James E Hartley

Destiny and the Coin Flip

“Most people dont believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.”

No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

Anton Chigurh is what you, Dear Reader, would call a homicidal psychopath. That is not what he would call himself. The difference between your description and his description reveals much about how you see the world.

(Side note: Chigurh is pronounced something like “sugar.” There is no way to really know how to pronounce it. Anybody who ever asked him is probably no longer among the living.)

The plot of the novel follows the actions of four men near the border of Texas. Llewellyn Moss, mid-30s, married, living in a trailer park, driving a pickup truck. Sheriff Bell, a small town sheriff, the old man of the title. Carson Wells, a rather cocky bounty hunter. And Anton Chigurh, a force of nature. It is Chigurh who interests us here.

Chigurh moves through the novel with an unflappable stoicism. You can imagine him delivering all his lines in a cold and patient monotone. You can imagine him shooting a man with zero hesitancy or doubt or even a twinge of guilt. You can imagine him accomplishing the task in front of him with a cold, almost mechanical precision. Who is this guy, you ask? You’ll never know. He shows up with no backstory. He just is.

At three points in the novel he explains his philosophy to a person who simply cannot comprehend what he is saying. It is hard to believe that such a person can really exist. What type of person is he? You are now thinking he is a cold-blooded psychopath. Maybe you are right. Maybe.

Twice, Chigurh takes a coin out of his pocket, flips it, and demands that the person to whom he is talking call it. He doesn’t explain what happens if you call the coin the right way, but neither the person of whom the demand is made, or you the Reader, have any doubt that calling the coin is a matter of life and death.

At this point, Chigurh sounds a bit like the Batman-villain Two-Face, who leaves his decisions up to chance by flipping a coin. But, that is not at all how Chigurh sees the coin flip.

Put yourself in the position of facing Chigurh. Is he there to kill you? Your immediate reaction is that he is deciding whether to kill you or not. So, you appeal to him. You tell him he does not have to do this; he does not have to kill you. His reply: “Everybody says that.” Everybody imagines that Chigurh is making a choice. So he takes out a coin, flips it, and tells you to call it.

You now think that your life is being decided by the random flip of a coin. But as Chigurh will explain, it isn’t. The coin has been flipped. Nothing you can do or say will change the outcome of the flip. You can appeal to the coin all you want, but whether it is heads or tails will be totally unaffected by your pleas. So, call it. (This is the Reader Participation portion of the essay—call the coin. The result will be revealed shortly. The whole message of this essay depends on you calling the coin flip now. So, do it. After all, what do you have to lose by calling this coin flip?)

Was your fate just decided by how you called the coin after reading the last paragraph? If you called it wrong, will bad things happen? You think the coin has absolutely nothing to do with whether your future is good or bad, whether you live or die. Calling the coin wrong will not cause bad outcomes in your life. Chigurh pulling a trigger is what causes the death. But, this is where Chigurh will explain that your view of the world is wrong. “Look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.”

As Chigurh explains, the coin flip does not determine what happens to you. The coin flip merely reveals destiny. You were either going to say the same thing as how the coin came up or you were not. If you are destined to live, then obviously your call and the coin flip will be the same. “It doesn’t have to be that way” makes no sense. What is is what is. Nothing you can say or do will change what is. Nothing you can say or do will change whether the coin was heads or tails. And just as what is is what is, what will be is what will be. You call the coin wrong, then you will die. All Chigurh is doing is acting out what will be. You cannot change the coin. You cannot influence Chigurh. Both are impersonal forces, implacable and unchangeable.

Most people don’t believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.

Why don’t you believe there can be such a person? Why do you call him a homicidal psychopath? You don’t like the idea that whatever will be will be. You don’t like that idea at all. But what if your preference does not affect what will be. What if no matter how much you plead, the coin will still be what it will be. What if there is a person who is just like that coin? What if the whole universe is just like that coin?

You called the coin above. It was Heads. There is nothing you can do about the fact that you either called it correctly or not. And now you have to live with the consequences. You have no say at all over what consequences will come from whether you called Heads or Tails above. You scoff. You insist that nothing will come if it. You say it is just a silly trick in an essay. Maybe you are right. Maybe. But there is nothing you can do about it, is there?

Lost in Thought

It is always nice to talk about a book which has been getting universal over-the-top praise and which actually merits that praise. If the discussion below does not convince you to read this book, chalk it up to the failure of Your Humble Narrator and not the book. You, Dear Reader, want to read this book.

But first, what seems like a digression. “What did you think about the book? What was good about it? Bad about it?” Every time I am teaching a Great Books class or having a discussion with a reading group, that is always the first question I ask. It is the single most important question I ask in any discussion, not because all by itself it generates the best and most thoughtful answers, but because it centers the discussion exactly where it belongs. A person reads a book, and the single most important thing about that interaction is the effect the book has on the Reader.

