Janus Face Time

In the spirit of the many year-in-review articles we see at this time of the year, permit me to offer a 2012 year-in-review of the Huntington Public Library Great Books Reading and Discussion Group:

January: "Epic of Gilgamesh"
February: "Prometheus Bound," by Aeschylus
March: "Of Friendship" and "Of Solitude" by Montaigne
April: "Pensées," by Pascal
May: "Self-Reliance," by Emerson
June" "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," by Whitman
September: "Democracy in America," by de Tocqueville
October: "An Enemy of the People," by Ibsen
November: "The Value of Science," by Poincaré

In July and August we experimented with the themes of Money and Sex as found in the readings in the Vital Ideas anthologies (click here to see link).

Here's to reading MORE Great Literature in '13. Happy New Year!!!

Henri Poincaré (1854-1912)

Our discussion of excerpts from French mathematician Henri Poincaré's "The Value of Science" takes place Monday evening.  Does "science for science's sake" make any sense?  Or must it serve some perceived "useful" purpose?

October's Author: Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Join us on October 22d for a discussion of Ibsen's play "An Enemy of the People." When Dr. Thomas Stockmann raises the alarm about contamination of a city's spa, it sets in motion a row among a cast of prominent personages that results in Stockmann's demonization. "An Enemy of the People" might be the first literary effort to weigh the benefits of economic growth against the costs of environmental damage. 

Portrait of Ibsen by Eilif Peterssen (1852-1928)

Original Norwegian ms. of "An Enemy of the People" ("En Folkefiende")

"Democracy in America": Passages for Textual Analysis

page 204: from "Democratic laws generally tend" to "but the object it has in view is more useful."

page 211: "the government of the democracy" to "and society cannot perish."

page 243: "I am wrong, however, in saying all classes" to "A law is observed because it is a self-imposed eveil iln the first place and an evil of transient duration in the second."

page 214: "It is not possible to conceive the surpassing liberty the Americans enjoy" to "to give a constant example of temperance."

page 217: "We must first understand what the purport of society" to "to the end you have in view."

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Alexis de Tocqueville in a portrait
by Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856)

French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont during the years 1831 and 1832. As employees of the French Interior Ministry, their trip was intended as a "fact-finding" mission on conditions in the American penal system. De Toqueville and de Beaumont landed in Newport, Rhode Island on 9 May 1831.  They traveled through the states of New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, made a foray into Québec, then into Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and D.C. before sailing back to France from New York City on 20 February 1832.

De Tocqueville was a scholar of history and politics with a deep interest in the affairs of his own country. France in his time had been embroiled in a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions. His 10-month visit to America took place during the second half of the first administration of President Andrew Jackson. When he returned to France, he set to writing what became his most famous work, De la démocratie en Amérique or Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840.

Democracy in America was and is much more than a report on the U.S. criminal justice system or a road trip journal. It is a deep meditation on our political system, and we Americans have ever since been looking into de Tocqueville's mirror to understand ourselves better.

 

Readings for August 27th in "Sex"

Last evening our "Money" discussion drew 20 attendees and ranged over authors as diverse as Thoreau, Marx, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, and Barbara Ehrenreich. It was the first time in our 8 years together that we've attempted to discuss such a large number of readings (10 in all) at once.

Next month's discussion on "Sex" will focus on seven of the readings contained in that volume.  They are:

David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11-12:7)
"To His Mistress Going to Bed," by John Donne
Sex (selection) by Fay Weldon
"Helen of Troy Goes Counter Dancing" by Margaret Atwood
"Lust," by Susan Minot
"Love and Trust" by Louann Brizendine
"For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" by Nathan Englander

Questions about "Money"

Gentle Readers,

Our discussion of  "Vital Ideas: Money" on Monday, July 23rd, will consist of a series of comparison questions of the following selections:

• Henry David Thoreau's "Economy" and Karl Marx's "The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society"
• John Cheever's "The Housebreaker of Heartbreak Hill" and "Barbara Ehrenreich's "Selling in Minnesota"
• Harriet Jacob's "New Master and Mistress" and Zora Neale Hurston's "The Gilded Six-Bits"
• Theodore Drieser's "Sister Carrie" (selection) and Amy Tan's "Joy Luck Club" (selection)
• Thoreau and the Katy Lederer poem "The Heaven-Sent Leaf"
• Paco Underhill's "Sex and the Mall" and the Theodore Dreiser selection.

