My infinite library
A short list of the books that have most affected me and for which I hold the most affection.
I recently read an essay speaking much in praise of George Orwell. It was inspired in turn by a post from Jay Nordlinger, a writer I deeply admire, who asked readers which books most influenced their politics.
I thought of writing my own response to Nordlinger. But I realized that, for unknown reasons, the idea did not interest me. What did interest me was to write about the books, the writings, that have most affected me and for which I hold the most affection, whatever their quality in the eyes of others.
I present my library to you in no particular order:
The Kindness of Women by JG Ballard
There is great beauty in transgression when transgression is not easy. It is easy to offend or disgust people, but it is very difficult to profoundly upend them. It is even harder to do so in a manner that forces them to think, especially of things that they had never even imagined existed.
JG Ballard, survivor of a Japanese internment camp, lived a staunchly bourgeoise life in a London suburb, from which his imagination roamed across the dystopian underside of the modern West. He believed the suburb was a place of promethean imaginations that were reshaping the West into something unprecedented except in science fiction. This alone, given the sentiments of the literary establishment, was transgression enough.
Ballard’s greatest transgression, however, set him apart from all other dystopianists. Such writers generally write cautionary tales, some justified and some not. Ballard believed, like them, that dystopia was possible, perhaps certain. But he did not think this was entirely a bad thing.
The opposite, in fact, was just as likely: In dystopia, man might find new erotic possibilities, a heightened life unknown in the consumer society, a place where he might become, as Ballard put it in his early masterpiece The Drowned World, “A second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun.”
His most detailed explorations of this idea were the abstract and non-linear The Atrocity Exhibition and then the legendary Crash, which explored the sexual resonances of the car crash and, by extension, technology itself. Today, with the ubiquity of technologically mediated internet pornography, its infinite perversions distanced and objectified by binary images, the novel seems more of a prophecy than ever.
I hold another book, lesser known, closest to my heart: The Kindness of Women, a sequel to Ballard’s bestselling account of his internment Empire of the Sun.
I underwent a traumatic childhood, enduring experiences that, I have read, induce the same level of trauma as that suffered by combat soldiers. I found in the fictional autobiography of The Kindness of Women not Ballard’s recounting of his own traumas, but of his reconfiguration of them, which granted him sexual, artistic, even philosophical insights that were and remain unknown to those who, being middle-class eunuchs, have not undergone the blood rites of the ancients.
In the chaos of his memories, Ballard recounts how he re-sensitized himself through dissecting cadavers in an anatomy class, overcame the death of his young wife by chronicling his own derangement, and above all found solace in the arms and compassion of women—compassion being, if I may be retrograde, something for which women seem to possess a unique talent.
I too have undergone Ballard’s katabasis, his journey through the underworld, and met its shades. I believe in his conviction that writing redeems and trauma can, if properly handled, be made into something that expands rather than constricts and strangles life, however terrible the suffering must be along the way.
And I believe in the kindness of women. I have known it, and it is real, as Ballard’s world is real, ever more real as the singularity approaches and we wonder at the pleasures that may await us in a new and sinister world.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
One day, when I was living in the southern Israeli city of Beersheva, I wandered past the outskirts of the city into the desert shrubland, where I encountered a Bedouin with a flock of sheep. Under a blazing sun, we noted each other’s existence, and then went on our way.
It was only then that I understood: You cannot understand Albert Camus until you have been under the Mediterranean sun. In particular, you cannot understand the transcendent and terrible moment in The Stranger in which the sky cracks from end to end and Meursault fires “four more times” into the knife-wielding Arab, “and it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.”
I do not remember when I first read The Stranger, but I do remember its shattering effect on me. I had been raised amongst the poverty of American literature, which has always been far inferior to American cinema or popular music. Here, in Camus’ slim volume, with its raw and concise language, hewn down to an absolute finitude of line, I felt I had finally found what the novel could be and what the novel could do.
Novels did not have to be banal tales of scarlet letters worn by dull adulteresses. They could be a miniature day of judgment, a final moment before the end of the world, utterly without pity or sentiment, but all the more admirable and elevating for it. Aujourd’hui maman est morte, “Mother died yesterday,” a single sentence, could be deafening.
I also, like many others, saw something of myself in Meursault. I empathized with his chosen solitude, his relentless honesty, his refusal to lie, his barely suppressed rage and violence, and his defiant hope that the world might “greet me with cries of hate.”
