Yasunari Kawabata

I once heard the great Long Island author Nelson Demille speak at the BookExpo in New York City.  He fielded some questions, and one audience member asked a question about the work habits Demille employed to bring his latest book to light.

“Ah,” Demille answered, “a question about the writing process!”

Monday evening’s discussion will be on the story “First Snow on Mount Fuji,” by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972).  Above is a photograph of Kawabata at work.  Need I say any more about Kawabata’s “writing process”?

Let the photo serve as a clue to the beauty, hidden or otherwise, in this story.

Chekhov's "The Darling"

You are sitting next to a stranger on an airplane. What, according to the self-help experts, is a surefire way to engage such individuals in conversation?  By guiding them along to talk about themselves and what they do!

Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Darling” is a character sketch of Olenka (“Olenka” is an alternate form of the name “Olga”).  She has successive romantic relationships with Kukin the theatrical producer, Pustovalov, the timber agent, and  Smirnin the verterinarian.  Chekhov writes, “she wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason, that would give her ideas an object in life and would warm her old blood.”

Olenka becomes so absorbed with her lovers, however, that she appears to have no self of her own.  For example, after her first husband Kukin dies and she marries Pustovalov, she has no time for the frivolity of the theater, because she has become so immersed in the timber business.  She even dreams about 2 by 4’s!

At our April 27^th discussion of this story, one participant wondered if Olenka is classifiable with a particular psychological syndrome.  Another compared her to Woody Allen’s character Zelig, a person who took on the characteristics of every person with whom he became familiar.  A third opined that Chekhov might be questioning whether it's right for us to esteem original thinkers more than those influenced by the ideas of others.  Olenka has empathy for others, and Chekhov's story shows empathy for Olenka.

Shaw's "Major Barbara"

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), playwright and man of letters

We had a good, and as usual, opinionated, group for our March 27th meeting on George Bernard Shaw's three-act play "Major Barbara." Many thanks to the participants who play-acted two scenes from the play. One of them, from Act II, contained the following words spoken by Andrew Undershaft, a munitions manufacturer, to Adolphus Cusins, his daughter Barbara's minion in the Salvation Army, who is a scholar of ancient Greek:

Pooh, Professor! Let us call things by their proper names.  I am a millionaire; you are a poet; Barbara is a savior of souls. What have we three to do with the common mob of idolators?

Barbara becomes disillusioned with the Salvation Army when she learns that Mrs. Baines, the Army's commissioner, will accept sizable donations from Bodger, a whiskey distiller (thus by definition a corrupter of those whom the Army seeks to save), and from her own father, who considers his business and Bodger's to be in a mutually beneficial relationship.

What these three in the end have to do with "the common mob of idolators" is very simple: give them jobs!  At the end of the play, Barbara is betrothed to Cusins, to whom Undershaft intends to hand over the family business. The final act takes place in Undershaft's idyllic company town of Perivale St. Andrew. It's last line is spoken by Undershaft.  He tells Cusins, "Six o'clock tomorrow morning, Euripides." He calls him "Euripides" because Cusins had earlier declaimed lines from a translation of Euripides's "Bacchae". We all of us, poets and playwrights not excepted, have to get to work.

P.S. The real Euripides will be our author later in the year!

William James and Pragmatism

American philosopher 
William James (1842-1910)

We had a very high turnout (25!) for last week's meeting on James's Pragmatism.  The book is a collection of lectures James delivered in the winter of 1906-07 in Boston and New York.  We looked at two of these lectures, "What Pragmatism Means," and "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth."

Think of how the words "pragmatic" and "pragmatism" are used in the English language.  We say of a certain politician, for example, that he is "pragmatic."  In other words, he favors getting results over strict adherence to an ideology. James's concern is with a more philosophical pragmatism. Such a pragmatism, he writes, is "first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth."  The method is one of radical empiricism (i.e., a strong reliance on observation and experience in establishing our knowledge), the "genetic theory," one that most values truths that make a practical difference in our lives.

My wife's well-worn copy of "Pragmatism"
 (list price $1.50: cheap!)

Our discussion brought up the current debate on climate change. By applying James's criteria of philosophical pragmatism to this idea, we can move beyond difficulties in defining both "climate" and "change" and start to think about how observable factors in the atmosphere, oceans, etc. might really be affecting us.  We can then say "yeah" or "nay" to efforts to address this current situation.

In a Jamesian formulation, "climate change" becomes not a "solving name," but "a program for more work."  Or, as James put it most famously: "We must bring out of each word its cash value."

But Mr. Arnold ... Nobody's Perfect!

Poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Hats off to the eighteen hardy souls who braved Monday night’s northeaster for our discussion of four essays from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. We held a lively conversation, and there were spirited critiques of Arnold’s view of individualism in a liberal society, and his apparent lack of interest in scientific endeavor.  One participant mused, What if Arnold could have looked at images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope?

We spent some time homing in on Arnold's definition of “culture.”   At various times he calls it “the love and pursuit of perfection,” “a study of perfection,” and something that “originates in the love of perfection.”

In the part called “Hebraism and Hellenism,” in which Arnold compares these two wellsprings of his Victorian England, he writes, “And yet the lesson must perforce be learned, that the human spirit is wider than the most priceless of the forces that bear it onward, and that to the whole development of man, Hebraism is, like Hellenism, but a contribution.”

Indulge with me if you will in a “thought experiment.”  Reflect on a person dear to you and who had a great influence on you: a parent or grandparent, mentor, friend, spouse, teacher, clergyperson.  Now the Arnoldian trick question: Did that person achieve perfection?  The answer is obvious.  Nevertheless, for you, that individual human being possessed a wideness of spirit that qualified her or him as a person of culture, as Matthew Arnold would have it.

Matthew Arnold

In addition to producing prose writings, of which "Culture and Anarchy" is perhaps the most famous example, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) wrote poetry (e.g., the well-known "Dover Beach"), traveled around England as a school examiner, and served as a prototypical public intellectual.  He rebuts various other thinkers in the essays in "Culture and Anarchy."

Looking back at 2016

Once again, in the spirit of the year-end retrospectives so popular this time of year, I offer up a list of our past year's offerings:

January 25th: "The Second Sex," by Simone de Beauvoir
February 22nd: "An Interest in Life," by Grace Paley
March 28th: Selected Poems by Wislawa Szymborska
April 25th: "Discipline and Punish," by Michel Foucault
May 23rd: "Interpreter of Maladies," by Jhumpa Lahiri
June 27th: "The Prince," by Machiavelli
July 25th: "The Meno," by Plato
August 22nd: "Life of Nicias," by Plutarch
September 26th: "To Perpetual Peace," by Kant
October 24th: "The Chilean Earthquake," by Heinrich von Kleist
November 28th: "Where I Lived, and What I Lived for," by Thoreau.

Here's looking forward to another year of personal growth in 2017, aided and abetted by the mysterious and miraculous power of talking and listening to others.