When I got the book home, I looked for clues to the author’s name, but sadly the hand-stenciled title page had almost faded away; as far as I could make out it appeared to be something like “Maxwell Poldark”. A rudely sketched portrait on the frontispiece revealed a haunted-looking man in late middle age, with a broad forehead beneath a receding hairline, a square jaw framed by drooping jowls, a strangely flattened nose, and the sunken eyes of a bibulous insomniac. Alas, a lengthy Google search turned up nothing.

I have since made discreet inquiries amongst my international network of scholars, literary critics, collectors, and connoisseurs, and my initial impression — that this “Poldark” is a hitherto unknown bard of sublime gifts, and that the slim volume now in my possession is a major discovery of immense literary importance — has been amply confirmed. I shall not publish its contents in full before my negotiations with various libraries, academic institutions, and private collectors are complete, but it would be churlish of me not to offer at least a small sample to our loyal readers. Here, then, is an offering randomly selected — and indeed, I have reason to believe that the long-forgotten verse here presented may in fact have served as the model for one far better known, and of far humbler quality.

Drinks

I shall not see, I dare to think
A poem lovely as a drink.

A drink whose level settles south,
Whilst flowing t’ward my thirsty mouth;

A drink that looks at me all night,
And puts my troubled thoughts to flight;

A drink that may, in summer, be
A frosty beer, or G&T;

Upon whose bosom tinkles ice
And rests a lovely lemon slice.

Poems are made by Hallmark, Inc.
But I’ll just make myself a drink.

This week, feeling spent and deep in existential gloom, I decided to cheer myself a bit with a sampling from Mark Twain, America’s greatest humorist. I went to the bookshelf and took down Letters From the Earth, which Twain wrote in 1909, shortly before he died.

Here are some excerpts from Letter VII:

Noah and his family were saved — if that could be called an advantage. I throw in the ‘if’ for the reason that there has never been an intelligent person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again. His or anyone else’s.

The Family were saved, yes, but they were not comfortable, for they were full of microbes. Full to the eyebrows; fat with them, obese with them, distended like balloons. It was a disagreeable condition, but it could not be helped, because enough microbes had to be saved to supply the future races of men with desolating diseases, and there were but eight persons on board to serve as hotels for them. The microbes were by far the most important part of the Ark’s cargo, and the part the Creator was most anxious about and most infatuated with. They had to have good nourishment and pleasant accommodations. There were typhoid germs, and cholera germs, and hydrophobia germs, and lockjaw germs, and consumption germs, and black-plague germs, and some hundreds of other aristocrats, specially precious creations, golden bearers of God’s love to man, blessed gifts of the infatuated Father to his children — all of which had to be sumptuously housed and richly entertained; these were located in the choicest places the interiors of the Family could furnish: in the lungs, in the heart, in the brain, in the kidneys, in the blood, in the guts. In the guts particularly. The great intestine was the favorite resort. There they gathered, by countless billions, and worked, and fed, and squirmed, and sang hymns of praise and thanksgiving; and at night when it was quiet you could hear the soft murmur of it. The large intestine was in effect their heaven. They stuffed it solid; they made it as rigid as a coil of gaspipe. They took pride in this.

… The discomforts furnished by the Ark were many and various. The family had to live right in the presence of the multitudinous animals, and breathe the distressing stench they make and be deafened day and night with the thunder-crash of noise their roarings and screechings produced; and in additions to these intolerable discomforts it was a peculiarly trying place for the ladies, for they could look in no direction without seeing some thousands of the creatures engaged in multiplying and replenishing. And then, there were the flies. They swarmed everywhere, and persecuted the Family all day long. They were the first animals up, in the morning, and the last ones down, at night. But they must not be killed, they must not be injured, they were sacred, their origin was divine, they were the special pets of the Creator, his darlings.

By and by the other creatures would be distributed here and there about the earth — scattered: the tigers to India, the lions and the elephants to the vacant desert and the secret places of the jungle, the birds to the boundless regions of empty space, the insects to one or another climate, according to nature and requirement; but the fly? He is of no nationality; all the climates are his home, all the globe is his province, all creatures that breathe are his prey, and unto them all he is a scourge and a hell.

To man he is a divine ambassador, a minister plenipotentiary, the Creator’s special representative. He infests him in his cradle; clings in bunches to his gummy eyelids; buzzes and bites and harries him, robbing him of his sleep and his weary mother of her strength in those long vigils which she devotes to protecting her child from this pest’s persecutions. The fly harries the sick man in his home, in the hospital, even on his deathbed at his last gasp. Pesters him at his meals; previously hunts up patients suffering from loathsome and deadly diseases; wades in their sores, gaums its legs with a million death-dealing germs; then comes to that healthy man’s table and wipes these things off on the butter and discharges a bowel-load of typhoid germs and excrement on his batter-cakes.

… I will tell you a pleasant tale which has in it a touch of pathos. A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, “Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like him.”

The man studied his Bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb, and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him.

Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way.

There now. Doesn’t that feel better?

You can read Ms. Atwood’s exposition here, if you like, but I’ve also reproduced the whole thing below the fold.

John and Mary meet. What happens next? If you want a happy ending, try A.

A. John and Mary fall in love and get married. They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging. They buy a charming house. Real estate values go up. Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they have two children, to whom they are devoted. The children turn out well. John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends. They go on fun vacations together. They retire. They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging. Eventually they die. This is the end of the story.

B. Mary falls in love with John but John doesn’t fall in love with Mary. He merely uses her body for selfish pleasure and ego gratification of a tepid kind. He comes to her apartment twice a week and she cooks him dinner, you’ll notice that he doesn’t even consider her worth the price of a dinner out, and after he’s eaten dinner he fucks her and after that he falls asleep, while she does the dishes so he won’t think she’s untidy, having all those dirty dishes lying around, and puts on fresh lipstick so she’ll look good when he wakes up, but when he wakes up he doesn’t even notice, he puts on his socks and his shorts and his pants and his shirt and his tie and his shoes, the reverse order from the one in which he took them off. He doesn’t take off Mary’s clothes, she takes them off herself, she acts as if she’s dying for it every time, not because she likes sex exactly, she doesn’t, but she wants John to think she does because if they do it often enough surely he’ll get used to her, he’ll come to depend on her and they will get married, but John goes out the door with hardly so much as a good-night and three days later he turns up at six o’clock and they do the whole thing over again.

Mary gets run-down. Crying is bad for your face, everyone knows that and so does Mary but she can’t stop. People at work notice. Her friends tell her John is a rat, a pig, a dog, he isn’t good enough for her, but she can’t believe it. Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough.

One evening John complains about the food. He has never complained about her food before. Mary is hurt.