I also knew what it was to be condemned by others for refusing to pretend, to wear the mask, to weep at the funeral vigil when one does not feel like weeping. And here, in the desert, I had discovered that, as Meursault insists, the sun can make you kill—that is the measure of its power.
If I differ with Camus, it can only be in the hopelessness of his book and his hero, because I am a Jew and Camus was not. Gentiles can afford to live without hope, the Jews cannot. Meursault’s solitude was my own, but his nihilism is impossible to me. I understand him but I could never be him.
No Jew can be indifferent to the world; there is too much of the world arrayed against us. Nonetheless, in that apocalypse beneath the sun, Camus captured something I know to be real, and there is little more one can ask of a writer, or indeed of any human being.
The Silence of Animals by John Gray
To a great extent, we are trapped by shibboleths. It is accepted, often without reflection, that if we are to deal with politics or philosophy, we must affirm certain catechisms. Moreover, if we accept certain principles of certain ideologies, we must accept all their other principles as well. Then, we are called upon to denounce the principles of their enemies.
These ideologies are, in the intellectual world, usually those of either liberal democracy or Marxism in all its variants. There are few public intellectuals willing to challenge both, to acknowledge the good and bad within them, and then strike off on their own—light out for the unknown territory.
In discovering John Gray’s work, I felt that I had encountered one of these roamers. His strident critiques of both enlightenment liberalism and tyrannical Marxism inspired me in the most profound sense. Here, I thought, was a man after my own heart, and he was presenting me with new possibilities that ought to be seized upon, even if I might reach conclusions that were not his own.
Gray has written many fascinating books, but The Silence of Animals has stayed with me the longest. It is, in the end, a literary analysis—of Freud, Jung, Joseph Conrad, and others. It focuses on the great dissidents, those like Gray who have stood aside and then lit out for the territory.
Once, Gray was told, “If I thought like you did, I’d never get up in the morning.” Gray replied, “Well, why not stay in bed?” It seems a flippant response, but it is not. Why not, after all, stay in bed? Interesting things might happen. Thoughts might come to mind that had not before. In idleness might lie a revelation.
The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters by George Orwell
I became a writer by reverse-engineering George Orwell. For years, I pored over his books and essays, trying to figure out how he did it. I wondered at the astonishing clarity his work possessed, the ease with which he could describe something in its totality via a sentence or even just a few chosen phrases.
“It was a bitter cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” tells you everything you need to know about the terrifying novel that follows. Orwell’s prose style—and it was a style, honed over years of practice—is perhaps the closest the English language has ever come to haiku.
This collection of his essays, journalism, and letters was little less than my Bible. The library at Ben-Gurion University was without it for some time as I borrowed it, renewed it, returned it, and borrowed it again. Finally, I simply purchased all four volumes and they now lie strewn in various places around my apartment, to be consulted when inspiration or advice are needed.
Libraries can be filled with encomiums to Orwell as an essayist, and I will not indulge in swelling them further. Suffice it to say that some trace remains in everything I write of the death of the elephant, the deconstruction of Tolstoy’s pretensions, the generous but nonetheless thorough mangling of Gandhi’s halo, the transcendent beauty of the toad’s eye, and above all the eternally sound advice on what it is to write and be a writer.
I sometimes wonder if I have suffered because of this. If I have hewn too close to clarity rather than allowing myself the freedom to risk incomprehensibility. There are times when I make the attempt to turn slowly off the road and risk the dangerous bends ahead. But often I find that there is more solace and solidity to be found in the attempt to make one’s prose like a window pane.
I believe this only becomes an Achilles’ heel when banality is the result. The most remarkable thing about Orwell is that he is a minimalist without a trace of banality, and this is perhaps the most difficult and daunting feat for any literary man. Eric Arthur Blair, I salute you.
The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq
Among the French, despair is an art form. For the last three decades, Michel Houellebecq has been the foremost practitioner of the genre. None of the results, however, is greater than this, his only masterpiece—and no writer needs more than one.
I first read The Elementary Particles early in my sojourn in Israel. I had few friends, barely spoke the language, and was unsure as to my future path. Often, I felt nothing but lost and lonely. I lived in a solitude that was sometimes comforting and sometimes unbearable. I felt, not that no one understood me, but that no one, including myself, understood what was happening and, more importantly, why it was happening.
In this, his masterpiece, he chronicles the West’s late 20th-century auto-destruction in the persons of two brothers, demolished in their youths by the sexual revolution and its fallout, one of whom is a genius who cannot love and the other a bumbler desperate for human contact. Its compassion is immense and its denouement pitiless. I believe one of the saddest lines in world literature is “We believe Michel Dzerzhinsky went into the sea.”
