Richard Flanagan - Question 7 (Alfred A Knopf, 2024) *****

If there's an absolute must-read for this year, it's this book which defies classification. Part autobiography, part history, part an ethical treatise, part about literature itself, it's first and foremost a formidable work of literature, even if it's not fiction. Flanagan tells his own personal story about living in Tasmania, about growing up with a hearing impairment, making people think he was retarded, but a disability which led him to cherish the written language as a means of communications. It's also a brutal attack on Western 'civilisation' that exterminated the original population of Tasmania, mirrored by the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as this other horror of human invention. 

The title refers to a story by Chekhov, highlighting the absurdity of asking the wrong questions: 

"One of Chekhov's earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov's question 7 is typical: 

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came 

that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other? That's question 7. (p. 24)

 On the value of writing: 

"That's what I couldn't see then that I see now, that though it happened then it's still happening now and it won't ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can't be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn't. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?" (p. 99)

On the future of our world: 

"In any case, what remains will be a wet gravel desert amidst which will be found impoundments of dead water, ash heaps and tailings dams, charred tree stumps and open-cut holes, rusting derricks and cranes and ancillary structures, bricks and corro where women once washed in the incessant rain and the cold, so much detritus mirrored in dark, toxic puddles oozing heavy metals and acid and poisons. But of that annihilated civilisation: nothing.  

A masked owl, the last of its kind, its riddling face outlined with a heart and bisected by a murderer's beak, will spread its ermine spotted wings and leave the last tree, searching for a home now gone forever, chittering an imminent oblivion. 

We will have arrived back on Wells's time traveller's dying beach, alone, in a dimming twilight. If I were a sculptor this would be my art: rusting machinery without purpose rising out of oily scum. People might see it as beauty or meaning. But they would be wrong. It would be what remains. Nothing." (p. 149)

On his hearing impairment: 

"And now it is not Ratty or Peter, nor Cisco and Pancho, but me and my sister and most of all my mother and father who briefly shape out of the static and rain only to recede back into vaporous memory when I reach out for them. It remains for me to invent what has happened in order to hold them close a little longer. But almost immediately everything starts crumbling into confusions that muddle sweet, salted roast mutton scraps on buttery toast we ate for Sunday breakfast with a spoon of foul-tasting grenadine-coloured medicine for worms that our mother chased us around the house trying to get us to swallow; the joys of childhood with the growing pain and bewilderment of those years as my deafness grew worse, as people became harder to comprehend, and I struggled to be understood with my increasingly poor language. Only when we moved to Hobart was my condition correctly diagnosed and my hearing rectified with a series of minor operations. Without Rosebery, without its alcoholic doctor who failed to diagnose my condition leading to compounding complications, I would never have known that strange nether world of isolation and pain I did in those years of deafness, when slowly I gathered that people thought I was simple." (p.180)

On the atrocity of the Tasmanian genocide: 

"The War of the Worlds had its genesis in the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In a 1920 interview with Strand magazine, H. G. Wells attributed the idea of the book to a remark of his brother Frank, to whom he dedicated the novel. They had been talking ''of the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans - a very frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians." ''We were walking together through some particularly peaceful Surrey scenery. 'Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly,' said he, 'and begin laying about them here!''' 

In the first chapter of The War of the Worlds, Wells makes the connection explicit ''Before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" (p. 220)

But the real reason of all the subjects, is the power of literature: the curious link between the book "War of the Worlds" by HG Wells to nuclear physics and to the atom bomb. 

"I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished, because over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the world. It was a story of horror that was his fear of love, complete love without measure or boundary, and he created in its place an idea of destruction without limit. In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world. 

Without Rebecca West's kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells's book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terri­fied and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them." (p 237, 238)

Flanagan has achieved something truly exceptional. A wake-up call for humanity - one more. It deserves to be read very widely. 

Brilliant!

Charles Freeman - The Awakening (Head of Zeus, 2020) *****

This is one of those monumental works on the history of thought that anyone with an interest in the subject should read. Freeman is a well-known author of works on history, such as "The Closing of the Western Mind" (2005). In "The Awakening", he describes how the Western Mind opened to extract itself from religious thought, dogma and superstition, to be replaced by doubt, questioning, evidence and facts, and the development of the scientific method in parallel with the rise of democratic thought and structures. 

Yet he starts by describing the darkness from which we started, including the bizarre religious concept that god has a full insight of every feeling and every thought of every individual at any moment: a terrifying concept that already convinced me as a child that I would never ever be allowed to heaven. 

"If human beings are inherently sinful, as Augustine taught, there had to be definition of what was sinful and what was not. St John Cassian, who is credited with bringing the ideals and practices of eastern monasticism to the West, outlined eight vices in his influential Institutes, among them any expression of sexuality. It is interesting that in addition to fornication, self-glorification and avarice, Cassian includes what he considers unhealthy moods such as sadness and apathy (acedia). In the Irish Church, the clergy used Penitentials, handbooks that listed sins and the correct penance for each one. Crucially, as Augustine had already argued, the inner mind became accessible to God. 'Let us consider how severe a judge is coming; who will judge not only our evil deeds but our every thought,' preached Pope Gregory the Great. This was a psychological transformation of enormous importance. Nothing was invisible to God. Furthermore, the church itself defined what was sinful or not. The opportunities to manipu­late its control over its congregations were magnified. No ancient religion had enjoyed this power and its appearance marks a revo­lutionary development in the history of European thought. The Christian was required to live in a permanent state of alert, some­thing unknown in the classical world". (p. 70)

This was further reinforced with the obligation to confess. 