For further details see p. 149 in the "Money" book.

Have at it and have fun! 

Summer of Money, Sex

This summer we will take a hiatus from the Great Conversations I anthology and explore both classic and contemporary writings on the themes of money and sex found in the "Vital Ideas" anthologies recently published as handsome paperbacks by the Great Books Foundation.  Meetings take place at 7 p.m. on July 23rd and August 27th at the Main Library.  Discussion questions will be posted on this blog approximately one week before we meet.

“Money” has short fictional and nonfictional writings by Harriet Jacobs, an American freed slave, Henry David Thoreau, Karl Marx, Theodore Dreiser, African-American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston,  John Cheever, social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich, marketing consultant Paco Underhill, Amy Tan, and poet Katy Lederer. “Listening to them, we might just make sense out of that complicated concept we call money,” writes the book’s co-editor Dana Heller.

“Vital Ideas: Sex” comprises writings from the Book of Samuel, John Donne, Andrew Marvel, Sigmund Freud, Fay Weldon, Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mark Doty, Susan Minot, Louann Brizenine, Mona Simpson, and Nathan Englander.  In the words of editor Regina Barreca, we hear from these authors “the perspectives of those who have dared to think about sex rather than chortle or blush.”

"Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle"

Gray Catbird

Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" relates a boy's discovery of a mockingbird nest and the perceived sorrow of the male partner upon losing his mate. Here is what the Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior says about the breeding habits of the mimid family of birds, to which the mockingbird belongs:

"All North American mimids are essentially monogamous; the few reports of polygyny [one male with multiple partners] are mainly limited to the Northern Mockingbird.  Pair-bonding usually occurs at the onset of the breeding season, especially in migrant species such as the Gray Catbird, but can occur at any season in some of the resident [nonmigratory] thrashers. In some species, particularly Le Conte's and Curve-billed Thrashers, pairs can bond for several years."

The poem, like many of the others in Leaves of Grass, show Whitman's long and abiding connection to the natural world.

Photo by Matthew Petroff ( http://www.mpetroff.net/archives/2012/06/11/cats-and-catbirds).

Whitman Walked These Streets

I once asked our Huntington Town Historian Robert Hughes what he considered to be the most significant event that ever took place in Huntington. His reply: "Walt Whitman was born here." Our June meeting will be about Whitman's poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," from his signature work, Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman is a Favorite Son of Huntington. This spring we've read him in the company of Montaigne, Pascal, Emerson.

Whitman founded the Long Islander newspaper in Huntington Village. This is what the Long Islander building on Main Street looked like yesterday. The inscription at the top reads "Long Islander, 1836, 1884, 1889"

The Long Islander is an award-winning community newspaper that still publishes weekly.  The masthead of the paper displays Whitman's portrait.

Steel engraving of Walt Whitman that appeared in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

"Self-Reliance": Passages for Textual Analysis

Pages 182 to 185: Emerson's numbered list, beginning  "1. In what prayers do men allow themselves ... and ending with "bullet point" #4 on page 185. (At least I think it end on page 185, it's a legitimate question as to exactly where this section ends!).

Pages 186 ("Society is a wave") until the end of the essay.

Missing Epigraphs to "Self-Reliance"

For whatever reason, the editors of Great Conversations I omitted the Latin saying and the two pieces of poetry that preface Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" in other editions.  I offer them below. Whoever can give us a translation of the Latin at our meeting on Monday gets a prize.

"Ne te quaesiveris extra."