Above all, the novel has an absolute belief in love and the redeeming power of love. It is for this reason that Houellebecq condemns society and perhaps the world. He believes that they both work to thwart and exterminate love. That in a fit of absence of mind, we have created what he calls “a world in which it is simply impossible to live.”
I do not believe it is impossible to live, but I do believe in confronting the world as it is. Houellebecq’s vision is, of course, a partial one. There is still a great deal of good in the world. But I also believe that he is correct that this terrible structure we have built in the age of late-capitalism is determined, in many ways, to destroy the good, and we must resist the attempt.
Above all, Houellebecq gave us, and gave me, what may be the greatest gift in our alienated and tyrannized age: The voice of a human being.
Perkei Avot by the Sages of Blessed Memory
The title has many translations, most literally “Chapters of the Fathers,” more figuratively “Sayings of the Fathers” or “Precepts of the Fathers.” But it remains for me in the original Hebrew—Perkei Avot.
It is a very ancient and strange book, an excision from the text of the Mishnah, the first codification of the Sages of Blessed Memory’s debates on Jewish law. Alone among the tractates, it does not consist of law. Rather, it is a collection of vague aphorisms and admonitions. They are not per se “ethical,” but observational and exhortative. They plead with man in a certain despair but with resolution. Throughout, it is convinced that these things need to be said, even if no one is listening.
The simplicity and concision of its Hebrew is readable even for me, who speaks, at best, “street Hebrew.” I find much of my people’s great literature difficult if not impenetrable in the original. But there is not much one needs to learn to understand Perkei Avot in any language.
I am prejudiced, perhaps even slightly chauvinist, but I believe this slim volume contains the greatest of human assertions. Some of them are now legendary:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for none but myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
It is not for you to finish the work, but nor are you free to desist from it.
In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.
For me, however, the finest moment is a mere sentence, a kind of imperative, though I do not know if it is moral or not. It is given in the name of Rabbi Tarfon: “The day is short, the work multiplies, the workers are lazy, the reward is great, and the master of the house is impatient.”
There is no doubt that if there is a master of the house, he is impatient. The reward may well be great and the work immense. We writers may be, as Orwell claimed, “vain, selfish, and lazy.” But I do know with certainty that the day is short and there is much labor before us, so one must obey Rabbi Tarfon and continue.
“The Shadow Out of Time” by HP Lovecraft
There is great integrity in loathing the world, though I do not. Nonetheless, I acknowledge that the world often deserves to be loathed, and as Michel Houellebecq pointed out, few writers loathed the world as intensely as HP Lovecraft.
Lovecraft, the great father of “weird fiction,” appears to have lived almost entirely in his own imagination. He wished, above all, to escape the terrible world. Thus, all his works are fantasias.
Yet it appears this escape provided him little consolation. His are fantasias of horror and the unspeakable. He populated his tales with utterly unhuman and repulsive bio-monsters like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, the Deep Ones, Nyarlathotep, and the ambiguous Night-Gaunts, obsidian winged creatures that had haunted his childhood nightmares. These monsters’ great text was the hideous Necronomicon, a grimoire constructed of human flesh.
The novella “The Shadow Out of Time” was thankfully the first Lovecraft tale I ever read, as it is by far his greatest. It tells the story of a retiring professor of economics who finds his mind seized by an unknown other personality, only to return to himself several years later with no memory of what had transpired in the meantime.
His slow discovery through dreams of what may have been the horrifying truth of his experience, and then, eventually, his possible discovery of the necessary proof, is all the more striking for its ambiguity. It suggests everything from Jung’s Shadow to the pulpiest of pulp science fiction.
But what one senses above all is enormity. The tale begins in the most mundane fashion, with a simple lecture to a college class. Then, slowly, it expands into a vast infinity of cosmic time and space. At the same time, it is as enormous within as without. Its protagonist descends into vast caverns as the tale descends into the depths of the psyche, the alien other within, who emerges only to terrify the dreamer.
There is no doubt that “The Shadow Out of Time” is of a piece with Lovecraft’s other fictions in its atmosphere of cosmic menace and horror. But it also possesses an unmistakable grandeur that can only be described as strangely euphoric. Lovecraft, one senses, enjoyed writing it. Perhaps writing was the only thing about life and the world that he did enjoy.