The best reason to read books, particularly Great Books, is because they force us to confront our own thoughts, to think about what we believe, and to wrestle with the unanswerable questions. We become deeper, more fully human, as our interior life develops book by book. Yes, we can read books for information, we can read them to know what other people said, we can study them to do well on a test or a paper, but all of those purposes for reading a book get in the way of discovering the most important thing in a book. There is simply no pleasure like developing your own thoughts on the questions which matter most by letting your mind wander over the best that has been thought and said.

Convincing people that cultivating the joy of learning should be the real aim of education in an uphill battle. Most people think of education as something with a tangible purpose, usually related to employment. Class by class, book by book, indeed blog post by blog post, I wage my cheerful battle, constantly exclaiming: Look! This book is really amazing!

You can thus imagine my joy in reading Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. It is a wonderful book containing in its depths a new way to make the case for the type of education that matters most, the type of education that is not contained in a college classroom.

Stylistically, the book is marvelous; Hitz’s prose has an erudite charm, patiently inviting the Reader to join her in developing an intellectual life. Imagine a bookish dinner-table conversation full of wit and insight, and you are imagining having Hitz at the table.

Hitz begins by noting that much learning is done for instrumental purposes, “fame, prestige, fortune, and social use.” Those purposes are nice and all, but if you are learning to achieve any of those things, you miss the joy of an intellectual life. The other type of learning is purely for its own sake. It is not a means to an end; it is the end. Convincing people to learn for instrumental purposes is easy. Pay $70,000/year for four years, get a diploma, and then get that job with that nice salary. Convincing people to learn purely for the sake of learning, to read books purely for the joy of reading books, to think thoughts purely because it is pleasurable to do so…that is the harder task.

For the most part, the modern college is of little help in teaching the pleasures of learning for its own sake. As Hitz notes:

If intellectual life essentially involves a reaching out past the surface, a questioning of appearances, a longing for more than is evident, then it has next to nothing to do with what is commonly called “knowledge”—the absorption of correct opinions. And yet correct opinions are what our contemporary intellectual institutions traffic in: the correct opinions about literature, or history, or science, or mathematics. Hence the universality of the bullet point, delivered in a college lecture, whose temporary memorization is the condition for the above-average grade. Hence too the administrative emphasis on learning outcomes; hence the politicization of everything, the reduction of learning to its social and political results.

Colleges have a hard time escaping this trap. Even when they realize they have replaced learning with propaganda, they end up advocating more “viewpoint diversity,” which as Hitz astutely notes is “nearly as superficial and dehumanizing as the forms of indoctrination it means to replace.” Now instead of memorizing one viewpoint to be repeated on an exam, a student memorizes two or three viewpoints to be repeated on an exam, and students have no trouble figuring out which of the options is the correct one.

Learning for its own sake is much more difficult. Learning for its own sake involves removing all the exterior noise which wants to interrupt as we read and think. The exterior noise is easier to eliminate, though, than the interior noise.

Intellectual life turns out to be a sort of asceticism, a turning away from the things within ourselves. Our desires for truth, for understanding, for insight are in constant conflict with other desires: our desires for social acceptance or an easy life, a particular personal goal or a desirable political outcome….“The world” that we sought initially to escape turns out to be in us, part of our inbuilt motivations—not outside us. To exercise love of learning is to flee what is worst in us for the sake of the better, to reach for more in the face of what is not enough.

The fact that developing an intellectual life is hard is one of the reasons it is difficult to persuade people it is worth doing. We are surrounded by things designed to give immediate gratification. The constant hit of dopamine from (pick your favorite pastime) is a difficult thing to set aside for a while in order to ponder the nature of revenge or whether it was possible for the world to have never existed or what restrictions on liberty increase the common good. Asking yourself who you are and whether you have a purpose never quite seems as attractive as that thing you need to do to gain social acceptance or a pay raise or to relax at the end of the day.

This is where Hitz’s book achieves it greatness. The picture it paints of the intellectual life is sublime.

What good is intellectual life? It is a refuge from distress; a reminder of one’s dignity; a source of insight and understanding; a garden in which human aspiration is cultivated; a hollow of a wall to which one can temporarily withdraw from the current controversies to gain a broader perspective to remind oneself of one’s universal human heritage. All this makes clear at the least that it is an essential good for human beings, even if one good among many.

Why does an intellectual life bring these benefits? Why does reading Great Books, reading Dickens or Tolstoy or James, and pondering them purely for the joy of doing so enhance our lives? Why is this joy different from all other joys? Why is developing an intellectual life better than watching gladiator matches or spending time on social media? “Because reality has a better chance to break through.”

Reality breaking through is an intriguing formulation. One of the most common objections I hear from students about why instrumental learning is better than learning for its own sake is the need to live in the world rather than in some lofty tower of thought. Learning how to price municipal bonds seems much more important than asking whether charging interest is inherently a form of theft which leads to figuring out the nature of property and why it exists as a concept which leads to the question of what brings human happiness. Which of those questions is “real”? Which of those questions really matters? Bond pricing formulas are easy to learn and knowing them can bring tangible financial benefits. Pondering the relationship of property to human well-being? That is a question that really matters.

