will be home.

The Roaring or Boring ’20s

“As Charles Lamb said of Godwin, he had read more books not worth reading than any man in England.”

That is from Bring on the Girls by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. It is not quite an accurate description of the book in which I read the quotation. But, it is too close for comfort.

Back in the 1920s Wodehouse and Bolton were collaborators writing a swath of Broadway Musicals. Many of them were hits. Big hits! They were famous! Bring On the Girls is a memoir of those years. It tells the behind the scenes tales! All the juicy gossip! Character assassination galore! Girls and more girls!

And it is the 1920s! The Roaring 20s! Flappers and speakeasies and, did I mention, girls! For reasons which elude me, there is an incredible fascination with the era. The Great Gatsby is one of the Great Books on the Most Beloved lists of my students. When I ask why, the answer is inevitably some variant of “Duh. It’s about the 1920s.” (No, my students do not actually say “duh.” They just give me that look. You know the one.)

And then, we have P.G. Wodehouse! That man can write! He is funny and witty and hysterical and amusing. Guy Bolton? You probably have never heard of him unless you are an aficionado of 1920s Broadway musicals. But, no matter. Wodehouse Himself in a co-author!

What could go wrong with a book like this? You can imagine the birth of the idea. It’s the early 1950s. Wodehouse is world famous. People buy his books. So why not a memoir with Bolton about their time together in the 1920s? Instant Best-Seller.

Structurally, the storyline is perfect. They meet, they work together, and their first musical is a smash hit. Elation! Their next few, mixed bags. Depression! But, wait, then come more hits! Hooray! More hits! Double Hooray! And then, the crowning achievement. They get contracts to go to Hollywood! To write for the movies! They travel West! They arrive! Book ends: “And they knew they were really in Hollywood.”

Should you rush out and read this book? Not so fast. All that promise. The payoff? Eh.

Have you ever been to one of those cocktail parties where you end up getting stuck talking to the guy who is an inveterate name-dropper? The whole conversation is just one long exercise in listening to stories whose sole function it to allow the person to mention a famous person. Painful, right?

Now imagine 294 pages of name-dropping. Nonstop name-dropping. This book even has an index, so you can look up all the names. It is an eight page index. There are over 300 individual people listed in that Index. Do the math. The book has more than one name dropped per page.

Ah, but surely it is wonderful to read about Wodehouse (P G. Himself!) hobnobbing with all these famous people, right? Well, to be fair, you have never heard of almost all those 300+ people. Well, I suppose if you study the world of Broadway in the 1920s; then you might have heard of more than half of them. There are some famous people here, though, that even we regular people will recognize. If you read this book, you will see those famous people mentioned. Like these marvelous tidbits:

You have heard of Clark Gable, right? Here he is:

Sylvia Hawkes was not only pretty, she had a pretty sense of humour. George Gershwin was swept off his feet by her, so was Lord Ashley, heir of the Earl of Shaftesbury, so was Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, so was Lord Stanley of Alderley and so, finally, was the very sure-footed Mr Clark Gable.

That is the only mention of Clark Gable in the book. But, how about Ring Lardner or Oscar Hammerstein? Well, they share a sentence:

There were other neighbors. Eddie Cantor for one, Ring Lardner for another, Elsie Ferguson and, most esteemed of all, a young man named Oscar Hammerstein, who was just beginning to make a name for himself in the musical comedy field.

Charlie Chaplin? He gets a whole paragraph! It’s a description of a sketch he did in a variety show on a boat. O’Henry? He gets half a page! A conversation in which he says nothing. And so on.

To be fair, George Gershwin gets a bit more face time, since he collaborated with Wodehouse and Bolton. Flo Ziegfeld and his Follies get mentioned often for the same reason. Fred Astaire shows up too! W.C. Fields get a few pages!

The bulk of the book is just watching names drop by for a brief visit. Surely, you object, there must be some Wodehousian moments. Some levity and funny stories. Yep. They are there. Some of them are straight out of Wodehouse’s other stories. Or in one case, the other way around. There is a tale of Bolton’s misguided involvement with an Umbrella Club. The story reappears in Wodehouse’s novel French Leave:

“I was thinking of my Umbrella Club.”
“What’s that?”
“Haven’t I mentioned it to you? It’s an idea I got from a delightful book of reminiscences by a couple of musical comedy writers”

Now that is funny—a character in a Wodehouse novel has read Wodehouse’s memoirs! But, if you want to learn more about the mysteries of the Umbrella Club, French Leave is a much better book to read.

