Candide and the intellectual power of the author

Candide

Voltaire
here is another satire on human nature, laid bare with all of its deficiency: cruel, stupid, ugly and senseless; and on this world: meaningless, indifferent and chaotic.  it is a carefully constructed argument against the presumed purposeful human existence, expressed as "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds".  the rebuttal is caricatural but powerful; the stories, while sketchy and conceptual, are intriguing enough to hold one's attention and sympathy. from time to time, i mentally compared it to Gulliver's Travels. while it is cruder and less imaginative as literature, Candide does deliver its intended message effectively with blunt and brutal directness.

i had not read Voltaire's works till this novella and was rather surprised to learn, from wiki, that it was practically the only one of his thousand books still widely read. it seems sorrowfully inadequate to his lasting fame. evidently, one can be prodigiously intelligent and productive without being truly original. and time will erase all but the most indented traces. nonchalantly. without a yawn.

old dueling - the strange case of Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Haggard

She

King Somomon's Mines
by H. Rider Haggard


Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson

googling the most read books of all time, i was surprised (and ashamed) that i had never heard of "She" or H. Rider Haggard.  almost impatiently, i read through his two most famous books in next couple of days: first the Queen, then the King. it was certainly enjoyable, but i could easily imagine a much younger me to be mesmerized by such stories while observing this older, if not wiser, me criticizing the writing with detachment. like those stereotypical "good bad books", the plots are intriguing but the narrative plain, with the characters poorly depicted and of little development.  It also reminds one how time has changed. one of the main attractions of such stories is the description of vanishing worlds of past and lands far far away.  now with globalization, with internet, and with all sorts of blending and mingling, even moon has been touched upon and Mars bare for all to see, the only lost land seems these old generations of fantasy.

it was mentioned in the wiki entry that Haggard was prompted to write the books by the huge success of Stevenson's "Treasure Island". he even placed a bet that his stories would be far better. i did buy a copy of "Treasure Island" many years ago for the boys. neither was interested in reading so i didn't bother either. now i wasted no time to read Stevenson's classic.

well, almost from page one, it was a "hands down" in my mind whose books are better. far better: the writing and characterization, assuming the plotting is at par.  by this time, i was also reminded of Stevenson's Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. so intellectually, Stevenson was also superior.  i could only say i wish i had read Mr. Haggard at a much younger age.  Stevenson is probably timeless, however.

Travel with Gulliver again, or for the first time

Gulliver's travels
by Jonathan Swift
it's about the land of little men and the land of big men: one of those never-to-be-forgotten stories in everyone's childhood. i did not know for all those years, however, that it was actually an adult book: a satire on human nature.

with kindle, i started to read Swift with "a modest proposal" and "the battle of the books". i was not particularly engaged in either: so yesterday and so far away. but Gulliver's travels was different.  i immediately tagged along with Gulliver and was delighted to revisit those good old lands, this time, seen through the eyes of  the very original and bitter old Gulliver (or Mr. Swift). it turns out the Lilliputians (little men) are narrow-minded and mean and Brobdingnagians (big men) insensitive; Lupatanians are boring and Houyhnhnmsians too noble to reach. Yahoos? ouch! that's us, the mere human beings: too degenerate to bear.  the stories are delicious, cute, funny, ridiculous, realistic, other-worldly. and more. what a book. how one wishes to be able to write like that!

Memory palaces and places - Moonwalking with Einstein

Moonwalking with Einstein: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything
by Joshua Foer

1. pickled garlic
2. cottage cheese
3. salmon (peat smoked if poss.)
4. white -------------------------------------- six bottles of white wine
5. 3 hola hoops ------------------------------ socks (x3)
6. socks 2x ---------------------------------- 3 hola hoops (spared?)
7. -------------------------------------------- snorkel
8. -------------------------------------------- dry ice machine
9. email to Susan ----------------------------- email to Sophia
10. ------------------------------------------- skin toned cat suit
11. find the Paul Newman movie - someone up there likes me
12. ------------------------------------------- elk sausages??
13. megaphone in director's chair
14. ram steak --------------------------------- harness ropes
15.-------------------------------------------- barometer

well, this list was a supposed to-do list the author used to learn from his mentor (Ed Cooke) and to illustrate in the book the techniques of submitting something (and everything) to memory.  I grasped the principles as I read along and could remember 14/15 after finishing the chapter (1:30 am, 10/21/2011). with a few minor mistakes. 6:30 am in the morning, i recounted all 15 of the items with ease (not counting minor mistakes).  i hadn't thought of it since.

now, almost one month later, the list is no long crispy in my min: I barely managed half of it. with significant effort to recall the missing ones to no avail. and with quite a few mixed-ups. and crumbs here and there: only white is left with six bottles of white wine.