Hitz ends the book wrestling with a question that has obviously troubled her for years. Is it morally acceptable to discover the hidden pleasures of the intellectual life and then live a life simply enjoying those pleasures? Isn’t such a life inherently self-centered? Shouldn’t we be living our lives to help others?

Hitz makes a stab at an answer which clearly doesn’t entirely satisfy her. (By the way, another one of the marvelous things about this book is that Hitz puts her own unanswered questions on display. It is so refreshing to see an author acknowledge that the book you are reading does not solve all of life’s mysteries.) If you want to help others, Hitz argues, you can better do so if you have discovered the intellectual life. The argument is subtle, to be sure, but learning in order to help others is instrumental and misses the real value of learning. Learning for its own sake allows you to see reality, to see the things that really matter. Having seen those things, you will be in a much better place to help others. The tricky thing if you want to help others is approaching the intellectual life for its own sake and not simply for the sake of this other goal of helping others.

I think Hitz’s argument here is right as far as it goes, but because this is the question that troubles her so much, she misses the real force of her own argument. Imagine somebody taking Hitz seriously and developing an intellectual life by reading Great Books and thinking long and hard about deep questions. Over time, reality breaks through and this person discovers answers to deep questions and leads a satisfying intellectual life. What will this person do then? Isn’t it obvious that the answer is “Well it depends on the person and the answers that person found to deep questions”?

One treat which is remarkably obvious to all those who have found the hidden pleasures of the intellectual life is that there is not a one size fits all answer to how life should be led. Indeed, it is one of the joys of an intellectual life that all answers are provisional, that the questions never stop. Does an intellectual life lead to a conviction that helping others is important? Obviously, for some people it does lead to that conclusion. Those people, having thought deeply, seeing reality, will then launch out on a lifetime of helping others, not because they started with believing that this is something that would bring acclaim or assuage guilt, but because having tasted the depths of their own humanity, they realize that helping others is the activity an intellectual should do. Will everyone discover this? Maybe not. Doesn’t the fact that we might come to different answers increase the joy of the intellectual journey?

Hitz did not need to be concerned that her argument does not prove that the intellectual life necessarily leads to a life of service to others. Hitz’s life provides the argument that some people will indeed find that answer. Hitz wants to lead a life in service to others, she uncovers the joy of the intellectual life, and the result is a book which provides a magnificent service to others. Everyone who reads this book and is persuaded to take just one more step along this journey owes her a debt of gratitude.

A Jolly Time with Martin Chuzzlewit

If you made a list of the Best of Charles Dickens, you would almost certainly not include Martin Chuzzlewit. You would not be unusual.

A sign of where this book ranks in the popular imagination: Doctor Who once met Charles Dickens and while expressing his general admiration, he did wonder what in the world Dickens was thinking when he wrote this novel.

Is it really that awful? A complicated question, that.

The subtitle of Martin Chuzzlewit could be A Tale of Two Novels. Well, really two novels and a short story.

The whole work is a little over 800 pages long. First, an aside: the sheer length of the typical Dickens book prevents many people from starting one. This is unfortunate. The novels really aren’t as long as they seem when they are sitting on the bookshelf. Remember, the novels were originally published in installments; when the installments were collected into a single volume, the break points were eliminated. Fear not. With the handy aid of Wikipedia, you can find the original installment break points. My advice: read Dickens in those installments. Each section is about 40 pages long. One section at a time is a rather short bit of reading, and the next thing you know, you are done with the book. Moreover, the installment breaks themselves are really interesting to notice, something which is totally lost in plowing through the book all at once.

Returning to Chuzzlewit: the first big break in the book comes around the halfway point. The first half of the novel was an awful slog. Characters are introduced and then meander around doing little to nothing. Then new characters come along and also do nothing. A few of the characters rise to the level of potentially interesting, but, even those characters have nothing to do and get lost in the general malaise of a novel heading nowhere.

Then quite suddenly, the novel shifts into something wonderful. The characters become Dickens characters, alive and full of irrepressible charm. The plot jerks into motion with dastardly villains doing evil things to good people. Through an improbable set of coincidences, the good people win out in the end. The good people live happily ever after; the villains meet their just ends. Best of all, characters who had potential realize their potential. Pecksniff, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Mrs. Gamp, Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley all become those perfect Dickens caricatures who reveal more about humanity than you would think could be possible.

This break in the quality of the novel was quite jarring. Here I was dutifully picking up the book again to read another 40 pages without anticipation that it was going to be a pleasant hour, and suddenly, I found myself immersed in a world of joy. Jonas Chuzzlewit turned from dull mean guy into a villain right up there with Bill Sykes. Pecksniff became fully Pecksniffian, a bombastic smarmy, manipulative conniving man whose every speech is so over-the top you can’t help but laugh at the wonder of it all. It even has one of those marvelous endings which Serious Literary Critics™ hate, but I absolutely adore, when we suddenly find out that one of the characters who seemed so mean was really just pretending all along and is actually a good guy!