Her friends tell her they’ve seen him in a restaurant with another woman, whose name is Madge. It’s not even Madge that finally gets to Mary: it’s the restaurant. John has never taken Mary to a restaurant. Mary collects all the sleeping pills and aspirins she can find, and takes them and a half a bottle of sherry. You can see what kind of a woman she is by the fact that it’s not even whiskey. She leaves a note for John. She hopes he’ll discover her and get her to the hospital in time and repent and then they can get married, but this fails to happen and she dies.

John marries Madge and everything continues as in A.

C. John, who is an older man, falls in love with Mary, and Mary, who is only twenty- two, feels sorry for him because he’s worried about his hair falling out. She sleeps with him even though she’s not in love with him. She met him at work. She’s in love with someone called James, who is twenty-two also and not yet ready to settle down.

John on the contrary settled down long ago: this is what is bothering him. John has a steady, respectable job and is getting ahead in his field, but Mary isn’t impressed by him, she’s impressed by James, who has a motorcycle and a fabulous record collection. But James is often away on his motorcycle, being free. Freedom isn’t the same for girls, so in the meantime Mary spends Thursday evenings with John. Thursdays are the only days John can get away.

John is married to a woman called Madge and they have two children, a charming house which they bought just before the real estate values went up, and hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging, when they have the time. John tells Mary how important she is to him, but of course he can’t leave his wife because a commitment is a commitment. He goes on about this more than is necessary and Mary finds it boring, but older men can keep it up longer so on the whole she has a fairly good time.

One day James breezes in on his motorcycle with some top-grade California hybrid and James and Mary get higher than you’d believe possible and they climb into bed. Everything becomes very underwater, but along comes John, who has a key to Mary’s apartment. He finds them stoned and entwined. He’s hardly in any position to be jealous, considering Madge, but nevertheless he’s overcome with despair. Finally he’s middle-aged, in two years he’ll be as bald as an egg and he can’t stand it. He purchases a handgun, saying he needs it for target practice–this is the thin part of the plot, but it can be dealt with later–and shoots the two of them and himself.

Madge, after a suitable period of mourning, marries an understanding man called Fred and everything continues as in A, but under different names.

D. Fred and Madge have no problems. They get along exceptionally well and are good at working out any little difficulties that may arise. But their charming house is by the seashore and one day a giant tidal wave approaches. Real estate values go down. The rest of the story is about what caused the tidal wave and how they escape from it. They do, though thousands drown, but Fred and Madge are virtuous and grateful, and continue as in A.

E. Yes, but Fred has a bad heart. The rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they both are until Fred dies. Then Madge devotes herself to charity work until the end of A. If you like, it can be “Madge,” “cancer,” “guilty and confused,” and “bird watching.”

F. If you think this is all too bourgeois, make John a revolutionary and Mary a counterespionage agent and see how far that gets you. Remember, this is Canada. You’ll still end up with A, though in between you may get a lustful brawling saga of passionate involvement, a chronicle of our times, sort of.

You’ll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don’t be deluded by any other endings, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.

The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.

That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

Now try How and Why.

Eric Hoffer, for those of you who don’t know of him, was a most unusual autodidact. Born in the Bronx sometime around 1900, he lost his mother when just a boy, and his father when still a very young man. He also mysteriously lost his sight from age seven until fifteen, perhaps due to the aftereffects of the accident (a fall down the stairs, with the five-year-old Eric in her arms) that killed his mother. Upon the death of his father, he moved to Los Angeles, and spend ten years on Skid Row before taking work as a farm laborer, and ultimately as a longshoreman in San Francisco. The harbor work suited his temperament, and he worked on the waterfront until retiring at 65. He died in 1983.

Hoffer was a profoundly gifted observer and thinker, and despite his lack of formal education, became a widely admired writer of social criticism and political philosophy. He was also, as I am finding out now, an extraordinarily acute and prolific aphorist.

The book I am reading, which is called Before the Sabbath, is not one of his major works — it is a diary he began in 1974, eight years into his retirement. Hoffer wondered what effect the advancing years had had on his mental faculties, and decided that for six months he would keep a journal of thoughts and observations in order to “sluice” his mind: a metaphor that referred to time he had spent as a young man prospecting for gold.

I’ve only just begun reading, but here are a few of the nuggets the book has yielded already:

• It is almost eight years since I retired from the waterfront, but in my dreams I still load and unload ships. I sometimes wake up in the morning aching all over from a hard night’s work. One might maintain that a pension is pay for the work we keep on doing in our dreams after we retire.
• That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes.
• One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.
• I cannot see myself living in a socialist society. My passion is to be left alone and only a capitalist society does so.
• Probably what the creative spirit needs is an annoyance that irritates but does not crush.
• Our materialist civilization is edging toward tyranny because the elimination of scarcity also eliminates the hidden hand of circumstances that keeps the wheels turning. The coming of abundance has weakened social automatism and discipline. Societies now need forceful authority to function tolerably well.
• The fateful event of our time is not the advancement of backward countries but the leveling down of advanced countries.
• There is a large body of educated opinion that wants to see white humanity diminished and defeated.
• A revulsion from work is a fundamental component of human nature. It is natural to feel work to be a curse. A social order that grants only minimal necessities but asks for little effort will be a more stable system than one that offers superfluities but demands ceaseless striving.
• The change that matters is the change of a society’s axioms. The 1960s saw a slaughter of axioms. It would be interesting to identify the new axioms. I can think of a couple: (1) The object of life is fun. (2) The world owes everyone a living.
• Islam’s rapid and total de-Christianizing of the Middle East and North Africa contrasts with the ineffectuality of Christian proselytizing in Islamic lands. Islam contributes to basic human needs and is without inner contradictions and tensions. It legitimizes an easygoing, even indolent life. I doubt whether any Islamic country can be durably modernized.
• The backwardness of the Arabs in most fields of endeavor makes it impossible for them to acquire the confidence necessary for genuine cooperation with the Jews.
• We are surrounded by mysteries: the mystery of the absence of outstanding leaders anywhere on this planet; they mystery of teachers no longer able to teach children to read and write; the mystery of the blurring of differences between men and women — in San Francisco even a close look does not always tell you beyond doubt the sex of a person; the mystery of a majority incapable of getting angry with those who trample it underfoot.
• The misanthropy of the old comes from the fading of the magic glow of desire.

That’s all from the first 16 pages.

Thanks, Jess.