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
           Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

Where's Waldo?

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

According to the chronology of Ralph Waldo Emerson's life contained in the Library of America edition of his Essays and Lectures, Emerson decided in his junior year at Harvard that he wanted to be known as "Waldo," not "Ralph." Hence the title of the present "Author of the Month" post.

"Where's Waldo?" It's a good question, just as last month we might have asked "Where's Blaise?" How do we situate the "greats." We learn in school that Emerson was (a) a minister, (b) the first American intellectual of international caliber, (c) an American Romantic (Romanticist?), (d) a Transcendentalist.  In these two latter capacities he influenced Henry David Thoreau and the great son of Huntington, Walt Whitman, among many others.

We also know he published a number of essays that became famous, such as "Nature," "Compensation," and this month's selection, "Self-Reliance." Emerson is a disciple of Montaigne in that regard. I believe, however, that Emerson deserves to be received as a preacher delivering an inspiring sermon, as he was at one time at the Unitarian Second Church in Boston.

I would recommend that you seek out a sound recording of "Self-Reliance" and give it a listen. It just might afford a different take on Emerson's deep thoughts and beautiful language. If you find Waldo, tell us where.

"Pensées": Passages for Textual Analysis

Our discussion next Monday will focus on the following "Pensées" of Pascal:

136, 44, 978, 512, 199, 200, 678, 148, 110, 423, 418

These accord with the questions on pages 164 and 165 in the Reader.

I hope you find them diverting!

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Pascal with pages of his pensées below to his right by Augustin Pajou (1730-1809).

The biographical essay that accompanies this month's selection from Pascal's Pensées in Great Conversations I concludes, "Of lasting interest [is] ... his challenge to those who think that studied skepticism is a worthy substitute for a vigorous lifelong pursuit of truth."

Chief among "those" who thought this was Montaigne, two of whose essays we discussed last month. The philosophical school of skepticism, which dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho, suspends judgement on all belief.  In Montaigne's case, skepticism was accompanied by a light-hearted attitude towards life. In the end, he couldn't bring himself to worry too much about "deep" questions.

Pascal was quite a different type of philosopher, although in the context of the history of French letters, Pascal's beliefs were formed in a Montaignian crucible. As Sarah Bakewell has written in her fine How to Live or a Life of Montaigne, "If La Boétie hovered over Montaigne's page as his invisible friend, Montaigne hovered over Pascal's writings as his ever-present enemy and co-author."

Pascal, an accomplished scientist and mathematician, employs rigorous logic to crush doubt. He was devoutly Catholic, and the Pensées were written as fragmentary drafts for a larger defense of his faith. Pascal's untimely death prevented him from writing that work, and the Pensées stands as one of the great unintended classics of all time.

Montaigne's "Of Friendship" and "Of Solitude": Passages for Textual Analysis

At our meeting on next Monday, we'll talk about the questions on pages 127 to 129 and the textual passages below.  I usually pick passages that either (a) leave me baffled on first reading, or (b) ring true and are artfully stated.

From "On Friendship"

pages 108 to 109, starting "And that other, licentious Greek love ..." and ending "Because it was he, because it was I."

pages 110 to 111, starting "When Laelius," and ending "more readily than to myself."

page 112, from "Eudaimidas of Corinth" to "holding their weddings on the same day"


From "Of Solitude"

pages 118 to 119, from "Now the aim of all solitude" to "he took himself along with him."

page 120, from "We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health," to "Virtue, says Antisthenes, is content with itself, without rules, without words, without deeds."

page 124, from "This occupation with books" to "I am one of those who think that their benefits cannot counterbalance this loss."

page 125, from "Seek no longer that the world should speak of you" until the end of the piece.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

This month's selection, "Of Friendhip" and "Of Solitude" form a "boxed set."  The first is a eulogy to Montaigne's deceased friend, Etienne de la Boétie, the second a paean to the solitary, contemplative life. The translator of these essais, Donald Frame, has written of Montaigne, "His greatest attraction for most readers is that the book reveals a man and that the man becomes a friend and often another self."