Naturally enough I got to puzzling over why the novel suddenly became good, but while my cursory search of the matter did not turn up anyone talking about this (for reasons which will be discussed anon), I did find a remarkable coincidence, which may in fact be explanatory. In the midst of writing Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens also wrote A Christmas Carol. Then I looked at the dates and much to my shock, the story took on its charm at the very time when A Christmas Carol showed up.

The likely reason that nobody else is splitting the novel in two as I have done here is that there is another split which is even more obvious and which takes up all the air in the room in discussions of this novel. Suddenly, for no apparent reason in the middle of the long meandering first part, young Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley head off to America. This journey occupies three (non-sequential) installments. They go to America, meet some Americans, and then come home. There is absolutely nothing in this entire journey that advances the plot of the novel in any way whatsoever. You could rip this whole section out and there would be no break in the story.

Indeed, the American section would be better ripped out and published separately. It is nothing more than a chance for Dickens to vent his spleen a bit. The message: America is a land of slave-owners, swindlers, and saps. Had Dickens simply put this satire into a stand-alone work, it might have been quite good. There is some potential here for something akin to what Twain did on a regular basis. But, crammed into a novel about the Chuzzlewit family in England, the whole thing just leaves the reader trying to figure out where this is going. The fact that it goes nowhere then just compounds the bewilderment. As Doctor Who puts it: “Mind you, for God’s sake, the American bit in Martin Chuzzlewit, what’s that about? Was that just padding? Or what? I mean, it’s rubbish, that bit.” On the other hand, G. K. Chesterton likes that bit…which just shows the sad fact that Chesterton is not always reliable.

Enough about the downsides of the novel. Let us praise Mark Tapley for a bit. As Tapley is always quick to explain, he is a jolly fellow. But, he suffers from an unbearable problem. When you are living in good circumstances, it is easy to be jolly. There is no credit in being jolly when things are going well. For example:

“Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There an’t much credit in that. If I was very ragged and very jolly, then I should begin to feel I had gained a point.”

“There might be some credit in being jolly with a wife, ‘specially if the children had the measles and that, and was very fractious indeed. But I’m a’most afraid to try it. I don’t see my way clear.”

What is Mark Tapley to do? Everywhere he goes, he finds himself jolly. He desperately wants to find some way out of this problem:

‘I was thinking,’ Mark replied, ‘of something in the grave-digging way.’
‘Good gracious, Mark?’ cried Mr Pinch.
‘It’s a good damp, wormy sort of business, sir,’ said Mark, shaking his head argumentatively, ‘and there might be some credit in being jolly, with one’s mind in that pursuit, unless grave-diggers is usually given that way; which would be a drawback. You don’t happen to know how that is in general, do you, sir?’
‘No,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘I don’t indeed. I never thought upon the subject.’
‘In case of that not turning out as well as one could wish, you know,’ said Mark, musing again, ‘there’s other businesses. Undertaking now. That’s gloomy. There might be credit to be gained there. A broker’s man in a poor neighbourhood wouldn’t be bad perhaps. A jailor sees a deal of misery. A doctor’s man is in the very midst of murder. A bailiff’s an’t a lively office nat’rally. Even a tax-gatherer must find his feelings rather worked upon, at times. There’s lots of trades in which I should have an opportunity, I think.’

It is hard to fully recommend Mark Tapley as a role model, but there is something quite admirable about a guy whose biggest complaint is that things around him never seem bleak to him. He goes to America with Martin because maybe America will allow him to feel credit for being jolly. You will be happy to hear that things are indeed so awful in America that Mark fully deserves all the credit he can get for being jolly even in America!

All of which raises an interesting question: do you get credit for being jolly while reading Martin Chuzzlewit? For the first half, most certainly, but then the book becomes wonderful and I am afraid you will just have to be content with getting no credit for being jolly as you finish the novel.

Can’t You Read the Sign?

“Signs, Signs, everywhere there’s signs.”

Thus saith Tesla. And before that Five Man Electric Band. And before that C.S. Lewis. And before that John.

Not to disparage the first two, we’ll start with Lewis.

The Silver Chair is book 4 in the Chronicles of Narnia. (Yes, I know saying it is the 4^th book is fightin’ words in some circles.) If you haven’t read the Chronicles of Narnia, you really owe it to yourself to do so. They are all very quick reads which can be enjoyed by children as nice fantasy tales and by adults as a font of philosophical asides. But, (hopefully) you knew that already.

I just reread The Silver Chair, and this time out it got me to pondering the nature of signs. Hang out in religious circles long enough and you will hear many times that something or other was a “Sign from God.” Hang out in non-religious circles and you’ll hear the same thing without the “of God” part. The implication is the same in either case. Someone was faced with a decision and along came this external event which told the person what to do.

The intriguing thing about Signs from God or from some Undefined Sign-Generating Force is the need for interpretation. Signs of this sort do not show up in Red Hexagons. This type of Sign is something that is not obviously a sign at all. The question is how to interpret this thing that may or may not be a Sign.