Not exactly a new normblog poll…

… but I would really like to hear from you on how you would react to being offered the following choice. You are going to some distant and lonely and low-tech place where you will have to spend the rest of your days, and you can:

- (a) either take 100 books you have already read and which you may then re-read without limit, those being the only books you will ever get to see;

- (b) or not take any of the books you have already read, however much you may love some of them, but instead have a free and regular choice from all the books in the world you haven’t yet read, to be supplied to you by the Mobile Library for Isolated Readers in Distant Places.

Would you go for (a) or (b)?

My first response was just to wave off the question as too capricious to bother with. But then it began to nag at me. If I had to choose, which would it be?

It seems natural enough to pick (b); after all, the number of books one has never read is, in effect, almost all the books ever written, minus a paltry few, and anyway you’ve already read the ones you’ve already read. But the books I have read are such an essential part of what I am that the idea of never being able to commune with them ever again — to re-read a beloved favorite, or to refresh my memory of some vital and formative passage — seems such a cruel deprivation that I think I might very well choose (a).

I just don’t know. It’s still eating at me.

Which would you choose?

As usual, my family gave me books for Christmas — I’m otherwise hard to shop for, as I already have all the material things I need, and everybody knows that books are always welcome.

But I did get one new toy: an Amazon Kindle.

I’ve had mixed feelings about e-readers. I collect books, and have thousands of them in my house. I love the physicality of books, and the way they beckon patiently from their shelves. I admire their technical simplicity: they require no electricity or software for their operation, and work just fine anywhere on Earth. The screen never fails, they need no connection to anything, and their batteries never go dead. The data they contain is stored in a highly stable form that can persist in directly readable form for hundreds or thousands of years.^† I’ve written about all this before (see here and here), so won’t repeat myself in this post, but let’s just say I’m in no hurry to see books go the way of buggy whips and slide rules, and have qualms about abetting their demise. (With good reason, too: anybody who thinks I’m just being an old mossback should read this.)

But I must admit the Kindle is an awfully appealing gadget. It is elegantly designed, and imperially slim, and it is far easier to lug around than the pile of books I usually take with me when I travel anywhere. It is also much gentler on the eyes than a laptop or desktop screen: it has an “electronic ink” grey-scale display that looks very much like printed paper. It weighs next to nothing, and has a built-in wireless connection that enables Amazon to download books and periodicals directly into the device. Books are typically $9.95, and subscriptions to major newspapers are available too, and even some blogs. (Don’t look for this one anytime soon, however; I hope that isn’t a deal-breaker.)

I’ve only been using the thing for a day, so it’s too soon for me to say whether I’m really going to take to it, or to give it a proper review. I’ve bought one book so far (The Greatest Show on Earth, by Richard Dawkins), and spent a couple of hours last night reading it.

Reading on the Kindle is a breeze. The contrast between the text and the grey screen seems just right (to me at least, though some disagree), and the text is rendered in a soothing font called PMN Caecilia (see here).

There are a few annoyances, however. First of all, it’s easy to lose your place. The device remembers where you were in the book whenever you navigate away or turn the unit off — and you can bookmark the page you’re reading easily enough — but it’s easy to press the wrong button and jump back the the beginning of a chapter, and if you haven’t bookmarked the page you were on you have to step through, page by page, to get back to where you were.

Reading footnotes requires effort also. When you see one on the page, you have to step the cursor up to the link , line by line and word by word, using the little joystick, then click; the footnote will be displayed in a new page, and after reading it you press the “Back” button to return to the page you were on. This is far more work than glancing at the bottom of the page.

It may be, though, that I simply haven’t quite got the hang of this UI yet; there may be shortcuts and best-practices I’m not aware of. I’m sure that operating it gets more and more intuitive the longer you use it. And there certainly are compensatory benefits, like being able to search the text (the printed book’s greatest shortcoming) and to store your own notes, automatically linked to each page. (The thing will also read to you; I haven’t even tried that yet.)

So, the jury’s still out. But I do like this little gadget, I have to say, despite feeling a little guilty while using it.

As long as I am reviewing things, I might as well mention my first impressions of the Dawkins book. He writes as clearly as ever, and is one of the greatest living popularizers of evolutionary theory. The book, whose purpose is to make, once more, the overwhelmingly persuasive case for Darwinism, will of course do a splendid job of presenting the evidence. But Dawkins himself is getting harder and harder to bear: his sneering smugness, haughty scorn, and inability to avoid the nasty little dig are in evidence on almost every page. Whom is he hoping to persuade? If it’s people like me, he really needn’t even have bothered (I’m only reading it because I always learn a thing or two from his books, and enjoy how he assembles his case); if, on the other hand he hopes to convert the 40% of Americans who deny Darwinism on religious grounds, he’s hardly going to win them over by insulting them every chance he gets.

Finally, I think he is unreasonably, even embarrassingly obstinate in his persistent opposition to the now-broadly-accepted idea of group-level selection, a model that he rejects with his usual lack of tact. In particular, he has got into a public feud with the author of Darwin’s Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson, who recently wrote a paper with E.O. Wilson defending the idea. (To see how nasty it’s gotten, have a look here.)

But that’s enough for tonight. I’ll keep using the Kindle, and we’ll see how I like it after I’ve been at it for a while. If it can hook an old-school bibliophile like me, this thing’s going to take over the world.

1. † N.B.: after working for years as a software engineer, I have now officially given up on insisting that “data” be plural, as much as that pains me.

Wells is best known today for his immortal contributions to science-fiction — such classics as The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man — but in his own time (1866-1946) he was perhaps better known as a political author and activist, one of the most outspoken members of the “Progressive” movement from which today’s liberalism descends. He had an extraordinary faith in the ability of visionary men and women, armed with the ascendant power of science, to sweep aside the old order of the world, and to put a new and better civilization in its place.

Like most Progressive thinkers of the era, Wells approved of the Leftist social reforms that swept Europe in the early years of the 20th century under the banners of the Fascists and Nazis, and he called, in a speech to the Young Liberals at Oxford in 1932, for a “‘Phoenix Rebirth’ of Liberalism,” a kind of “enlightened Nazism” that he proposed be called “Liberal Fascism.” He was a friend and admirer of FDR (who, before the war, shared Wells’ high opinion of Fascist ideals), and was a frequent visitor to the White House.

Wells was frank about the difficulty of creating a new order, guided by an elite of cultural, scientific, and political savants, in such a messy world; in particular there was the lingering issue of the lowest, most unproductive classes. It was obvious to him that if we were ever to get anywhere, their numbers must be culled, and he shared in, and was an influential spokesman for, the prevailing support amongst Progressives for a global program of eugenics. In Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1902), Wells wrote:

And how will the new republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world state with a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads, its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will, I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult… The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die. … And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?
Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.