This isn’t the only cross-reference. Wodehouse has a butler, for example, who acts and talks exactly like Jeeves. I mean, exactly like Jeeves.

The appearance of Jeeves under a pseudonym gives up the game. This is not a reliable account of the 1920s. A brief hunt around reveals the story. Guy Bolton wrote the bulk of the text. He is undoubtedly responsible for the endless, pointless name-dropping. Wodehouse, who was famous for writing funny books, then comes along and tries to make the book funnier by adding in some comic relief.

The best summary of Bring on the Girls is in the book itself in a description of one of the stars of the day: “There are no doubt by this time a whole generation of voting-age who will fail to see the significance of all this enthusiasm.” Exactly.

This isn’t really a bad book, it is just a thoroughly disappointing book. The only type of person to whom I could recommend it is someone who thought Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was fantastic. If you like rambling anecdotes about the 1920s which do little other than offer an excuse to drop a name or two, then you’ll love this book. If you just want to read Wodehouse being Wodehouse, look elsewhere.

Conducting and Lecturing

A question which has puzzled me off and on for decades is what music conductors are doing.

Sure, they wave their hands around a lot. And they get applause both before and after a concert.

But, what exactly are they doing?

Don’t get me wrong. I knew what my music teacher was doing when I was in elementary school band. In practices, she would spend a lot of time trying to convince us we needed to stay on the beat. That is kinda important. But come concert time, she would start us and we would all screech our way through the piece. Maybe we all accidentally ended at the same time once or twice.

But, surely there is a big difference between conducting a bunch of 11 year olds and conducting professionals. Professionals already know how to keep time, right? They know how to read music, right? So, what is the conductor doing?

Enter Mark Wigglesworth, The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters. The key to the answer is in an aside which comes about midway through the book. It is the answer to a trivia question I never even knew was a trivia question, but once you hear it, you realize a lot about music history. What was the “first symphony to need a conductor”? Think about it for a moment. You don’t need a conductor for a soloist piece. You can play a violin quartet no problem without a conductor. When do you start needing a designated person to stand up front waving around a baton?

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the “Eroica” is arguably the first orchestral piece to benefit from constant, albeit extremely subtle, fluctuations of tempo. It is perhaps the first symphony to need a conductor.

The mystery of what conductors do evaporated while reading this book. Truth be told, I am now puzzled why I was ever puzzled. Does a professional Shakespeare troupe need a director? After all, the script is there, all the actors are professionals, what is the point of a director? That is a really silly question. Or, does a professional football team need a coach? After all, one of the players can call the plays and all the players are professionals, so what is the point of a coach? Again a silly question. What is a conductor, then? The musical equivalent of a director or a coach. It’s obvious now that I think about it.

So, is Wigglesworth’s 250 page book worth reading to get such an obvious conclusion? Sort of. The book is definitely overly long—like far too many books, it would be vastly better at two-third’s or maybe even half, its length. But, scattered throughout the book are some rather interesting observations on both music conducting and, much to my surprise, lecturing.

First, the music notes. The best line in the book:

Richard Strauss said that a conductor should only ever conduct the strings, the woodwind should be treated like soloists, and if you so much as look at the brass they will just play too loudly.

The primary job of the conductor is to manage the parts; not only does someone need to set the time for the piece, but the volume of both the orchestra and in particular, the volume of the assorted parts in the orchestra has to be determined by someone. If everyone in the room decided their part was the most important and played loudly, there would just be a cacophony of noise. Someone has to tell the trombones to be softer and the clarinet to play a little louder.

When an orchestra does not sound together, Wigglesworth argues, it is the fault of the conductor being too indecisive. The conductor’s chief role on the night of a concert is to signal to the orchestra that someone is in charge here. That gives the players confidence. It also, interestingly, give the audience confidence. Curiously, the way the audience hears a piece may depend crucially on how the conductor behaves. Imagine a rousing piece of music with a conductor standing still slightly waving one hand to beat time. Imagine a softer quiet piece in which the conductor is gesticulating wildly. Both images would seem so off it would indeed affect how the audience hears the piece of music.

