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| Kali |
“And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle--all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe--for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”An interesting book. I've set down The Confusion, which has a different cast of characters and didn't grab me as much, but I may return to it.
At my suggestion, our bookclub's most recent selection is Murakami's 1Q84. An interesting factoid from Wikipedia: "The title is a play on the Japanese pronunciation of the year 1984 and a reference to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The letter Q and the Japanese number 9 (typically romanized as "kyū", but as "kew" on the book's Japanese cover) are homophones, which are often used in Japanese wordplay."In the story, a young man is travelling alone with no particular destination in mind. He rides the train and gets off at any stop that arouses his interest. He takes a room, sees the sights, and stays for as long as he likes. When he has had enough, he boards another train. He spends every vacation this way.
One day, he sees a lovely river from the train window. Gentle green hills line the meandering stream, and below them lies a pretty little town with an old stone bridge. The train stops at the town’s station, and the young man steps down with his bag. No one else gets off, and, as soon as he alights, the train departs.
No workers man the station, which must see very little activity. The young man crosses the bridge and walks into the town. All the shops are shuttered, the town hall deserted. No one occupies the desk at the town’s only hotel. The place seems totally uninhabited. Perhaps all the people are off napping somewhere. But it is only ten-thirty in the morning, far too early for that. Perhaps something has caused all the people to abandon the town. In any case, the next train will not come until the following morning, so he has no choice but to spend the night here. He wanders around the town to kill time.
In fact, this is a town of cats. When the sun starts to go down, many cats come trooping across the bridge—cats of all different kinds and colors. They are much larger than ordinary cats, but they are still cats. The young man is shocked by this sight. He rushes into the bell tower in the center of town and climbs to the top to hide. The cats go about their business, raising the shop shutters or seating themselves at their desks to start their day’s work. Soon, more cats come, crossing the bridge into town like the others. They enter the shops to buy things or go to the town hall to handle administrative matters or eat a meal at the hotel restaurant or drink beer at the tavern and sing lively cat songs. Because cats can see in the dark, they need almost no lights, but that particular night the glow of the full moon floods the town, enabling the young man to see every detail from his perch in the bell tower. When dawn approaches, the cats finish their work, close up the shops, and swarm back across the bridge.
By the time the sun comes up, the cats are gone, and the town is deserted again. The young man climbs down, picks one of the hotel beds for himself, and goes to sleep. When he gets hungry, he eats some bread and fish that have been left in the hotel kitchen. When darkness approaches, he hides in the bell tower again and observes the cats’ activities until dawn. Trains stop at the station before noon and in the late afternoon. No passengers alight, and no one boards, either. Still, the trains stop at the station for exactly one minute, then pull out again. He could take one of these trains and leave the creepy cat town behind. But he doesn’t. Being young, he has a lively curiosity and is ready for adventure. He wants to see more of this strange spectacle. If possible, he wants to find out when and how this place became a town of cats.
On his third night, a hubbub breaks out in the square below the bell tower. “Hey, do you smell something human?” one of the cats says. “Now that you mention it, I thought there was a funny smell the past few days,” another chimes in, twitching his nose. “Me, too,” yet another cat says. “That’s weird. There shouldn’t be any humans here,” someone adds. “No, of course not. There’s no way a human could get into this town of cats.” “But that smell is definitely here.”
The cats form groups and begin to search the town like bands of vigilantes. It takes them very little time to discover that the bell tower is the source of the smell. The young man hears their soft paws padding up the stairs. That’s it, they’ve got me! he thinks. His smell seems to have roused the cats to anger. Humans are not supposed to set foot in this town. The cats have big, sharp claws and white fangs. He has no idea what terrible fate awaits him if he is discovered, but he is sure that they will not let him leave the town alive.
Three cats climb to the top of the bell tower and sniff the air. “Strange,” one cat says, twitching his whiskers, “I smell a human, but there’s no one here.”
“It is strange,” a second cat says. “But there really isn’t anyone here. Let’s go and look somewhere else.”
The cats cock their heads, puzzled, then retreat down the stairs. The young man hears their footsteps fading into the dark of night. He breathes a sigh of relief, but he doesn’t understand what just happened. There was no way they could have missed him. But for some reason they didn’t see him. In any case, he decides that when morning comes he will go to the station and take the train out of this town. His luck can’t last forever.
The next morning, however, the train does not stop at the station. He watches it pass by without slowing down. The afternoon train does the same. He can see the engineer seated at the controls. But the train shows no sign of stopping. It is as though no one can see the young man waiting for a train—or even see the station itself. Once the afternoon train disappears down the track, the place grows quieter than ever. The sun begins to sink. It is time for the cats to come. The young man knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is another world, which has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to take him back to the world he came from.