Some have read into this a call for genocide, but this is mistaken; in the prevailing view of the time, a steady downward pressure would suffice. For Wells, and the Progressives of his day (in contrast to the programs later undertaken by the Nazis, who combined genocide with selective breeding of “pure” Aryans), eugenics would bring about gradual attrition of the congenitally deficient by curtailing their reproduction. Wells wrote elsewhere that “it is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.”

Much of this seems shocking now, but in the heady zeitgeist of the Progressive era, these were not uncommon views, as witness Oliver Wendell Holmes’ oft-quoted opinion in Buck v. Bell. In that case, which challenged Virginia’s eugenics statutes authorizing the compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded, Holmes famously opined that that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Little of this is remembered now, of course; even the word “fascism” has now become, in the mouths of those on the Left, a caustic term for the political Right, despite its origins on the diametrically opposite side of the political spectrum. Indeed, two of the favorite causes of the political Left, now seen as social blessings for the masses of the poor — contraception and the minimum wage — originally arose as Progressive projects intended not as ways to help lift a struggling underclass, but to breed and starve them out of existence. (I’ll save that for another post.)

But however you may feel about Mr. Wells’s politics — and this briefest of summaries cannot begin to do justice to the complexity and evolution of his views over the tumultuous decades of the early 20th century — what a strong and restless mind he had, and what stories he told! I read all of his science-fiction novels as a boy, and his many short stories as well. His contribution to English letters was enormous, and for that alone he deserves his Google banner.

The first reply, which I have transcribed here in its entirety, is from the great H.L. Mencken. If this were the only entry, the book would still be worth its cover price several times over. I hope you enjoy it: you are not likely to run across it anywhere else.

You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism — in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

There is very little conscious volition in this. What I do was ordained by the iinscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other realtively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. But I became a writer just the same, and shall remain one until the end of the chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.

I am far luckier than most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing precisely what I have wanted to do — what I would have done for nothing, and very gladly, if there had been no reward for it. Not many men, I believe, are so fortunate. Millions of them have to make their living at tasks which really do not interest them. As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life, despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. For in the midst of these woes I still enjoyed the immense satisfaction which goes with free activity. I have done, in the main, exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible effects on other people have interested me very little. I have not written and published to please other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives milk, not to profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.

Next to agreeable work as a means of attaining happiness I put what Huxley called the domestic affections — the day to day intercourse with family and friends. My home has seen bitter sorrow, but it has never seen any serious disputes, and it has never seen poverty. I was completely happy with my mother and sister, and I am completely happy with my wife. Most of the men I commonly associate with are friends of very old standing. I have known some of them for more than thirty years. I seldom see anyone, intimately, whom I have known for less than ten years. These friends delight me. I turn to them when work is done with unfailing eagerness. We have the same general tastes, and see the world much alike. Most of them are interestd in music, as I am. It has given me more pleasure in this life than any external thing. I love it more every year.

As for religion, I am quite devoid of it. Never in my adult life have I experienced anything that could be plausibly called a religious impulse. My father and grandfather were agnostics before me, and though I was sent to Sunday-school as a boy and exposed to the Christian theology I was never taught to believe it. My father thought that I should learn what it was, but it never apparently occurred to him that I would accept it. He was a good psychologist. What I got in Sunday-school — beside a wide acquaintance with Christian hymnology — was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous. Since that time I have read a great deal in theology — perhaps much more than the average clergyman — but I have never discovered any reason to change my mind.

The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling before a Being who, if He really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected. I see little evidence in this world of the so-called goodness of God. On the contrary, it seems to me that, on the strength of His daily acts, he must be set down a most cruel, stupid and villainous fellow. I can say this with a clear conscience, for He has treated me very well — in fact, with vast politeness. But I can’t help thinking of his barbaric torture of most of the rest of humanity. I simply can’t imagine revering the God of war and politics, theology and cancer.

I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. The belief in it issues from the puerile egos of inferior men. In its Christian form it is little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on this earth. What the meaning of human life may be I don’t know: I incline to suspect that it has none. All I know about it is that, to me at least, it is very amusing while it lasts. Even its troubles, indeed, can be amusing. Moreover, they tend to foster the human qualities that I admire most — courage and its analogues. The noblest man, I think, is that one who fights God, and triumphs over Him. I have had little of this to do. When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.

I’ve been having this conversation for years (I wrote about it here, three years ago). I can certainly see the advantages of gadgets like the Kindle: for starters, you can carry 1500 books in your pocket, and you can download new ones out of thin air in seconds. You can add your own contextual annotations, which are then backed up by Amazon (along with a list of the books you own) in case you lose the device. You can read not only books, but also magazines, newspapers, and even blogs. You can copy passages into a “clippings” file. And of course, perhaps best of all, you can search the book’s text.

But there are drawbacks as well, including one that really gives me the creeps. In my own 2006 post (linked above), I downplayed the problem of “data rot” — the tendency of data to be lost as storage media evolve — but it is certainly worth noting that there are printed texts in existence that are still legible after thousands of years, while 8-track tapes from the Seventies are effectively useless. Also, books are so low-tech that they require nothing except light to deliver their content, while a Kindle relies on a fantastically complex computer and display — not to mention charged batteries.

As for the part that “really gives me the creeps”, readers should have a look at this classic post on the subject, by blogger Mark Pilgrim. It is called The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts), and in Act V Mr. Pilgrim quotes George Orwell’s 1984:

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

I’ll be hanging on to my books.

One thing that distinguishes the forms is that non-fiction’s value rests primarily upon the practical expertise of the author. If I have in hand, say, a book about the taxonomy of cichlid fishes in Lake Victoria, I am reading it because I am curious about this fascinating topic, and assume that the author knows a lot more about it than I do. He will have spent many years in the field, examining the unique geological and biological circumstances that have made this enormous lake such a productive and instructive laboratory of vertebrate evolution. I will expect that he has drawn important lessons from these years of detailed study, lessons that make possible a broader and more general understanding of life’s history and origins.

What will not be guaranteed, however, is that the author will have any conspicuous literary gifts. He will likely have learned to write coherently, and to explain complex ideas in an accessible way, but he is a scientist first and a writer second, and to expect that he will be both a dedicated and expert icthyologist and a brilliant prose stylist is asking rather a lot. There are some notable exceptions, but they are just that.

Currently I am reading a very interesting (and, I think, quite important) book about the underpinnings and architecture of human morality. The author has done exceptional work in this field, and is at the pinnacle of his profession. It is a subject that engages me at the deepest level, and about which I want to learn everything I can. Unfortunately, though, for all his professional excellence, the author simply is not a very good writer. His sentences have no lilt, no music; they are stiff and wordy, and larded with clichés. I admire his expertise and insight, and want very much to read what he has to say, but it’s a long book, and tough going.