the basic techniques are simple enough. the first step is to build one's memory palaces (in my case, it can be appropriately called "a place", one place), where everything is in unforgettable order and they serve as your own signposts. next is to hang whatever you want to remember to each of those signposts in order. for this, you have to first create an image of the thing to remember and then assign that image to the signpost to make them inseparable.  now things to remember become things to visualize with association. according to the teaching, the best palaces are places you've lived: childhood home, familiar neighborhoods, grandparents' houses, train stations ....

for someone as disoriented as me, this kind of palaces are impossibility compared to whatever I have to remember. so for my practice, not done with serious effort, i used the Chinese zodiac: a tiny place with 12 animals called for my service: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, ram, monkey, chick, dog, pig. since there were 15 items in the laundry list, I reused the first 3 animals:

my rat hang a picked cucumber jar on his neck; but it is not cucumbers, but white garlic. next.

my ox got the cottage cheese. he was puzzled: cheese belongs to the rat. done (it helped also, i am sure, that i associated the first two items this way).

my tiger fights with salmon (it looked more like an alligator as I just Haggard's She).

checking back to what's retained, memory is about hardworking, time, concentration and repetition. i can see this technique powerful, but the effort is insignificant.  my original insincere objective was to memorize the card deck so that i could show off at imagined parties of future. for that, i must build a much larger memory palace and I must have 52 unique images of subject-action-object. then i have to practice, practice, practice... now the question becomes "do i have better things to busy myself with?"

it is certainly a book worth reading. i have learned something unforgettable: not the laundry list, which is now back in my memory again, but the impressive memory techniques and principles. so I've acquired knowledge, if not skills.  it chewed up a significant chunk of the mystery regarding "photographic memory", which I always find fascinating. many small stories are quite fun to read. however, i also find this book itself slightly superficial. it is well researched, yet lacks the authenticity of true knowledge and passion. the writing is bland, too. the best part is Foer's skepticism and investigation of one of the so-called "high functioning savants" (Daniel Tammet). anyway, i could envision a far better book on the same topic, of the same style.  Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak came to mind. with all this and that, however, this is a book hard to forget.

A heavy-handed portrait of an artist

The Moon and Sixpence
by W. Somerset Maugham

He was a stock broker, and a good husband with a lovely wife and beautiful kids. He turned 40. He abandoned his family to become an artist. His art works were strange, other-worldly and eventually recognized as the touches of a genius.

Maugham must have been fascinated and puzzled by the incredible life story of Gauguin. To comprehend, he recreated a fictional version of him.  The moon and sixpence is really a rational depiction of pure artistic temperament, as exemplified by the reclusive artist. Having made myself fairly familiar with the biographical facts before hand, I did not find Maugham's portrait to coincide with my own impression of Gauguin.  I even liked "the real thing" better. However, I was not at all disappointed with the book.  Maugham was a very good story teller and able to make his thoughts and reasoning interesting by vivid characters and plausible plots.  And his appreciation of art and artists is genuine and touching.

can't go wrong; hard to add much - to the immortal Michelangelo

The Agony and The Ecstasy
by Irving Stone

this is the very popular "biographical novel" of Michelangelo. it was not poorly written and did add texture to the usual sketches of his life. however, Michelangelo's life was no ordinary life; it was full of astonishing achievements and never short of drama, all of which meticulously documented and recounted over and over. having already visited Rome to "witness" his artworks and read several books and numerous articles about him, i found it hard to get excited about the little stories made up by the author beyond the "authentic facts" i had already become familiar with. it would be a fun book for someone who enjoys an easy read and has only started to learn this amazing genius.

Oh Oscar!

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde


Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions
by Frank Harris


Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellman

it's not possible to come up with a witty title when one wants to talk about Oscar Wilde. and no words could express my total sympathy for someone whose life was like a mirror that reflects the ultimate shame and terror of humanity even in one of its better forms.

i started with Dorian Gray. it is a very fine book with a clever design and intriguing possibilities. i say "possibilities", instead of stories, because the whole design is evidently fictional, from start to end, and readers are fully prepared for it. this sets it opposite to the conventional "realistic style", which, in Wilde's words, is "art imitates nature", and dictates a distinct reading experience as if pondering a philosophical question (with disbelief suspended): what would happen if one remained young and beautiful while his portrait (art) aged in his place?  in Oscar's mind the answer is likely open-ended and Dorian for one takes on ever extravagant and bizarre sensual adventures, with his portrait taking a beating with each of his "successes".  "possibilities" are also felt as Dorian is constantly redirected by his friend Lord Henry Wotten. Henry lives a more mundane do-nothing life, except providing hints, suggestions and encouragement: Dorian is his artwork in constant need of touching up and perfection. the creator of Dorian's portrait is the virtuous Basil Hallward, who is hopelessly attracted by Dorian but tries in vain to illustrate the right way of living for the latter - the road not taken. The writing is absolutely absorbing in the first half of the book but becomes repetitive and tiresome slowly, only to be saved by a well-thought of ending. and my interest in Wilde was kindled.