The Silver Chair provides a marvelous example. Jill Pole shows up in Narnia and meets Aslan, who gives her Four Signs to aid her in the quest he has set for her. The Signs all seem pretty straightforward. Yet, as the story proceeds, Jill and her companions (Eustace Scrubb and Puddleglum) completely miss the first three signs. The signs pointed to things which were only obvious in retrospect. And therein lies the first problem with Signs. ”Find the ruined city of Giants” seems like a pretty straightforward command, but if the city is really, really ruined and it is dark and snowing, you may not recognize that those heaps of stones around you are actually the ruined city of Giants. You imagined something looking like a slightly ruined city with obvious buildings missing a few windows or a collapsed roof; you were not imagining large rocks in your way as you try to find a path.

Having missed the first three signs, our heroes reach the moment of crisis with the Fourth Sign. The sign was that the person for whom they were searching would be the first person who asks them to do something in the name of Aslan. Suddenly a raving lunatic who is tied to a chair utters that request.

“It’s the Sign,” said Puddleglum. “It was the words of the Sign,” said Scrubb more cautiously. “Oh, what are we to do?” said Jill.

Are the words of the sign the same thing as the Sign? How do you know? Maybe it is a coincidence? Maybe it is an accident? Maybe the Evil Queen knew about the sign and arranged this as a fake Sign?

“Oh, if only we knew!” said Jill.
“I think we do know,” said Puddleglum.
“Do you mean you think everything will come out right if we do untie him?” said Scrubb.
“I don’t know about that,” said Puddleglum. “You see, Aslan did not tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he’s up, I shouldn’t wonder. But that doesn’t let us off following the Sign.”

In the fantasy land of Narnia, it all worked out nicely once they followed the Sign. As a children’s story it has a nice message about following directions.

But, Lewis is playing a deeper game than just thinking of this as a children’s story. It is the use of the word “Signs” that tips it off. The story would work just as well if Aslan had given Jill four instructions or directions or tasks; indeed all those words would fit the matter better than the word “Signs.” So, why use “Signs”? Why the repeated emphasis on the word “Signs”? Look at the discussion above and note the prominence and repetition of the word “Sign.”

Lewis is clearly referencing the Gospel of John in this matter. One of the (very many) fascinating structural details in the gospel of John is the author’s use of the word “sign.” At the end of the first miracle in this gospel (changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana), John writes, “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.”

A bit later on we get “This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.” Later still, “When people saw the sign that he had done, they said, ‘This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world.’” Towards the end of the gospel, we get Johns summary:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

The prominence of the word “sign” in John’s gospel prompted people to start counting, and there is widespread consensus that John carefully constructed the story to have Seven Signs, seven being one of the numbers of perfection. Alas, there is not total agreement on which seven events in the book are the Seven Signs—but that is a matter for another day.

It is the connection between Lewis and John that is of interest here. In what sense are the events in John actual signs? As John explains, they are signs because they point to something else. It looks like Jesus is just doing a miracle or a magic trick, but John wants the reader to realize that if you are focusing on the event itself, you are missing the thing to which the sign points. Jesus feeding 500 people with trivial amount of food is a sign pointing to something much larger.

Is it obvious that these events in John are actually signs? Is the fact that John tells us that something is a sign proof that it is actually a sign? Johns says that healing a kid in Capernaum was a sign. Is he right about that? I say that the fact that it is sunny outside today is a sign; am I right about that? The debate on either of those events between a believer that it is a sign and a skeptic is inevitably tedious. “Yes, it is a sign.” “No, it is not.” Repeat.

This is where Lewis enters the conversation. Is it a Sign or just something that looks like a Sign? How do we reason this out? There are, after all, truly many ways to interpret this event, only one of which is that it is an actual Sign. Some of those other ways of interpreting the event are every bit as reasonably and logically consistent and believing it is a Sign. “Oh, what are we to do?” asks Jill (and you). “Oh, if only we knew!” exclaims Jill (and you).

Puddleglum has the only possible answer. You don’t try to reason it out. You just decide. Is this a Sign or not? If so, do what the Sign indicates you should do. And then take the consequences. Figuring out if something is a sign, Puddleglum implicitly argues, is not the sort of thing you reason out through logical argument. You either believe or you do not. It’s faith.

This is why discussions about signs are so frustrating to people. Someone comes along and says they have a sign from God that they should do something which you know is preposterous or silly or wrong. So, you try to reason them out of it, but all your fine reasoning falls on deaf ears. The person who believes in the sign, by the way, is every bit as frustrated as you are; why can’t you read the Sign?

We often don’t recognize the prominence of faith in our understanding of the world. Sometimes the signs are right there in front of us, with John pointing to them in big letters saying “Look, here is a Sign.” We can spend a lot of time like Jill agonizing over what to do about those Signs. That agonizing will get us nowhere. Some things are not amenable to reason. Instead, we can do something much better. As Lewis writes in big letters: You have no choice; Embrace your inner Puddleglum.