"Prometheus Bound": Passages for Textual Analysis

On next Monday night, we'll take a close look at these passages from "Prometheus Bound," by Aeschylus in Great Conversations I:

page 67, from "Bright light, swift-winged winds, springs of the rivers ..." to "I pay nailed in my chains under the open sky."

page 78, from "Do not think that out of pride or stubbornness I hold my peace ..." to "all arts that mortals have come from Prometheus."

page 92: "Yet shall this Zeus, for all his pride of heart be humble yet..." to "So, in his crashing fall shall Zeus discover how different are rule and slavery."

page 96: "I have said too much already ..." to the end of the play.

What You Need to Know about "Prometheus Bound"

The subject of discussion at our meeting on Monday, February 27th will be the drama "Prometheus Bound."  Prometheus is chained to a crag in the Caucasus. In a twist on the idea of "crimes against humanity, Prometheus is being punished for "crimes for humanity"!  He gave humankind fire and other useful arts.

"Prometheus Bound" consists of a sequence of dialogues between Prometheus and the other characters: Oceanos, Io, Hermes, and perhaps most significantly, the daughters of Oceanos who form the Chorus. 

The Greek divine order, or "pantheon" forms an important backdrop to the work. There had been a dynastic struggle among races of gods. Prometheus's kin, the titans, were overthrown by the Olympian gods. In essence, "Prometheus Bound" is about the aftermath of this struggle.

Below is a glossary of some of the names of the play. I hope it helps you to follow the story line.

Amazons: A race of warrior women.

Armipasians: A one-eyed people who live near a gold-bearing river

Atlas: A titan, best known as the giant who held the earth separate from the sky.

Hades: the underworld

Haephaestus: God of metallurgy

Hera: wife of Zeus

Hermes: Messenger of the gods

Io: A daughter of the river god Inachus; changed in to a cow by Zeus

Kronos: Father of Zeus

Loxias: a title of Apollo meaning  “interpreter,” relating to Zeus’s prophetic power.

Might: a demon and servant of Zeus

Oceanos: A river and its god

Phorcys: A sea-god

Prometheus: A titan

Rhea: a titaness

Tartarus: A dark region below the earth, far below Hades

Themis: mother of Prometheus

Thetys: a sea goddess

Typho: a monster

Uranos: God of the sky

Violence: like Might, a demon and servant of Zeus; “muta persona”, or “silent character”

Zeus: The top Olympian god.

Questions on Gilgamesh

At our meeting on Monday, January 23rd, we will discuss the questions on pp. 58 and 59 in Great Conversations I, and take a close look at these sections of the work:

The Killing of Humbaba: Tablet IV (columns iii and iv)
The Spurning of Ishtar: Tablet VI (columns ii and iii)
The Death of Enkidu: Tablet VII (columns i, iii and iv)

And here's a bonus question:

Since the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is a title given by modern redactors of this work, if you could assign an alternate title, what would it be?

See you on the 23rd!

Epic of Gilgamesh

We usher in 2012 with the Epic of Gilgamesh, famous in the popular imagination as the oldest written epic of any civilization (at least as far as we know). The modern-day text comes to us via clay tablets painstakingly translated by British archaeologists in the nineteenth century.  Versions of the saga have since been discovered in various places in the Middle East. In approaching this text, I found a need to suspend my strong curiosity concerning the context of the Gilgamesh epic, and just enjoyed the story of Gilgamesh the king and demi-god who visited the "other" world and returned to tell the tale.

Cunieform table containing famous Gilgamesh epic version of the flood.

Statue of Gilgamesh at University of Sydney, Australia (credit: D. Gordon E. Robertson)

9th century BC orthostat relief found in Kapara's palace, Tell Halaf, depicting "Gilgamesh Between Two Bull-Men Supporting a Winged Sun Disk".