So, these past few evenings, when I’ve found myself starting to clench my fists and grind my teeth, I’ve put the book down and gone after some sweet relief, which I always keep handy. This week it has come in the form of an old collection of the best of S.J. Perelman, the diffident virtuoso who always managed, without apparent effort, to spin mere words into purest gold.

One of the many pleasures of reading Perelman, whose career spanned the heart of the twentieth century, is his fondness for contemporaneous ephemera. Many of his delicious little soufflés begin with some outlandish item taken from the local news, or some florid ad copy that caught his all-seeing eye. And the story I picked up last night, when the aforementioned dreary tome had me gasping for air, indeed gave a glimpse of a marketing ploy that would be unthinkable today, but must have seemed the height of sophistication half a century ago.

The story was called Hell Hath No Fury… and Saks No Brake, and was published in the New Yorker in 1951. It was inspired by an actual product with a clever distribution scheme, an ad for which had attracted Perelman’s attention. The commodity in question was a pefume called Chaqueneau-K, and the angle was this: it could not be sold to a woman. That’s right: the only way a woman could wear this perfume was if it had been given to her by a man. This was more than enough for Perelman’s fecund imagination, and off he went with a breezy little tale of imposture and intrigue. I am certainly not about to transcribe the whole thing for you — but as the curtain rises, a grand dame is about to meet her match:

Mrs. Hector Seaforth Patroon, Park Avenue socialite, prominent Bermuda hostess, and spouse of the chairman of the American Roller Towel Corporation, was in high dudgeon. Stamping her aristocratic foot, shod by Palter DeLiso, she drew her ankle-length Revillon Frères sable coat closer about a statuesque figure sculpted by Lily of France, snapped shut the emerald clasp of her handbag, and glared down majestically at the clerk behind the prefume counter. “Young man,” she said with freezing scorn, “do you know, by any remote chance, who you’re talking to?”

“Perfectly, Mrs. Patroon,” he replied, bowing courteously. “Whether captivating every eye in her ringside box at the Horse Show or bandying persiflage with other celebs at Gotham’s gilded ’21′ Club, the uncrowned queen of the champagne set is class personified, part and parcel of the metropolitan élite. Indeed. ’tis rumored by wiseacres that without her portrait to grace their pages, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar would long ago be floundering on their derrières.”

“Very well, then,” retorted the lady, her arctic reserve thawing under his flattery. “Give us a large flacon of Chaqueneau-K and let me have no more ridiculous chin music about you do not cater same to the frail sex.”

“I’m sorry, Madam, apologized the clerk. “Those, regrettably, are my orders, that their infraction is punishable by immediate dismissal.”

This being Perelman, baroque complications ensue, the elaboration of which in this space would require a great deal more typing than I have in me this evening, I’m afraid. But you get the idea. I didn’t learn much about fishes or morality, but what a splendid analgesic.

Anyway, time to sign off. I have reading to do.

There’s plenty of simple, Lutheran stuff:

Humble Hearts, have humble desires.

The House shewes the owner.

Hee that gets out of debt, growes rich.

All is well with him, who is beloved of his neighbours.

A good bargaine is a pick-purse.

Better the feet slip then the tongue.

Better a bare foote then none.

And some cautionary words for those who might, perhaps, prefer philosophical inquiry to honest toil and the simple rewards of hearth and church:

Hee that lives well is learned enough.

A handfull of good life, is better then a bushell of learning.

He lives unsafely, that lookes too neere on things.

Better to be blinde, then to see ill.

Knowledge is folly, except grace guide it.

All truths are not to be told.

And some are downright gloomy:

Whether goest griefe ? where I am wont.

Autumnal Agues are long, or mortall.

Cover your selfe with your shield, and care not for
cryes.

Ill comes in by ells, and goes out by inches.

I wept when I was borne, and every day shewes
why.

In life you lov’d me not, in death you bewaile me.

Many kisse the hand, they wish cut off.

The filth under the white snow, the sunne discovers.

And there are some I’m not sure what to make of:

Hee puis with a long rope, that waights for anothers death.

The gentle Hawke, halfe mans her selfe.

Brabling Curres never want sore eares.

Where you thinke there is bacon, there is no Chimney.

Presse a stick, and it seemes a youth.

As the yeere is, your pot must seeth.

A thousand and ten in all, friends; something for everyone. Here.

The book is called Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames, by one Luis d’Antin van Rooten. It purports to be a scholarly treatment of some previously undiscovered poetry. The foreword begins:

To detail the exact manner by which “The d’Antin Mss. Mots’ dHeures: Gousses, Rames” came to my hand would be too tedious and of but little moment here. Suffice it to say these curious verses were part of the meagre possessions of one François Charles Fernand d’Antin, retired school teacher, who died at the age of ninety-three in January of the Year of Our Lord, 1950, while marking papers. Some time later, as the only living relative of the deceased, I received his personal effects through the kind offices of Maître Théophile Gustave Pol Ploin, Notaire, of Aix-en-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.

The pitiful little packet remitted to me included a ribbon-tied bundle of love letters from one Luisa Contempré, soprano, who died of tuberculosis while “en tournée” in Athens, Greece; a holograph of Napoleon III, some postcards marked “Vues de Naples et Pompéi”; and a prescription for falling hair. All these I consigned to the eternal discretion of my fireplace. An excellent recipe for turbot in saffron found welcome in my kitchen archives, and the thin sheaf of fragmentary poems here presented soon became the object of intriguing study and speculation.

What are they? Who wrote them? When? These are just a few of the many questions they evoke.

Well! What have we here, indeed? If you have any French, you will find, as you read them, that they have a familiar ring. Here is a sample, with annotation by the author:

Lit-elle messe, moffette,*
Satan ne te fête,
Et digne somme couers et nouez.
À longue qu’aime est-ce pailles d’Eure,
Et ne Satan bise ailleurs
Et ne fredonne messe. Moffette, ah, ouais!**

* Moffette: Noxious exhalations formed in underground galleries or mines.

** This little fragment is a moral precept addressed to a young girl. She is advised to go to mass even under the most adverse conditions in order to confound Satan and keep her heart pure until the knot (marriage) is tied. She is warned against long engagements and to stay out of hayfields, be they as lush and lovely as the Eure valley, for Satan will not be off spoiling crops elsewhere. She must not mumble at mass, or the consequences will make the noxious fumes of earth seem trivial.

Here’s one more:

Myriades évitent lames,
Et nuisent feux lissses.* Où asseoit et sonne haut.**
En aubrevoir dette mairie ointe
Deux lames azures d’Iago.***

* That thousands avoided the sword and spoiled smooth flames is an obvious reference to the Inquisition.