I wonder if HP Lovecraft found in the act of writing something akin to redemption or, at least, a welcome and precious escape, a sanctuary from the universe he feared and despised. I wonder if in this, if in nothing else, he was some kind of optimist.
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
I do not have a favorite writer, but I almost have a favorite writer, and he is Jorge Luis Borges: The sacred Borges, the Borges of labyrinths and unnamed cities, the Borges of forgery and satire and fear, the Borges of the infinite library.
My first encounter with the master was this short collection, originally published in the early 1960s. It was, I believe, the Anglophone world’s first real encounter with this unique Argentinean, and as far I know remains in print.
It contains most of Borges’ greatest texts, most of them a bare few pages long, such as “The Library of Babel,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Funes the Memorious,” “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and others.
The story that changed my life, however, was “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In it, Borges’ alter ego and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares, driven by Borges’ fear of a mirror, discover the existence of a strange encyclopedia of an unknown planet. The people of this world perceive time, space, and identity in a manner alien to our own. Its civilizations are bizarre, distorted reflections.
What chilled me, however, was the final pages, which reveal that the encyclopedia of Tlon has begun to capture the mind of the world. “Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe,” the author predicts. “The world will be Tlon.”
One can muse forever on the meaning of this allegory: Religion, totalitarianism, the madness of crowds—the possibilities, as in all things Borges, are infinite.
It was this small tale that showed me, as The Stranger had before it, what literature could be. Its possibilities are as infinite as the mind of its creator. I do not genuflect before anything, but if I were to do so, I would do so before Borges, the Author of Tlon, and grant him the homage due to transcendent genius.
The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu
There is nothing sadder than the passage of time, perhaps because we have no hope of stopping it, perhaps because it takes more than it gives. Einstein taught us that time is as malleable as space, and even the vast universe we see above us every night is only a stolen image. Who knows how many of those luminous stars are, in fact, already dead?
Time is the great theme of The Three-Body Problem trilogy, officially called, as it should be, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, because remembrance is a child of time. In this extraordinary cycle, the Chinese science-fiction master Cixin Liu takes the standard tale of alien invasion and transforms it into a meditation on existence itself.
This is the hardest of hard science-fiction, and the exigencies and limitations the natural world imposes upon us are staunchly respected throughout. But in them, Liu discovers tragedy born out of our history. In vengeance for the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, a lone human invites the destruction of the Earth. But due to the immense distances of space, the destruction cannot come for centuries, so mankind prepares itself to prevent the apocalypse.
What emerges out of this quest is an epic poem of eons, hundreds and then thousands and then millions of years, pocket universes and absolute relativity, the mythic beauty and terror of the universe. It is a work of unbounded ambitions and realizes them all.
The cycle’s second volume, The Dark Forest, is the best of the three. In particular, it presents the most cogent explanation of the “Great Silence” or “Fermi Paradox”: The universe should be populated by innumerable intelligent species, but as Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?”
Liu posits that intelligent civilizations, each fearful of the others’ intentions, hide from sight, avoiding potential conquest and even extermination by maintaining their Great Silence. It is disturbingly plausible and, if our earthly arrangements are any indication, perhaps the most likely solution.
The author has said that he finds the universe and the scientific study of it to be more compelling than any great myth or religion. I do not share this sentiment, but there is no question that Liu’s attempt to convey it constitutes one of the great literary accomplishments of the 21st century.
His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem
American science-fiction has never been a great favorite of mine. Too often, the writing is pedestrian at best and the ideas better suited to comic books than literature. There are exceptions, of course, such as Isaac Asimov in his best moments or Phillip K. Dick at any moment. But for the most part, the greatest practitioners of the literature of the future have not been Americans.
Stanislaw Lem was a Polish Jew of atheist convictions who was perhaps the greatest writer of 20th century sci-fi. He is best known because of the cinematic adaptations of his strange novel Solaris—one extraordinary, the other less so—but it is His Master’s Voice that illustrates for me the unique veracity of Lem’s work.
I perceived this uniqueness and its veracity due to the contrast between Lem’s book and Carl Sagan’s Contact. Both deal with the receipt of a message from the stars and the quest to understand its meaning and the nature of those who sent it. In Sagan’s very American version of this well-worn narrative, the protagonist ends up visiting the aliens themselves, who appear to her in the comforting and benign form of her beloved late father, conveying a message of love and hope.
In Lem’s deeply eastern European work, all of this is cast aside in favor of a more likely scenario: The message is never deciphered, its senders remain unknown, and the scientists’ attempt to decipher it nearly threatens the human race with nuclear extinction.