thanks to my new kindle, i read Frank Harris's Oscar first (it's free). it's not a scholarly biography but a friend's recounts, biased and intimate.  in fact, it's very much a fictional story with two main characters. fictional because Harris was criticized even at his own time for recreating dialogues, an obvious no-no for an ordinary biographical writing. it is okay with me, however - i take it as a fact that memory is always "reconstructed" each time it is called into action, knowingly or unintentionally, obviously or subtly.  Harris himself becomes a major part of the narrative because he has an overbearing personality loaded with opinions and conviction.  Harris is highly sympathetic to Wilde for two reasons: he appreciates the latter's genius more than most of his contemporaries and he believes in fighting for a more liberal and tolerant society (for art and artists). it attests to his strong belief that he also shows a total lack of understanding of Oscar's homosexuality. thus, they are friends of contrast, but not of intimacy; of respectful deference, but not of love. one "casualty" of this powerful and revealing book of his is that i found Harris himself rather too straight-arrow-ish and ended up with no wish to learn more about him (his autobiography is fairly known, mostly for its frank and abundant sexual contents).

Ellman's book is considered the most authentic Wilde biography. it is well researched and comprehensive, but the writing is a little tedious. Ellman's Wilde is more mature if not as vivid. reading Ellman, i evolved from sympathy for Oscar's personal tragedy to appreciation of his true genius. with that, i do not feel Wilde had had too much to regret in life. tragic as it was, he knew what his desires were and dared to live them, too - not many human beings could have claimed that.  to a large extent, his contemporaries, supporters and detractors, behaved as well as their own nature had dictated.  the real terror is their well functioning society, with its capacity to exaggerate and multiply the collective sentiment or hatred of the populace, under which, Wilde was simply pulverized, as numerous before and after him.  and Wilde knew: 'as one reads history, not in the expurgated edition written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishment that the good have inflicted.' not just sickening but horrifying. and Oscar becomes a martyr - most unwillingly, i am sure.

most memorable quotes:

"The Love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name," and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it."


------ his speech in the court


Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

- from The Ballad of Reading Gaol


"A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys" (it is a relief that he never regretted his true nature)

Wilde had always held that the true "beasts" were not those who expressed their desires, but those who tried to suppress other people's. 

"What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. without it,the world would grow old and colorless". “by its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notion about morality, it is one with the highest ethics."


How Wilde is remembered now:


from Harold Bloom:
...after more than a hundred years literary opinions has converged in the judgement that Wilde, as Borges asserts, was almost always right. This rightness, which transcends wit, is now seen as central to the importance of being Oscar. Daily my mail brings me bad poetry, printed and unprinted, and daily i murmur to myself Wilde's apothegm:"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." -  Harold Bloom


from Ellman:


the monument bears an inscription from The ballad of reading goal: 
And alien tears will fill for him
pity's long-broken urn,
for his mourners will be outcast men, 
and outcasts always mourn.


'There is something vulgar in all success,' Wilde told O'Sullivan.'The greatest man fail, or seem to have failed.' he was speaking of Parnell, but what was true of Parnell is in another way true of Wilde. His work survived as he claimed it would. We inherit his struggle to achieve spureme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being santized and standarized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria's. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.

I also copied a passage from an old biography of Carson "Carson the advocate" by Edward Marjoribanks - probably the only one that has survived him, which nobody reads anymore. I searched for his biographies with the desire to find something like this, and did:

There remains only to be recorded a circumstance as strange and terrible as the culminating scene in Dorian Gray.

Some years afterwards, Edward Carson was walking by himself in Paris on a wet day in the early months of the year. He was about to cross the street when the driver of a fiacre, with Parisian recklessness, almost ran him down, and splashed him clothes with mud. He stepped back quickly on to the pavement, and knocked someone down. Turning around to apologize, he saw a man lying in the gutter, and recognized the haggard, painted features of Oscar Wilde. Like a flash, his mind went back to that occasion eight years before, in London, when Wilde's fine carriage had almost overrun him. the eyes of the two men met, and they recognized each other. Carson turned around and said, "I beg your pardon." Wilde, under the name of Sebastian Melmoth, was living in Paris, dying of a terrible disease, "beyond his means," as he observed with the wit which never deserted him, preying on the generosity of his friends. In a week or two, he was dead.

voyaging with Darwin...and Browne

Charles Darwin: Voyaging (vol1) and the Power of Place (vol2)

by Janet Browne

it's one of the best books i have ever enjoyed, certainly the best biography i've read.