After reading Dad's review, I decided to check out Maugham's Of Human Bondage. It was a very interesting tale of a neurotic young man afflicted with a clubfoot, and his coming of age in England and France during the late 18 and early 1900s. Although it starts off fairly slowly (the tale begins in Philip's youth), it builds powerfully and is a very captivating read.Society had three arms in its contest with the individual: laws, public opinion, and conscience; the first two could be met by guile, guile is the only weapon of the weak against the strong... but conscience was the traitor within the gates; it fought in each heart the battle of society, and caused the individual to throw himself, a wanton sacrifice, to the prosperity of his enemy.
The Master said, "Riches and honours are what men desire. If it cannot be obtained in the proper way, they should not be held. Poverty and meanness are what men dislike. If it cannot be avoided in the proper way, they should not be avoided."Other quotes, while interesting or thought-provoking, were less clear to me. For example,
The Master said, "A cornered vessel without corners---A strange cornered vessel! A strange cornered vessel!"I think this would be a good book to keep around to re-read and consider in small sections over a period of time.
Tonight I read Carlos Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan" in a single sitting (I skipped part 2, his structural analysis of the teachings, which does not interest me). I became interested in this book in a sort of roundabout way - one part of Levack's Witch-Hunt that keenly aroused my interest was the offhand reference to the hallucinogenic "flying unguents" purportedly used by medieval witches, which may (in some cases) have inspired the visions of flying to the witches' sabbath. These ointments contained plants such as atropa belladona and datura, and in my online research into their effects, I came across the following passage from Castaneda:"There was a question I wanted to ask him. I knew he was going to evade it, so I waited for him to mention the subject. I waited all day. Finally, before I left that evening, I had to ask him, "Did I really fly?," don Juan?"Although I am disappointed that Don Juan the man appears to have been a fiction, I still find this passage very powerful, and am still intrigued by some of the arguments Castaneda attributes to him, such as his rejection of there being only one way to understand our physical relationship with the world.
"That is what you told me. Didn't you?"
"I know, don Juan. I mean, did my body fly? Did I take off like a bird?"
"You always ask me questions I cannot answer. You flew. That is what the second portion of the devil's weed is for. As you take more of it, you will learn how to fly perfectly. It is not a simple matter. A man flies with the help of the second portion of the devil's weed. That is all I can tell you. What you want to know makes no sense. Birds fly like birds and a man who has taken the devil's weed flies as such [el enyerbado vuela asi]."
"As birds do? [Asi como los pajaros?]."
"No, he flies as a man who has taken the weed [No, asi como los enyerbados]."
"Then I didn't really fly, don Juan. I flew in my imagination, in my mind alone. Where was my body?"
"In the bushes," he replied cuttingly, but immediately broke into laughter again. "The trouble with you is that you understand things in only one way. You don't think a man flies; and yet a brujo can move a thousand miles in one second to see what is going on. He can deliver a blow to his enemies long distances away. So, does he or doesn't he fly?"
Levack's work is a overview of the legal, political, economic, religious, and epidemic circumstances which he argues enabled the great witch-hunts of early modern Europe. Although witches have been a lifelong interest for me, and I was eagerly anticipating reading this book, I found it kind of disappointing, to be honest.
In my Shakespeare class we recently read the "problem comedy" Measure for Measure. The action of Measure for Measure commences with the Duke’s reflection that due to lax law enforcement in the city of Vienna, “liberty plucks justice by the nose/…and quite athwart/ Goes all decorum” (I. iii. 29-31). Believing himself to blame, the Duke decides that he cannot be the one to discipline the citizens, and thus decides to temporarily leave Vienna and appoint the austere Lord Angelo as deputy in his place, to restore order to the city through strict punishment. In fact, the Duke only pretends to leave the city, but remains behind disguised as a Friar. Angelo’s first act is to sentence a young man, Claudio, to death for fornication. When Claudio’s sister, a young postulant nun named Isabella, comes to Angelo to plead for his release, Angelo becomes passionately enraptured by her. I won’t give away more, but suffice to say, this play is full of surprises, including a “bed trick” and a “head trick.” The play is dark and disturbing but excellent, and I had the pleasure of watching it performed by the Reed theatre. I highly recommend it.
Just finished reading Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Satan in Goray" for my Russian lit class, Literature of Destruction. The novel was written in Yiddish in 1955.