Don’t Bother to Pick-Up

When you pick up a Library of America volume, you naturally enough expect the material within to be the best of American Letters. That is, after all, the whole point of this non-profit publication company. The physical quality of the books is as good as it gets and the books themselves are full of the best that has been written by Americans.

Take Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, nicely paired with Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s. These are not detective stories; these are stories of criminals. For the most part, it is obvious why the particular novels are included in these collections. After reading the six novels in the first volume and two of the five novels in the second, I had no hesitation in saying that these really are amazing examples of the type of gritty noir you would expect to read in a cheap paperback edition in the mid-20^th century.

Then I got to Pick-Up, by Charles Willeford, originally published in 1955. Don’t be alarmed that you have never heard of this novel. Sure, it is one of five novels selected to be in the Library of America volume of Crime Novels from the decade of the 1950s. That makes you think it is a really big important novel. But, here is a shocking bit: when you go to look up the novel on Wikipedia, it does not have a page. That’s right. Nobody has bothered to create a Wikipedia page on one of the five novels included in this Library of America collection. Charles Willeford has a Wikipedia page. Some of his other novels have Wikipedia pages. But, this novel does not. Then you go to Amazon and find several Willeford novels still in print with publishers seeking a profit. But not this one. The only way to get this novel is from the Library of America.

OK, so maybe this is a forgotten gem. Maybe the Library of America is bringing a great novel back from oblivion. So you set out to read it. And what do you find?

Harry, the narrator, meets Helen when she wanders into a diner where he is working. Harry and Helen set out on a torrid affair. Helen just ran away from home. Harry is living in a run-down apartment, floating from job to job. He quits his job at the diner and Helen moves in with him and they live on alcohol and love until the money runs out. Harry decides he should get another job, but when he heads off for work, Helen ends up in bars drinking with other men. So, clearly Harry can’t go to work. What to do? Obvious: a suicide pact. Which fails. So they head off to the hospital to get psychiatric help. Which fails. So, here we have a couple of alcoholic losers who can’t grasp that maybe they ought to think about their lives three days into the future.

Helen got out of bed, slid her arms around my neck and kissed me hard on the mouth. “You shouldn’t have to work, Harry,” she said sincerely and impractically.

Eventually they get around to making another suicide pact. Harry strangles Helen and then turns on the gas to kill himself. But, darn it, he left the transom widow open, so he didn’t die. That’s OK. He killed Helen after all, so he will get the death penalty. Off to jail. Wait! Coroner’s report comes back and Helen died of natural causes before Harry strangling her had a chance to kill her. Harry is set free (apparently if someone has a heart attack while you are strangling them, you are totally innocent.) He heads back to his old apartment to collect his stuff.

And we are now three paragraphs from the end of the novel. Riveting? Hardly? Willeford writes in a sort of flat prose so the story moves along quickly enough. But, this isn’t Chandler or Hammett or any other master of noir prose. Moreover, at no point do you feel the least bit of sympathy for Harry and Helen. Well, if you do feel sympathy for them, then you are the type who just feels sympathy for everyone at all times. There is nothing particularly sympathetic about Harry and Helen. Oh, and remember this is in an anthology called Crime Novels; where is the Crime? Harry’s attempt to kill Helen in a double suicide pact which turned out not be a crime after all. There is no crime here. Just a couple of losers floating through life.

How did this otherwise entirely forgettable novel rise up out of the obscurity into which it had fallen and get included as one of the Big 5 of American Noir in the 1950s? It had to be because the editor, Robert Polito, thought the last three paragraphs were stunningly great, that they turned this novel from a humdrum decent way to pass the time into something that needed to be preserved for all time. Those last three paragraphs:

I walked down the steps to the street and into the rain. A wind came up and the rain slanted sideways, coming down at an angle of almost thirty degrees. Two blocks away I got under the awning of a drug store. It wasn’t letting up any; if anything, it was coming down harder. I left the shelter of the awning and walked up the hill in the rain.
Just a tall, lonely Negro.
Walking in the rain.

It is really only the penultimate paragraph, five words long, that matters. Until that moment, Harry never mentioned his race.

OK, so what? This is where the novel get truly puzzling. Willeford wrote this whole novel and then at the very end tells you that Harry is black. What was he trying to convey in that moment? What reaction was he expecting or desiring the reader to have? I can think of several possibilities.

1. He wanted readers to realize that they are racists. Here they are reading a noir novel and assuming the narrator is white, but he is really black. Skimming through assorted recent online reviews of this novel (most of which torture themselves to avoid revealing the “Just a tall, lonely Negro” end), this is the preferred assumed message. All those racists in the 1950s would have to face their racism in assuming that the hero of the book was white, when the hero is really black. This must have forced all those terrible people in the 1950s to rethink their racist presumptions.