Conductors theoretically could have a massive influence on how a piece sounds. Start Beethoven’s fifth at a very slow pace, and it would seem like a different piece of music.

The interesting question to me is whether or not the universal availability of recordings has led to a more homogeneous approach to performances around the world. The fact that conductors can easily hear “how a piece goes” without having to make any decisions about what the composer might have meant does diminish the potential for a genuinely individual response…

The idea that we are witnessing a homogenization of music is fascinating. Particularly when that fact is coupled with another of Wigglesworth’s observations: there is a distinct variation in the way different nationalities play music.

But put a hundred cosmopolitan players into an orchestra and as a group their national characteristics still reveal themselves with all the stereotypical differences of that particular country’s identity. These are generalizations, but it is hard not to be aware of the work ethic of the Japanese, the suave style of the Italians, the passion of the Hungarians, the efficiency of the Americans, the sophistication of the Swedes, the teamwork of the Dutch, the freedom of the South Americans, the cultural confidence of the Germans, “no-worries” attitude of the Australians, and the more-passionate-than-we-like-to-admit British. Music might be international language but it is one full of many different accents and dialects

Reading that makes me really want to hear a compilation of the same piece of music played by different national orchestras. Someone should put this together as a YouTube video. (You may take on this task, Dear Reader.)

It wasn’t just the observations on music that intrigued me, however. The more shocking discovery was how much being a music conductor is like being a college professor. The parallels were at times uncanny. Here I am merrily reading about music conductors and I run across a passage that makes it sound like I am reading about my job. Simply convert the following from conductors and music to professors and a particular subject, and you have a manual on teaching well.

For example, “The easiest way to give the impression of being at ease with yourself is to be at ease with yourself,” gets at the root of why nervous professors are not good professors.

Or on why I lecture without notes:

Conductors need to share their love for the music with those who are playing it, and it is easy to underestimate how open one has to be to do that. Speaking personally, I find that openness more accessible if I am conducting without a score. For all sorts of reasons, conducting by heart, which is a far healthier way of describing it than “from memory,” forces me to express myself more, and therefore, I hope, better. And if you conduct by heart, it doesn’t really matter whether the score is in front of you or not.
Memory can be a distorting tool. And it is more reliable if your system for learning a score is one of trying to understand it rather than remember it. Once you understand something, it is impossible to forget it. It is also a far more positive, stimulating, and meaningful way to prepare. Because whatever physical control or psychological intuition conductors may have, it is your relationship with the music that lies at the heart of your artistic identity: you are a musician first, a conductor second.

Or this on why I subconsciously wave my hands around constantly when lecturing:

The strength, mobility, and flexibility of our hands are extraordinary. Their vast range of movement offers limitless opportunities for communication, and we subconsciously associate their nerve-rich tactile nature with a great deal of sensory perception….Hands seem to speak a primordial language, with a vocabulary that no one who seeks to be understood ignores.

Or on perfecting the craft of becoming not an average, but a truly great, teacher:

The problem with trying to learn from watching great conductors is that one of the things that makes them great is that they are unique. I cannot think of any two, dead or alive, who are similar either musically, physically, or psychologically, and the moment students start to copy one is the moment they identify themselves as students. It is perhaps more useful to watch those who show you what not to do, and you would probably learn more by attending bad rehearsals.

And, finally, on why teaching is such an amazing job:

It can be incredibly rewarding to help young people unearth more of their ability than they might have realized they had, and it is a privilege to be the one who accompanies them into the kind of emotional discovery that, for example, the first playing of Mahler symphony can unlock. With nothing to lose, with no consciousness of the possibility of failure, they live on the wild side of the music, they embrace the edge, and countenance no compromise. Although they are unaware of it, their innocent wonder at the extraordinary power of music can be a reminder to their conductor of just what a special life it is. The “teacher” gets just as much out of it as a student.

What do conductors do? The same thing college professors do. Make something written in the past come alive and inspire a whole new generation to realize that there is both Beauty and Truth in this world.

Is All Time Redeemable?

Let us begin, once again, by expressing gratitude to the Library of America.

American Science Fiction: Five Classic Novels, 1956-58, closes with a book by Fritz Leiber, The Big Time.