** Here choir stalls are indicated, if the inference above is accepted.

*** To satisfy debts (spiritual?), the mayoralty anoints two blue steel blades of Iago. Without a doubt, Santiago, patron of Spain, is meant. The exact relationship of the Inquisition to the civil courts has long been a matter of conjecture and study. In this case exoneration by a civil authority not only indicates close association between the secular and lay justices, but also hints that the defendant was a powerful and important personage.

You get the idea by now, I hope. This is about as far into a cheek as a human tongue can go.

One of the reasons I admire Churchill so is the astonishing inquisitiveness and flexibility of his intellect, and in reading this book I found (on page 119) another wonderful example. In this selection, taken from Savrola, his only novel (I haven’t read it), Churchill is explaining the evolution of alliance in human societies:

I think of it in this way. When the human race was emerging from the darkness of its origin and half-animal, half-human creatures trod the earth, there was no idea of justice, honesty, or virtue, only the motive power which we call the “will to live”. Then perhaps it was a minor peculiarity of some of these early ancestors of man to combine in twos and threes for their mutual protection. The first alliance was made; the combinations prospered where the isolated individuals failed… Thus man became a social animal. Gradually the little societies became larger ones. From families to tribes, and from tribes to nations the species advanced, always finding that the better they combined, the better they succeeded. Now on what did this system of alliance depend? It depended on the members keeping faith with each other, on the practice of honesty, justice, and the rest of the virtues. Only those beings in which those faculties were present were able to combine, and thus only the relatively honest men were preserved. The process repeated itself contless times during untold ages. At every step the race advanced, and at every step the realization of the cause increased.

This is simply dazzling. In this brief passage Churchill has given us a concise, limpid account of the evolution of morality. In a single paragraph we have a prescient account of the group-selection model described by David Sloan Wilson (which Wilson has applied most convincingly to the origins of religion in his recent book Darwin’s Cathedral), of the expansion of “non-zero-sumness” that was the central theme of Robert Wright’s excellent book Nonzero, and even of the Baldwin Effect, in which useful cultural tricks favor the selection of those organisms that are apter to learn them.

If there is any quibble at all to make, it is that our prehuman ancestors were probably already highly social. But such a nit is hardly worth picking.

What a mind! What a man!

After the war, Churchill felt that the most fitting response to the Holocaust would be to punish those guilty of the most horrific crimes against the Jews and to fulfill the promise of a Jewish homeland that he and Britain had made almost 30 years earlier. When Ernest Bevin, Britain’s Labour Party foreign minister, hesitated to recognize Israel nine months after its founding, for fear of inflaming Arab opinion, Churchill swung back hard: “Whether the Right Honorable Gentleman likes it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” Israel was just recompense, Churchill felt, not only for what the Jews of Europe had lost but for what they had given to civilization over the centuries.

This view, of course, no longer prevails. Today the existence of Israel is apparently something to be regretted, even deplored, not only in Arab capitals but in European ones and on American university campuses. Paradoxically, such feelings intensified after 9/11, an event that should have made us all aware of who the friends of Western civilization really are–and who its enemies. Martin Gilbert’s book reminds us that anti-Semitism is the dark turn of the modern mind against itself, and a form of cultural patricide.

You can read the whole piece here.

I did, however, read an Op-Ed piece by Ms. Faludi back on September 7th, in which she articulated the principal theme of her book: that America is founded on a mythos of helpless women and protective men, and that the circumstances that originally fostered this mindset — American settlers at risk of Indian attacks as they began to tame the wilderness — were similar enough to the terror-haunted post-9/11 U.S. that this primeval worldview is ascendant once again, in political and popular culture.

I was not impressed by the piece at the time. While there was a noticeable stirring of martial and patriotic sentiment following the attacks — not a startling response, as we had just suffered the most damaging single assault on US soil since Pearl Harbor — it did not strike me that the womenfolk were exactly huddling in the barn. I knew one, Marian Fontana, who after losing her firefighter husband Dave became a galvanic figure indeed: a tireless advocate for families of the victims, and the author of an extraordinary book about perseverance in the face of tragic loss. Everywhere one looked, in fact, it seemed that women, far from hiding all aflutter behind their menfolk, were ascendant as never before in the highest circles of power and influence. We have, for the first time in history, a female Speaker of the House, and we may well elect a woman as our next president. So it seemed to me that Faludi just had a familiar political axe to grind — about the eternal victimhood of women at the hands of men^† — and was going to grind on regardless, without allowing herself to be unduly inconvenienced by the actual state of affairs.

At any rate, the point of this post, as it happens, was not to criticize Ms. Faludi, but rather to express my sympathy: because Ms. Kakutani, the Times’s chief reviewer of books, today gave The Terror Dream a painful scalding. The review opens:

This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name.

Ouch. Trouble ahead.

With “The Terror Dream,” Susan Faludi has taken the momentous subject of 9/11 and come to the conclusion that it led to … an assault on the freedom and independence of American women. In the wake of 9/11, she argues, the great American cultural machine churned out a myth meant to “restore the image of an America invulnerable to attack” — “the illusion of a mythic America where women needed men’s protection and men succeeded in providing it.” She contends that there was a “peculiar urge to recast a martial attack as a domestic drama, attended by the disappearance and even demonization of independent female voices” and that there was a “beatification of the ideal post-9/11 American woman” as “undemanding, uncompetitive, and most of all dependent” — a woman who “didn’t just want a man in her life” but “needed one.”

These efforts on Ms. Faludi’s part to use the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an occasion to recycle arguments similar to those she made a decade and a half ago in her best-selling book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” (1991) feel forced, unpersuasive and often utterly baffling.

Ms. Kakutani is not bowled over by the weight of Ms. Faludi’s scholarship:

… Ms. Faludi displays a disturbing tendency to write off or ignore evidence that might undermine her theories, while using highly selective anecdotal evidence (of which an endless supply exists in today’s blogosphere) to buttress her arguments.

And so on. The review concludes:

Not only are many of these assertions highly debatable in themselves, but Ms. Faludi’s overarching thesis in this book rings false too. In fact, her suggestion that the 9/11 attacks catalyzed the same fears and narrative impulses as those unleashed by our frontier ancestors’ “original war on terror,” leading to a muffling of feminist voices and a veneration of “the virtues of nesting,” runs smack up against her own “Backlash,” which suggested that similar assaults on women’s independence were being unleashed in the 1980s — a time not of war or threat but a decade that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming end of the cold war.

Such errors of logic are typical of this ill-conceived and poorly executed book — a book that stands as one of the more nonsensical volumes yet published about the aftermath of 9/11.