But, there is a problem with that narrative. While Harry is indeed the narrator, he is hardly heroic. He is an alcoholic loser. It is hard to see how it is a sign of racist attitudes to assume that this good-for-nothing suicidal attempted murderer is white. Is it racist to assume that the pathetic loser in a novel is white? If confronting racial attitudes is the point, then wouldn’t this book confirm racist stereotypes? “Gosh, I assumed this terrible person was white, but he is really black” is hardly what we now consider an expression of racial sensitivity.

2. So, maybe Willeford was trying to do something different. Maybe he is trying to make you think the novel is deeper than it actually is. There are many episodes in the book which could be read differently if one is inclined to think differently about Harry depending on his race. Three examples.

a) At one point Harry and Helen are in a bar and some drunks in the bar take exception to the fact that Harry and Helen are together and try to muscle in and take Helen away from Harry. If Harry is white, this is easily explained; as the novel makes very clear, Helen is incredibly attractive, while Harry is not. So, the drunks just want the hot girl to be with them instead of with this pathetic loser. If Harry is black, then the drunks are objecting to this black guy being with this white woman.

b) Helen’s mother shows up in the middle of the novel, trying to convince her daughter to come home. Helen refuses. So, Helen’s mother, seeing the squalor in which they are living, decides to send them $25 a week as long as they promise never to come back to Helen’s hometown. If Harry is white, this is because Helen’s mother is embarrassed that her daughter is with a total loser. If Harry is black, this is because Helen’s mother objects to the interracial relationship.

c) When Harry is in prison he has to meet with a psychologist. The psychologist starts grilling Harry about his sex life, starting when he was a child. The psychologist is rather pushy about all this; Harry get mad that the psychologist is so obsessive about his sex life. If Harry is white, this is an example of a Freudian State Psychologist who sees everyone through the lens of their sexual lives. If Harry is black, this is because the psychologist has racist assumptions about the sex lives of black children.

That list could be expanded pretty easily. So, what is the message of the book? Is the reader supposed to realize that all these episodes which were perfectly understandable when Harry was presumed to be white were actually misunderstood? Is this proof of the omnipresence of racism? It is hard to see how it could be that. Every single episode which you can chalk up to racism once you know Harry is black was perfectly explainable when Harry was white. So, if you can explain the episode without knowing Harry’s race, then can you turn around as say that this is a story about the effects of racism?

3. Was Willeford trying to show that there really isn’t a difference between blacks and whites? Was he trying to show that the race of the narrator is irrelevant to the story? It is hard to justify that explanation too given the way the ending was constructed. Willeford was clearly trying to shock the reader.

I am running out of ideas here. My personal reaction to that ending was “Oh, so that is why this rather pedestrian novel is in the Library of America volume.” I then figured it must have sent shock waves through the land when it was published in 1955, only to discover the aforementioned total lack of any interest in the book at all.

You can file this essay under “Books you now don’t have to bother to read.” And for all those other contemporary reviewers out there who think the book is a vehicle for the modern racial sensibilities, think about it a bit more. Just because the author drops in a five line paragraph about race at the end of the book does not mean the book validates your racial preconceptions about people in the 1950s.

Your Mind is an Arrant Thief

How does your mind work? Has there ever been anyone who didn’t spend time musing on that question? What we can dub “Mind Studies” is a rather popular genre of literature. Not only are there the books written by psychologists and neuropsychologists and biologists and economists, but every self-help book ever written fits into the same category. Discover how your mind works and you can unlock the key to making it work better. So, if I told you I recently read one of the most fascinating books on how your mind works, you are interested.

What does a Great Novel do? It creates a world that starts with some important aspect of humanity, isolates it, and creates a story which brings that aspect into sharp relief, allowing the Reader to see more clearly than would otherwise be possible. If you want to think deeply about X, you read novel Y. One of the many beautiful things about a Great Novel is you are never quite sure what it is you will learn. Truly Great Novels have the potential to show more than one thing, and the Greatest of the Great show new things on each rereading. So, if I told you I recently read a novel that illuminated things I never imagined could be illuminated in a novel, you are interested.

The books described in the last two paragraphs are obviously the same book. But the descriptions in the last two paragraphs are not the normal descriptions of Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

If you picked up and flipped through a copy of Pale Fire, you would not recognize it as a novel. It begins with a Foreword, which is not that uncommon. Then comes the poem. A 999 line poem divided into four cantos. The first and fourth cantos are 166 lines; Cantos 3 and 4 are 334 lines. (Is that fact important?) There then follows 173 pages (in the Library of America edition) of Commentary on the poem arranged by the line numbers. The book ends with an index, allowing you to easily find where a given reference is found.

Pale Fire looks identical to a critical commentary on a long poem entitled, you guessed it, “Pale Fire.” The only sign on first glance that things are not what they seem is Nabokov’s name on the cover of the book. A bold publisher would have left off Nabokov’s name. Pale Fire, by John Shade, edited with critical commentary by Charles Kinbote. Since the book was published in 1962, pre-internet, it would have been fascinating to see if the ruse would have worked.