I had never heard of this book. It is almost certain at you have not heard of it either. Yet, there it is making the list of the Big Five in the LOA collection.

It is not that it is completely forgotten. Neil Gaiman knows about it:

It’s funny, smart, and resonant, playing out huge themes on a tiny stage, and it demands a great deal of its readers, so it’s no surprise that it was rewarded with the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1958, nor that, over fifty years later, it remains relatively unknown.

That is a pretty accurate description. It is definitely a clever story. It is also sadly true that if I had picked up this book in high school, I would have set it right back down after about 10 pages.

The problem? It is virtually unreadable if you expect that you will have any idea what is going on. The book drops you into a universe and the story begins. No background. You just sort of piece together what everyone is talking about as you merrily read along. Lots of little things are never explained. Lots of big things, the sort of things you really want to know, are also never explained. Yet, you do learn exactly enough to make sense of the story even if you have no idea how the universe in which the story is set actually works.

It’s a time travel book. Well, sort of. There actually isn’t any time travel in the book itself. Unless traveling outside time counts. Hmm. It is really hard to explain this universe of this book.

Let’s start again. There are people traveling back and forth through time, changing the past and the future. You’ve read stories like that. In this universe, however, there is the Conservation of Reality. Small changes in the past do not create radical changes in the future. So to make a big change in Time, you have to go back and forth, constantly changing things until the small changes add up to a really noticeable change. Even still, Reality has a way of reasserting itself. OK, so far?

Now imagine two competing forces trying to change history in different ways. That is the Change War.

Now, what are the effect of all these changes? From the first page of the novel:

You don’t know about the Change War, but it’s influencing your lives all the time and maybe you’ve had hints of it without realizing.
Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn’t seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it’s hard to believe they’ll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you’ve had hints of the Change War.

On that basis a fun story is built, all set in a place cleverly named “the Place,” which is like a rest stop for soldiers in the Change War. Well worth the read if you like stories that read like a massive jigsaw puzzle where you don’t have the box so you don’t know what the picture is and, alas, lots of the pieces are missing.

Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound too fun. Why read a story like that? For exactly the same reason we read Science Fiction in the first place. It helps us think about reality by exploring the fringes of reality. This book is a pleasant little romp through our sense of time.

Start with Eliot:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

“Burnt Norton” is a perfect expression of the idea that Time is a fixed thing. There is One Past and One Present and One Future. There are no alternative realities. There are no roads in time which are less traveled; there is only the road actually traveled.

One alternative to Eliot’s timescape is probably the normal way to think about time. There is a past which is fixed. We live in the present. Our decisions in the present determine the future. The past is fixed, but the future is unknown. We create the future by our decisions in the present. Make a different decision and the future changes.

The difference between these two ways of thinking about time is related to the question of free will and determinism. Question: Is the next sentence I will type when I finish this one already determined or will I be able to make a decision about what sentence I will type as soon as I finish tying this sentence?

The Big Time offers a third possibility. What if Eliot is not just wrong about the future? What if he is also wrong about the past? What if the past can change just as easily as the future? What if that thing you remembered but found out didn’t happen actually did happen and you are just remembering the way the past used to be? What if when you and your friend are arguing about what actually happened 20 years ago, that both your memories are right, but one of you is just remembering the way the past used to be and one is remembering the way the past is now?

Why is that impossible? If all time is unredeemable, then Eliot is right and the past and the future are fixed. But if the future is alterable, why isn’t the past also alterable? As one of the characters in The Big Time explains it:

It’s about the four orders of life: Plants, Animals, Men and Demons. Plants are energy-binders—they can’t move through space or time, but they can clutch energy and transform it. Animals are space-binders—they can move through space. Man (Terran or ET, Lunan or non-Lunan) is a time-binder—he has memory.

Demons are the fourth order of evolution, possibility-binders—they can make all of what might be part of what is, and that is their evolutionary function.

Maybe the reason you think Time is bound is the same reason that plants think space is fixed. You haven’t learned how to move through the universe of possible pasts.

I don’t like that conclusion either. But then I like Eliot’s conclusion. All time is unredeemable. Nonetheless, given the choice between a) only the future is unknown and b) both the future and the past are unknown, I am not convinced the latter is less likely than the former. If all time is not unredeemable, all bets are off.

Test: Is the last book you read the same book which the author originally wrote? How do you know?