His Master’s Voice is perhaps the finest example of Lem’s great gift to his genre: The utter alienness of the alien, which he presumed mankind would be incapable of understanding, given that we are all to a great extent alien to ourselves.
Before this rigid integrity, Sagan’s vulgar Freudianisms collapse into insignificance, and the unknowability of others and of the universe remains for us to confront. Lem confronted it as an American would never have dared, and for this, the literature of the future owes him a very great deal.
“Ion” by Plato
It was Plato who made me an agnostic. I did not grow up believing in God, though I had a semi-religious (albeit very liberal) upbringing. For a time, I became an outspoken atheist, influenced, no doubt, by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who were riding high at the time. It was not until I discovered this eternal Greek that I felt such surety was no longer sustainable.
“Ion” is one of Plato’s lesser-known dialogues, and I have encountered collections in which it does not even appear. But it was the one that shook my faith in nothingness.
In it, Socrates queries Ion the rhapsode, and tells him that his work is not his own. Instead, the philosopher asserts, Ion is possessed by some unknown god when he recites.
I thought about Socrates’ assertion for some time, along with my own experience, and then concluded, “I think… that’s true.” Indeed, I feel, even as I write these words, that in the act of writing I am possessed by something. Whether it is God, a god or neither, I prefer not to speculate.
I have entertained other possibilities, of course; in particular, Carl Jung’s theory that creativity is the product of the unconscious mind’s rearrangement of outside stimuli into new and seemingly inexplicable configurations. But I admit, as Borges did, that the universe is so strange that anything is possible.
So, on all questions regarding the divine and possession, I prefer to say that I am not simply an agnostic but a hard agnostic: It is unknowable whether God exists, and if he does, he is also unknowable. As such, art is also unknowable. I believe I am in good company in saying so.
The Oresteia by Aeschylus
It is not unusual for the greatest works to be the first ones. Certainly, any art form requires time to develop, but once it does, the genius who brought it forth is often its foremost practitioner, as anyone who acknowledges the beauty of cave paintings will readily agree.
I believe that The Oresteia is the greatest work of drama ever written, perhaps because it is the first. Like the great filmmakers of the silent era, Aeschylus was inventing the art form as he went along. By definition, he was a transcendent genius, as is this, the greatest of all the extant Greek tragedies and the only trilogy we possess.
Aeschylus’ retelling of the upheavals of the house of Atreus does not move us solely because of the beauty of its verses—which I cannot read in the original in any case—but also because of the brute force of its subjects.
There is the arrogant and imperious Agamemnon, victor of the Trojan War, who will soon be murdered by a vengeful wife. Clytemnestra, the vengeful wife, determined to exact the ultimate price from her hideous husband who murdered their daughter for the sake of military greatness. The hapless Cassandra, whose first line is a scream and who knows all the horrors that are about to take place, but nobody listens to her due to a divine curse.
Then there is Orestes himself, doomed to be tortured by the Furies for murdering the mother he must murder by the laws of both gods and men, taking vengeance for a father who was unworthy of it. And perhaps most of all Electra, the daughter who is loyal to the memory of her unworthy father, and even more loyal to her brother Orestes, who she knows will take the revenge she desperately wants but, in doing so, condemn himself.
No story, Orson Welles said, has a happy ending unless you stop telling it before it’s over. Yet, at the end of this pageant of bloodshed and betrayal, of the insurmountable and the irreconcilable, the greatest of all the tragedians gives Orestes a happy ending, redeeming him by way of Athena and the Athenian democracy over which she presides.
We should be grateful. If Orestes, of all people, can enjoy a happy ending, it is not unreasonable to think that, though our ending may be, for many of us, unhappy, we can nonetheless be happy in the meantime.
Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman
Like many of my generation, 9/11 marked the turning point of my life. It, like all atrocities, is beginning to pass into memory. Nonetheless, I feel that my life was never more profoundly changed by an outside event, and that I can firmly divide history both personal and communal into before it and after it.
I was at work when the attacks occurred, and distinctly remember stepping outside and seeing Boston’s vast Commonwealth Avenue completely deserted—no cars, no planes overhead, a terrible silence looming over everything. I thought: It’s the end of the world.
It wasn’t, of course, but it was something very great and very terrible, and for years afterwards, many of us sought to understand it. Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman’s book-length essay on the attacks, radical Islam, and the challenges they posed to liberal democracy, was what finally focused my inchoate ideas.