But, we know it is fiction because we looked at the cover. How is it a novel? The editor, Kinbote, tells the story in the foreword. He is an academic who lives next door to the great poet John Shade. Kinbote tells Shade the story of how the king of Kinbote’s native Zembla (one of those tiny European countries that barely show up on a map) had to flee the country in the midst of a revolution. Shade sets out to write an epic poem about this story, and the result is “Pale Fire” (the poem). Sadly, Shade is murdered right after finishing the poem, but fortunately Kinbote rescued the Great Poem and was able to publish it with all the critical annotations necessary to fully understand this most magnificent poem. Between the poem and the commentary, we get a complete novel of Kinbote’s relationship with Shade as well as the whole history of the events in Zembla. So far, so good. Kinbote is a pleasant prose stylist; the commentary flows right along.

If you read the book and your brain stopped there, you have just read a nice little story and probably enjoyed it. There is nothing on the surface of this story that disturbs that nice little narrative. There is no grand revelation at the end that there is more to this book than meets the eye. But your mind, working away in the background, notices something before too long. Kinbote is the exiled king. The story of the exile is his story. And now you think this is a slightly more intriguing story of an exiled king who is trying to keep his identity hidden. Why does he need to hide his identity? Because those Zemblan revolutionaries have sent an assassin out to kill him. And, alas, you realize as the story moves along, Shade was accidentally killed by the assassin who was trying to kill Kinbote. Again, if your mind stopped there, you have a nice little story.

But, your mind doesn’t stop there either. The poem comes before the commentary. When you read the poem, you had no idea at all that it was about the fate of the King of Zembla. It is only when Kinbote tells you that certain lines are hidden references to Zembla that you would have any idea at all that Zembla is in any way relevant to this poem. The poem itself actually seems incredibly autobiographical; the poet is talking about his own life throughout. This makes you wonder as you read the commentary whether Kinbote is right that this poem was really about Zembla at all. Indeed, as Kinbote stretches the attempts to connect this poem you just read to the history of Zembla, it goes far beyond the breaking point.

The poem itself is a lot like something T.S. Eliot would have written in his “Waste Land” years. You read it and every now and then a bit of a story pops up and you can make sense of it for a few lines, but mostly it is the sort of poem you realize you’ll have to live with for years in order to start piecing together the images. Just in case you miss the Eliot comparison, there is a truly funny part about a third of the way through the poem. The poet’s daughter is in another room and starts calling out to her parents to ask them the meaning of some words in a book she is reading. The words she asks about: Grimpen, Chtonic, Sempiternal. If you laughed when you saw those three words, you have spent a lot of time puzzling out Eliot. (Kinbote’s commentary on this scene: “I believe I can guess (in my bookless mountain cave) what poem is meant; but without looking it up I would not wish to name its author. Anyway, I deplore my friend’s vicious thrusts at the most distinguished poet of his day.”)

And now your mind starts working a bit harder in thinking about this novel. If Kinbote is not being completely truthful about the connection between this poem and Zemblan history, about what else is he not being completely truthful? What if Kinbote is an unreliable narrator? As soon as the thought hits, you realize he is indeed an unreliable narrator.

But how unreliable? And now you can watch your own mind work. You just read this nice little book which if your mind would have left it alone would have seemed like a good story told in an unconventional format. But, your mind can’t leave it alone. Why not? Why do you feel compelled to solve the mystery of the book? The solution is just right there around the next corner, so you start recalling little oddities here and there, and you start putting together a picture of what really happened in this book. Step back and watch your mind make these connections, screaming “Aha!,” quickly followed a moment later with, “Oh, but what about this?”

Your mind starts racing through hypotheses about the book, each seemingly more outlandish than the last until you realize that the outlandish thesis actually seems to work even better that then less outlandish one. When you get really hooked you realize you probably should read the Index. Are there clues in there? If you start reading the index and looking up the passages referenced in the Index, are there even more clues there. (Yes, there are.)

Suddenly you realize this is even more intricate than Eliot. With the Waste Land or the Four Quartets, you just have a poem to puzzle over for the rest of your life. Don’t mistake how long you will ponder Eliot; as Kinbote notes in his commentary, “toilest” is an anagram of T.S. Eliot. Here in Pale Fire you have not just a poem, but a whole commentary and index as well. What fresh insights will you get with just 15 more minutes of thinking about it?

And sooner or later you realize you can’t help yourself. Your mind is wired to find ever more complicated answers to simple questions. You see clues everywhere. In fact, you start staring at passages which you originally read as straight narrative, looking for the hidden clues. The only question is how long you will keep at this game.

And when you are done playing, then you can step back and ask yourself why you played this game in the first place. Why did you make the connections you did? Where did you look for the clues? How does your mind work? Pale Fire does an incredible job at taking that one aspect of humanity—how does the mind form patterns?—isolating it and then crafting a story around it so that you can see it more clearly that you would have ever thought possible.

You want to understand how people craft grand narratives of their lives or the world which seem so different than the narratives you have crafted? Read Pale Fire.