Well, as I say, I haven’t read the book. (I will confess also that I am not likely to.) But I couldn’t help feeling a pang for Ms. Faludi. It must be awfully painful to work and work on a book — for writing is a lonely business, I hear, and conducive to sundry afflictions of the psyche — and then to wait breathlessly for the big review in the Times, only to find that one has been laughed off that global stage as a tendentious hack, a posturing intellectual fraud. The bottom must rather fall out of one’s world, I imagine. One’s friends and family must hardly know what to say. It must make for a pretty awful day.

You know, I hate to see a lady getting picked on like that. I hope she has a big strong man around to tell her everything’s going to be OK.

1. † Not without good reason, frankly.

Readers of these pages will know of Sam Harris; I’ve mentioned him often, and in a previous post I linked to videos of the Beyond Belief conference in which he played an important role. He is one of the “New Atheists” that have been going on offense lately with best-selling books (others being Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens), and as a nonbeliever myself, I am of course inclined to give them a sympathetic reading.

Harris’s book is in the form of an open letter to a Christian fundamentalist. He acknowledges in his introduction that many believers are not of this sort, but takes even such moderate Christians to task for their liberal tolerance of toxic religious views:

In Letter to a Christian Nation, I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms. Consequently, liberal and moderate Christians will not always recognize themselves in the “Christian” address. They should, however, recognize one hundred and fifty million of their neighbors. I have little doubt that liberals and moderates find the eerie certainties of the Christian Right to be as troubling as I do. It is my hope, however, that they will also begin to see that the respect they demand for their own religious beliefs gives shelter to extremists of all faiths. Although liberals and moderates do not fly planes into buildings or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they rarely question the legitimacy of raising a child to believe that she is a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. Even the most progressive faiths lend tacit support to the religious divisions in our world.

The book is blunt, it is harsh, but it is clear, and it is, with few exceptions, well argued. And the problem is serious. Harris reminds us that, according to a recent poll, a shocking 53% of Americans are creationists:

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the Earth, more than half the American population believes that the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect presidents and congressmen — and many who themselves get elected — believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah’s Ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God.

Harris scythes his way swiftly and methodically through many of the assumptions that undergird Christian faith, with the notion that religion provides a necessary moral keel getting the most attention. He presents an abundance of repugnant moral examples from the Old Testament — they are not hard to find — and offers numerous citations from the New Testament as well, to rebut the suggestion that the apostolic accounts of the teaching of Jesus provide a repudiation of the horrors of the earlier text.

He rails against the obsession that religious fundamentalists always seem to have with sex:

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. … You believe that your religious concerns about sex, in all their tiresome immensity, have something to do with morality. And yet, your efforts to constrain the sexual behavior of consenting adults … are almost never geared toward the relief of human suffering. …

Consider, for instance, the human papillomavirus (HPV). HPV is now the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States. The virus infects over half the American population and causes nearly five thousand women to die each year from cervical cancer; the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that more than two hundred thousand die worldwide. We now have a vaccine for HPV that appears to be both safe and effective. The vaccine produced 100 percent immunity in the six thousand women who received it as part of a clinical trial. And yet, Christian conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to premarital sex. These pious men and women want to preserve cervical cancer as an incentive toward abstinence, even if it sacrifices the lives of thousands of women each year.

The points Harris attacks — the lack of evidence for God, the moral inconsistency of the Bible, its conflicts with scientific facts, the hostile divisiveness of religious faction, and the horrors committed in religion’s name — are well-known chinks in the believer’s armor, and have been targeted for centuries. The fact is, though, that the most successful religions are brilliantly designed to deflect criticism, and I imagine Harris considers that it is only by pressing hard upon these genuine and inherent weaknesses that religion’s grip on otherwise rational minds may ever be loosened. So press hard he does.

On abortion:

[T]he Church’s position on abortion takes no more notice of the details of biology than it does of the reality of human suffering. It has been estimated that 50 percent of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a womwn even realizing she was pregnant. In fact, 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, he is the most prolific abortionist of all.

On the notion that God loves us:

Examples of God’s failure to protect humanity are everywhere to be seen. The city of New Orleans, for instance, was recently destroyed by a hurricane. More than a thousand people died; tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions; and nearly a million were displaced. … [What] was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. … These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend. … And yet, as will come as no surprise to you, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80 precent of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God. …

One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding preists among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the twentieth century, manu of them infants. God’s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith.

On the waste of our resources on religion:

Can you prove that Zeus does not exist? Of course not. And yet, just imagine if we lived in a society where people spent tens of billions of dollars of their personal income each year propitiating the gods of Mount Olympus, where the government spent billions more in tax dollars to support institutions devoted to these gods, where untold billions more in tax subsidies were given to pagan temples, where elected officials did their best to impede medical research out of deference to The Iliad and The Odyssey, and where every debate about public policy was subverted to the whims of ancient authors who wrote well, but who didn’t know enough about the nature of reality to keep their excrement out of their food. This would be a horrific misappropriation of our material, moral, and intellectual resources. And yet that is exactly the society we are living in.

On the Bible as the literal word of an omniscient God:

[The Bible] does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century. This should trouble you.

A book written by an omniscient being could contain a chapter on mathematics that, after two thousand years of continuous use, would still be the richest source of mathematical insight humanity has ever known. … Why doesn’t the Bible say anything about electricity, or about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the Universe? What about a cure for cancer? When we fully understand the biology of cancer, this understanding wil be easily summarized in a few pages of text. Why aren’t these pages, or anything remotely like them, found in the Bible? Good, pious people are dying horribly from cancer at this very moment, and many of them are children. The Bible is a very big book. God had room to instruct us in great detail about how to keep slaves and sacrifice a wide variety of animals. To one who stands outside the Christian faith, it is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.

On “intelligent design”:

Over 99 percent of all the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. This fact alone appears to rule out intelligent design. When we look at the natural world, we see extraordinary complexity, but we do not see optimal design. We see redundancy, regressions, and unnecessary complications; we see bewildering inefficiencies that result in suffering and death. We see flightless birds and snakes with pelvises. We see species of fish, salamanders, and crustaceans that have nonfunctional eyes, because they continued to evolve in darkness for millions of years. We see whales that produce teeth during fetal development, only to reabsorb them as adults. Such features of our world are utterly mysterious if God created all species of life on earth “intelligently”; none of them are perplexing in light of evolution.

You get the idea. Many will argue that Harris is attacking a straw man; that he is going after the easy targets, the benighted literalists, the book-burners, the hayseeds, the Yahoos, while overlooking the far subtler theology of millions of benign and educated Christians. But the people to whom Harris directs his letter are not straw men: they are very real, and here in America, they are many. And while nobody has a quarrel, really, with the mild-mannered vicar, or the ladies at the church social, the umbrella of uncritical tolerance that we and they extend to all religious beliefs also shelters a great many virulent pathologies.