Berman, like myself, came from the left. Thus, 9/11 presented him with the dilemma of how left-wing intellectuals could effectively confront a brutal reactionary ideology that was nonetheless embraced by many of their comrades. He sought, in effect, to synthesize left-wing ideas with the absolute demands of the moment. I believe he at least partially succeeded, and even the attempt itself was inspiring. I have attempted, in my small way, to do the same.
Perhaps more than its content, however, the book has stayed with me because of its extraordinary style. It showed me that a political essay, a polemic, could be a novel. Ideas could be characters and the sweep of history a finer setting than anything the imagination might create.
There is, in fact, very little that is more dramatic than ideas, and almost nothing that is more dramatic than history. Politics is the greatest spectator sport man has ever devised. Berman grasped this and could (and can) translate it into deceptively evocative prose that remains, for me, a constant model and inspiration.
Less Than Zero and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
“I want to go back.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, just back.”
I have always been fascinated by this enigmatic exchange from Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel Less Than Zero. The discontented and emotionally deceased Clay has come home from college and finds his friends enmeshed in various vices. They want to go “back,” but have no idea where “back” is. A finer expression of ennui has perhaps never been written.
When I first read the novel, I was struck by how familiar it was. I recognized both its characters and its ambiance from my youth as a petit bourgeois in a haute bourgeois suburb. I now believe that, being slightly lower and apart from them, I was able to see them and know them better than they knew themselves.
Ellis was one of them, but he was also a writer, and a writer is both a watcher and an assassin, silent and apart, waiting for the moment to strike. And there is no doubt that Less Than Zero is essentially a condemnation. Ellis hates this world and pities the people in it, but he does not spare them. I believe that, contrary to popular opinion, he is ultimately a moralist.
This aura of judgment found its culmination in Ellis’ perpetually controversial American Psycho. It is quite clear that amidst the book’s hideous, pornographic violence is a condemnation of a world, a world in which acquisition had become the highest value and indulgence of one’s whims the ultimate telos of life. It is a finer deconstruction of late capitalism than any Marxist ever conceived.
Above all, both disturbing chronicles are marked by what JG Ballard called the “death of affect.” Their characters, by and large, feel nothing, even when they commit the most horrendous acts of murder. It is this death, I believe, that Ellis seeks, albeit silently, to shatter.
One wishes there was more of this, more of the attempt to reassert our capacity to feel and to judge. Unfortunately, Ellis turned to cinematic ambitions for some time, and his latest novel The Shards is a retread of what he accomplished perfectly in his first masterpiece.
It is to be hoped that Ellis now moves on to other subjects, new vistas that may again inspire his quiet outrage at their own particular nihilism.
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and The Messianic Idea in Judaism by Gershom Scholem
In my youth, Judaism was a simple thing. I was raised in a very liberal Reform synagogue in Boston that had managed to denude Judaism of any trace of distinction. We learned little or nothing of the history and literature of the Jewish people, let alone traditional practice, and were instead subjected to endless exhortations about social justice and tikkun olam.
It was only much later, in my early 20s, after years of alienation from and even hatred of my identity, that I began to discover that Judaism was about something else. I found that what I had not been taught was everything.
It was Gershom Scholem who opened the gates of Judaism for me. The German-born scholar, who fled his country of birth in time and made his way to Palestine, where he eventually became a professor at the Hebrew University, was the first great and perhaps still the greatest secular scholar of the Kabbalah. All his successors in the discipline stand on his shoulders, whether they like it or not. As I was later to discover when I attended an Israeli university, many of them indeed do not.
In the end, Scholem wrote only tangentially about the mystical tradition, though it was his professed subject. The real subject was the nature of Judaism itself, which I believe is its true self. It is the sense of the text as an infinite abyss: Bottomless, dark, unknowable, but also of immense depth. There are extraordinary, luminous things to be discovered there for those brave enough to venture down into the deep.
Scholem’s two great works convinced me that it was in the Kabbalah that this sense of the text had found its greatest fulfillment. Here, the Hebrew letters were not simply absolute and immutable, but formed of divine fire. They possessed the secret of the world, there to be discovered if one could only read them properly, arrange them properly, understand the strange things for which they are a mere face and persona.
The Kabbalists, perhaps more than any other school of Judaism, contemplated the absolutes—the nature of creation and the coming end. This was a tikkun olam very different from the one I had been taught, in which the shattered material world, unworthy of continued existence, will be subsumed again into the divine.