while revisiting the notes i took on the Origin of Species - with the intention to expand them into something more substantial and interesting - it occurred to me that i should learn a little bit more about his life, beyond the ubiquitous iconic figure everyone seems to recognize.

but which biography to choose? i went Amazon.com, clicked the first Darwin book on top and dived right into the readers' reviews. almost immediately, someone was saying this book was pretty good; but Browne's far better. others concurred. with reasons i would heartily agree, like the avoidance of too much psychoanalysis... i got my book - such is wisdom of the mass.

and what a wonderful book. often biographies are as interesting as the lives depicted. i do not doubt biographical writing must be demanding and tricky. besides diligent research, one has to find ways to bring real-life heroes and sheroes alive, above and beyond merely "real". but i've rarely expected good writing and never actually noticed writers behind.

Browne's Darwin is different. Darwin is one of those few human beings endowed with high intelligence and luck, born in the right time and right place and lived a long life of amazing achievements. He is by nature complex, with controversies and contradictions abound, both as a person and as the "co-discoverer" of the "evolution by natural selection" theory. and what "controversies" his theory has been stirring, 150 years and counting! it seems any biography would do well.

not content with such rich a life, Browne attempted, and succeeded in placing Darwin in the much larger social and historic context of the Victorian era, which she painted with critical comments on the political and economical surroundings, with frequent references to the familiar (and less familiar) literary figures and books of the time, and with meticulous description of many trivial (but entertaining) details of a countryman's life back then. This realistic and beautiful setting is real and fictional at the same time, making the reading exceedingly satisfying.

with seemingly an effort to be thorough and objective, Browne also casts a very harsh eye on any, large or small, questionable behaviors and actions of her hero, unknowingly creating a digressive but amusing tension in her narrative, which tickled me to no end: "she is like Caroline, the loving but judging elder sister of Darwins'!" This kind of soft criticism eventually helps deflect any suspicion of Darwin's character and achievements that readers might have held based on other information and opinions, like those sympathetic to Wallace: "well, this indeed shows a little selfishness on Darwin's side, but taken as a whole, he had more than made up by his other good deeds!" thought this reader here and there.  

talking about Wallace, the only criticism, more like a wish, i could come up is that this expansive book provides very little scientific analysis on their respective contributions to the evolution theory and the critical difference in their thoughts. but this might take a different kind of expert.

ultimately, i am much gratified by finally learning a life as fully fulfilled as it could be. for once, free of the anguish i felt for my other favorites like Melville, like Van Gogh, like Orwell.

New day new plate

meat bad
rice a foe
make your (vege) plate 
fruitful

eat less
work more
live your (long) life
as a chore


(The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you don't want - Mark Twain)

When the domain Registar deletes...

(the pointer to www.baihua.org, "the woods")

it's pathless to the woods
and I am lost in the wilderness
of void

no burns and tickles from the cobwebs
and no twigs to break
or avoid

and two eyes are weeping:
where are my friends? and where
the feuds?!

----------------------

from Frost's Birches:

And life is too much like a pathless wood  
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs  
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping  
From a twig's having lashed across it open. 

 Birches

by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right  

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,  

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.  

But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.  

Ice-storms do that. 

Often you must have seen them  

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning  

After a rain. They click upon themselves  

As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured  

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.  

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells  

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust  

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away  

You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.  

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,  

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed  

So low for long, they never right themselves:  

You may see their trunks arching in the woods  

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,  

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair  

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.  

But I was going to say when Truth broke in  

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,  

I should prefer to have some boy bend them  

As he went out and in to fetch the cows--  

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,  

Whose only play was what he found himself,  

Summer or winter, and could play alone.  

One by one he subdued his father's trees  

By riding them down over and over again  

Until he took the stiffness out of them,  

And not one but hung limp, not one was left  

For him to conquer. He learned all there was  

To learn about not launching out too soon  

And so not carrying the tree away  

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise  

To the top branches, climbing carefully  

With the same pains you use to fill a cup  

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.  

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,  

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.  

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.  

And so I dream of going back to be.  

It's when I'm weary of considerations,  

And life is too much like a pathless wood 

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs  

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping  

From a twig's having lashed across it open.  

I'd like to get away from earth awhile  

And then come back to it and begin over.  

May no fate wilfully misunderstand me  

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away  

Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:  

I don't know where it's likely to go better.  

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,  

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk  

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,  

But dipped its top and set me down again.  

That would be good both going and coming back. 

dear Gaia I know

(it's mostly an "insider" parody, each line referring to one or two net friends)

Everyone is a poet at heart –
to free David from the Rock
to set sunflowers a-blaze!

Everyone is a poet at heart –
to play mother earth let
the white bunny graze

Everyone is a poet at heart –
to see a donkey in a glass
with odd numbers to praise

and to walk alone on
Kilimanjaro?
That’s all I know