Harris does go out farther on some limbs than his arguments can support. For example, there is this passage, on religious opposition to abortion:

If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulty than killing a human blastocyst.

Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a blastocyst is to be found in the latter’s potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings. This is a fact. The argument from a cell’s potential gets you absolutely nowhere.

Harris clearly overextends himself here; even were it “a fact” that every human cell could be promoted to tax-paying citizenship with the wave of the geneticist’s wand (I assume he refers to human cloning, which is not something we have ever in fact attempted, though it is surely within our grasp), he overlooks the important moral distinction between merely refraining from cloning new humans from nasal cells and actively interfering with the natural development of an existing embryo. Abortion is among the thorniest of moral and legal issues, as I have written elsewhere:

This is law at its most difficult, in which separating the rights and interests of the parties involved — in fact, even defining how many interested parties there are — depends not on simple, practical considerations, but upon metaphysical intuitions for which there is no demonstrably correct answer, and about which people’s beliefs vary diametrically.

At what point is a fetus a person whose rights must be considered? The spectrum of human opinion ranges from before the moment of conception, as in the Catholic Church’s position on birth control, to the moment of birth and even beyond. The development of a fetus is a continuum, from fertilized ovum to swaddled newborn, and there is no place to mark the point where the “person” enters the picture. To the religious, ensoulment, and therefore personhood, may occur at conception; to others, the fetus is a proper subset of a woman’s body until the moment of birth. Who is right? By what criteria can we answer such a question? Viability? But that is just a matter of technique. The onset of rudimentary consciousness? We have no idea how that could be determined. Religious or philosophical beliefs? Sure. Yours, or mine?

But Harris makes few such missteps (and, of course, he rejects the religious side of the abortion debate that I mention above, though that still leaves unresolved the sliding tension between mother’s and fetus’s rights); in general the book is very tightly argued. Yes, Harris might fairly be called an extremist, and it may well be that he and Dawkins and Hitchens do more to polarize people than to get them listening to each other, and that they would get better results if they softened their tone. But one might also argue that extremism in the defense of reason is no vice.

Spend an hour, read the book, and decide for yourself.

In an essay entitled Mr. Justice Holmes, Mencken pauses briefly to assess our legislators:

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology, or cannibalism.

He also rates our jurists:

The average American judge as everyone knows, is a mere rabbinical automaton, with no more give and take in his mind that you will find in the mind of a terrier watching a rathole.

If you haven’t read any Mencken, your life is the poorer: he is one of America’s greatest writers and sharpest wits.

The great tragedy, and supreme irony, of Mencken’s life is that he spent his last eight years rendered aphasic by a cerebral thrombosis, unable to read or write.

It’s a lot to read; the six volumes are dense with detailed accounts of affairs military, political, diplomatic, and economic, but the beauty of Churchill’s writing, and the matchless drama of the story itself, carry the reader along. And one is often caught up short by Churchill’s staggering eloquence, and the prescience with which he foresaw the course of coming events. From an earlier essay, as quoted on pages 40-41 in the chapter Lurking Dangers, he discusses, with remarkable foresight, the future of technological warfare in the aftermath of World War I:

May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings — nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp, or dockyard?

As for poison gas and chemical warfare in all its forms, only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book. Certainly every one of these new avenues to destruction is being studied on both sides of the Rhine with all the science and patience of which man is capable. And why should it be supposed that these resources will be limited to inorganic chemistry? A study of disease — of pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast — is certainly being pursued in the laboratories of more than one great country. Blight to destroy crops, anthrax to slay horses and cattle, plague to poison not only armies but whole districts — such are the lines along which military science is remorselessly advancing.

That was written in 1925. And here is a passage from 1928, quoted on pages 38-39, again considering the dangerous state of the world at the end of the Great War:

The campaign of 1919 was never fought; but its ideas go marching along. in every army they are being explored, elaborated, refined, under the surface of peace, and should war come again to the world, it is not with the weapons and agencies prepared for 1919 that it will be fought, but with developments and extensions of these which will be incomparably more formidable and fatal.

It is in these circumstances that we entered upon that period of exhaustion that has been described as Peace. It gives us, at any rate, an opportunity to consider the general situation. Certain sombre facts emerge, solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist. It is established that henceforward whole populations will take part in war, all doing their utmost, all subjected to the fury of the enemy. It is established that nations who believe their life is at stake will not be restrained from using any means to secure their existence. It is probable — nay, certain — that among the means which will next time be at their disposal will be agencies and processes of destruction wholesale, unlimited, and perhaps, once launched, uncontrollable.

Churchill now concludes this gloomy appraisal with a paragraph of harrowing power and eloquence:

Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverise, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now — for one occasion only — his Master.

Little has changed — save that now, as the clouds mass and darken once again, we have not giants to lead us, but pygmies.

Regarding Chapter XIX: Little Willies, these turn out to be short rhymes with a theme of gruesome accident or violence, sort of a precursor to the Dead Baby genre. Some examples:

Willie saw some dynamite,
Couldn’t understand it quite.
Curiosity never pays;
It rained Willie seven days.

Willie fell down the elevator —
Wasn’t found till six days later.
Then the neighbors sniffed, “Gee whiz!”
“What a spoiled child Willie is!”

Willie on the railroad track —
The engine gave a squeal.
The engineer just took a spade
And scraped him off the wheel.

Willie split the baby’s head,
To see if brains were grey or red.
Mother, troubled, said to father,
“Children are an awful bother!”

You get the idea.

There are jokes about lawyers:

Some physicians direct their patients to lie always on the right side, declaring that it is injurious to the health to lie on both sides. Yet lawyers as a class enjoy good health.

And about doctors:

The instructor in the Medical College exhibited a diagram.
“The subject here limps,” he explained, “because one leg is shorter than the other.”
He then turned to one of the students, and addressed him:
“Now, Mr. Sneed, what would you do in such a case?”
Young Sneed pondered earnestly and replied with conviction:
“I have an idea, sir, that I should limp, too.”

My own tribe takes it on the chin as well:

Mrs. McPherson informed her gude man one morning that she expected a party of guests that afternoon. He immediately rose and put al the umbrellas away.
“Why, Alec,” she exclaimed, “dae ya fear that ma guests will steal yer embrellas?”
“Nae: I’m afraid they’ll recognize them.”

Irish jokes, rube jokes, Negro jokes, jokes about Jews and jokes about hobos — we’ve barely scratched the surface, friends. More later.