We all seek to know the beginning and the end. Judaism, in its essence, does the same, perhaps better than any other tradition. I did not know this until Scholem informed me. For this, my only sentiment is gratitude.
2666 by Roberto Bolano
The English-language literary establishment is, by and large, a landscape of poverty. The works it champions are usually dull, haute bourgeois mediocrities, and one wishes above all to escape them into the masterpieces of the past.
Occasionally, however, even this decadent aristocracy gives us something like a gift. The most recent is the translated works of the South American master Roberto Bolano.
I do not usually care for books about writers, as writers writing about writers is, for the most part, a painfully narcissistic exercise. Bolano is a strange exception. He does write about writers, and somehow remains compelling. This may be because of his impish sense of humor, perhaps because he makes use of the essential solitude of the writer to achieve a rare and difficult combination of distance and empathy.
While The Savage Detectives is usually his most valorized novel, it was the immense 2666 that most profoundly moved me. It is a disconnected chronicle of various people’s encounters with a horrific series of brutal sex murders of innocent young women in a Mexican border town. It promises some great revelation, but withholds it throughout, hinting at the unknowable depths of the savage within us and the mechanized nature of modern violence, which by definition can have no author.
As a beleaguered policeman remarks as he examines a map of the murder sites, somewhere in this mutilated mosaic lies “the secret of the world.” This secret is never revealed, which is as it should be. I believe there is a secret of the world. But it is quite possible that, if it were revealed, it would be difficult to stand it. We should hope that those who do will remain silent.
Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
Pessimism had a bad rap these days, particularly in the realm of popular culture. From the average sitcom to the latest Hollywood movie to the standard uplift of the most asinine Oprah-style talk show, no one wants to think that things are anything but OK. If they aren’t, we are told, the best cure is to “think positive,” as if this would change anything.
Against this universal delusion, an auto-conspiracy undertaken by fools, stands the immense figure of Sigmund Freud. However much he may be derided and degraded today, Freud spoke certain uncomfortable and certainly inconvenient truths that we, for the most part, prefer to ignore. And as he pointed out, ignoring such truths can lead only to dysfunction and neurosis.
I wrote my master’s thesis on Freud, focusing mostly on his fraught Jewish identity and its expression in his final book Moses and Monotheism. But that bizarre volume of proto-psychohistory was the product of his great trilogy Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents.
This trilogy was his attempt to formulate a theory of collective psychology that might explain the horrific events of the First World War, which an entire generation of Enlightenment intellectuals found incomprehensible. They had thought mankind was progressing, getting increasingly better. They “thought positive.” And now there was definitive proof they been wrong to do so.
Civilization and Its Discontents is the greatest of the three texts. Its thesis is simple enough: Civilization was made possible by the repression of our primal, anarchic drives. Thus, the more civilized we become, the more repressed we find ourselves. This can only lead to eruptions of collective psychosis, each more destructive than the last as the technology of violence progresses.
As Freud put it, “We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.”
I have found no better explanation of the mass atrocities of the previous century and the continuing perversions of our own. We are at war with civilization because we must be. Billions of years of evolution have made us so. Yet without civilization, a great many of us could not live, so we are condemned to the endless cycle of repression and eruption.
As Freud believed of individual psychology, however, I wonder if these collective neuroses can perhaps be exposed, discussed, and properly analyzed. If so, we may, to some extent, be capable of mitigating their repercussions. This may be the only “positive thinking” that, in our ravaged modernity, can do us some good.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Basho
On his deathbed, the 19th century haiku master Matsuo Basho dictated his last poem:
Falling sick on a journey
My dream goes wandering
Over a field of dried grass
This may well be the most beautiful form of words ever written by a human being, encompassing the beautiful melancholy of the approaching end and the gathering shadows. But in its beauty, it redeems its author from the inevitable nothingness before him.
This poem does not appear in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Basho’s masterpiece. Nonetheless, the book does include such extraordinary utterances as
Summer grasses
All that remains
Of great warriors’ imperial dreams
Dreams loom as large in Basho as rain, wind, snow, islands, and the great sea that surrounds his homeland. Perhaps no writer ever grasped the uncanny depths of nature as he did, elevating animism into a sublimity that no Westerner—with the ubiquity of the monotheist tradition—could have done.
This informal travelogue, a song of wanderlust and what the Japanese call mono no aware—the melancholy evoked by the transience of all things—is as stunning in its prose as its verse, from its opening words “Days and months are travelers of eternity.” It chronicles what was to be one of the master’s last journeys, undertaken at a time when he was already something like a legend.
I believe Basho made his way north because he had no choice. More than the most beleaguered rock star, the road beckoned to him. He was unable to sit still. Despite illness, age, and growing infirmity, he set off on what were then the dangerous roads of a Japan that had enjoyed a homeostatic isolation for two centuries, which many of the era believed would never change.
But Basho moved, I believe, because he knew that things were ever-changing. Fascinated by Zen Buddhism, he embraced his century’s ideal of the “floating world,” all things coming into being and then passing out of it and coming into being again. In journeying, he may have felt that he became one with the essence of existence itself, whatever the hardships involved, and at whatever cost to his longevity.
I do not care for travel myself, but in my mind, I often go as astray as Basho. I wander among the synapses, dreaming and, perhaps, wandering over fields of dried grass. I would pass happily from the world if I knew that, for a brief moment, I had perchance been Basho’s dream.
From Hell by Alan Moore
There has likely never been anything quite as horrible as the 20th century. It was 100 years of genocide, oppression, war, terror, starvation, slavery, technological horrors of all kinds, and a seemingly insurmountable alienation from others and from ourselves. Encapsulated in Auschwitz and the atomic bomb, it was a trauma from which man may spend a thousand years recovering, perhaps never to recover at all.
Allan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell ends with the words, “I think there’s going to be another war.” It is, perhaps, the only words with which it could have ended. Because From Hell is one of the great contemplations of the ravaged 20th century; though, for the most part, it does not take place in the 20th century.
Instead, it is a fantastical, occult chronicle of the 19th century serial killer Jack the Ripper and the world in which this fiend moved and murdered—most especially the dark water city of London itself.
It works off the absurd conspiracy theory that the Ripper was Queen Victoria’s physician William Gull—a Masonic agent of a royal plot to slaughter the prostitutes of the East End. For Gull, however, the smoke-filled city is a vast altar of human sacrifice, upon which he will offer up enough blood to ensure the domination of man over woman. Enough blood, in the end, to give birth to Hitler and the horrors that ensue. As Gull puts it following his final, ecstatic slaughter, “The 20th century, I have birthed it.”
It is not an easy book to take. Its stark black and white, unsparing illustration of the ravages of 19th century poverty, and unspeakably gory violence combine to either fascinate or repel the reader. I confess that I am unable to reread the chapter “The Best of All Tailors,” in which the dark heart of Gull and the century he has birthed is revealed; though I acknowledge, with no reservations, its genius.
From Hell ends, as perhaps it should, in a moment of ominous hope: A defiant woman frightens the devil away and two old men, laid low by time and corruption, wander off into the distance as the waves break upon an English beach. They know that the next war is coming, as indeed we now know it did.
The Histories by Herodotus
As I have said, there is almost nothing more dramatic than history. The first historian knew this quite well, and the beauty and pleasure of Herodotus’ Histories is a testimony to his enthusiasm for human affairs.
There were many then and many now who find Herodotus distasteful. He is too anecdotal and seemingly credulous for their tastes, though recent archeological finds have shown that the “father of lies” was far less of a liar than we or his contemporaries imagined.
The dissenters prefer the pitiless analyses of Thucydides to the colorful recounting of Herodotus, but they are quite wrong. Not only is Thucydides deathly boring, but Herodotus understands and thus captures the human with an exactitude of which Thucydides is incapable. Thucydides is perhaps the better “historian,” but he has no sense of the human beings who make history. Even Alcibiades is dull in his hands.
What is most extraordinary about the Histories, however, is the immensity of the work and the labor that must have been invested in its creation. I often wonder what drove this itinerant Greek to make his way around the known world, inquire as to the world beyond it, and then spend what must have been decades compiling his notes and writing with such wit of the human comedy.
I imagine that, unlike most historians, Herodotus approached history as one would a work of the imagination. He perceived that humans exist only in the mind of whatever God or gods might exist, and thus in their bizarre foibles and inexplicable flaws, they create a mosaic of the unusual that cannot be overcome by fiction.
No fantasist would have created the mad Cambyses and his lost army, or the extraordinary last stand at Thermopylae. Such things would have seemed too overwrought and belabored to believe, and yet they happened, or happened in a manner very similar to their retelling.
Herodotus, in giving us the Histories, gave us a tableau of a moment in time. Without it, humanity would be and has been poorer. This is the only testament a historian requires.