"Prominent was the council's requirement that the faithful had to take communion once a year and also make a confession. This was, as one medievalist has described it, 'perhaps the most impor­tant legislative act in the history of the Church'. The dialogue between confessor and sinner forced the individual to search his or her own conscience, discuss the nature of their intentions and so the extent to which they should take personal responsibility for their guilt. The distinguished German historian Johannes Fried argues that 'the history of the psyche and human attitudes, and hence the entire history of the West, was profoundly affected by this change.' This may be too sweeping an assessment and assumes that the medieval mind was ready to he so subservient. Even so, taking personal responsibility for one's guilt was only part of the impact of the church's teaching on the probability of damnation at the Last Judgement. (p. 97)

Luckily, the religious dogma and often bizarre practices and behaviour (see first paragraph below) gradually started to crack by the insights and courage of individuals, even from within the Church. 

"As far back as the second century the earliest 'Latin' theologian, Tertullian, from Carthage in North Africa, had asked the question 'What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic? ... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic; and dialectic compo­sition. We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel.' Instead, one should simply be receptive to God's word, a view that was often repeated by the Church Fathers. Gregory the Great's saying that 'Faith has no merit for which human reason offers proof' sug­gested that praise should be given to those who do not question, a view that has persisted in the Catholic Church throughout its his­tory. lntrusion into faith was, in Bernard's (of Clerveaux) graphic phrase, simply 'tearing out the guts of God's secrets' and in a specific condemna­tion of Abelard, he protested, 'Let him who scanned the Heavens go down into the depths of Hell'. Offering his mind directly to the heavens, Bernard valued the Virgin Macy as an intercessor with Christ and even reported that once when he was ill a statue of the Virgin came alive and offered her breasts for him to suck healing milk" (p. 112)

"In Sic et Non Abelard hit on the original - if provocative idea of quoting the Church Fathers on specific theological issues, some 158 of them, so that one could see that they often contradicted each other. Although Abelard stated that much could be resolved by a careful analysis of the language of different texts, it was inevitable that readers would be unsettled by this presentat·ion of opposing views. Abelard did not seem to care. Doubting was healthy in itself, as he put it in the Prologue to Sic et Non: 'For it is from doubt that we arrive at questioning and in a state of questioning we arrive at the truth.' He went on to sug­gest that anyone, not just experienced theologians, could grapple with the issues of logic in Christian doctrine. This was bound to offend conservatives who argued that doctrine was coherent and beyond challenge, esp·ecially by the ordinary faithful. Even if the importance of this approach was not grasped at the time, Abelard's championing of doubt was an important moment in the awakening of the western mind. Progress in knowledge is impos­sible if conventional thinking is never doubted."(p. 107)

Gradually, reason and democracy join hands and become part of the system. The Magna Carta is a prime example of this. 

"In Plantagenet England a constitutional conflict between the barons and King John resulted in the remarkable Magna Carta of 1215, which is still recognized today in English law as a fundamental statement of liberty from arbitrary rule. Its original Larin title, Magna Carta Libertatum ('The Great Charter of Liberties') pro­claims its purpose. The personal and political freedoms it listed applied not only to the barons but to all freeborn men and to cities, notably London. There were now to be limits on royal authority, extraordinary taxes were only to be raised with the approval of 'the general council of the kingdom' (the word par­liamentum appears for the first time only in 1237), and the barons would be able to supervise the actions of the king. One of its most famous articles, Clause 39, stated that 'no free man shall be seized, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or exiled or injured in any way ... except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land'. Rights of the individual to inheritance and chattels were also protected." (p. 140)

In short, this book is highly recommended to understand the incredible struggle that Western civilisation has fought to emancipate itself from theocracy and dictatorship. Today, the most prosperous countries in the World, happen also to be the ones with the best democratic systems, the best education and the least percentage of believers. To me the recipe is clear, yet the dark forces of zealots, oligarchs and theocrats are still very much alive, including in the West.

"The issue that weighs on anyone who sees the importance of fostering tolerance, accepting that science has achieved more for the welfare of humanity than institutional religion, and being open to more profound thinking about the human condition' is that these values are still under threat 300 years later. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama was seriously mistaken in assuming that liberal democracy had triumphed after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and that a high point of civilization had been reached. Every passing year seems to throw further doubt on this assessment. It is all the more vital to learn how painful was the birth of such values and how vulnerable their survival. But it is also right to applaud the cultural riches that they have provided. I do think I am justified in describing the long centuries from the fall of the Roman empire to 1700 as a process, often fitful and haphazard, of an 'awakening of the Western mind'.

Here are some more worthwhile excerpts, yet I recommend to buy and read the whole book. 

"Between 750 and 900 they translated most of the known works of Aristotle into Arabic. Aristotle was particu­larly valuable because he looked at a question from all angles and emphasized that issues were up for discussion that could only be resolved through reason. This led to sophisticated debates on the relationships between philosophy and theology and an awareness of the key issues in ethics and the sciences. Ibn Sina, known in the west as Avicenna (980-1037) was an intellectual superstar. (...) His Metaphysics, which arrived in the west at much the same time, was a massive commentary on the works of Aristotle that reinterpreted them to present a coherent system of Avicenna's own making. In the words of the contemporary scholar Peter Adamson: Avicenna went out of his way to be innovative, deliberately overthrowing centuries of tradition to forge a new and distinctive philosophy. This was an essential step forward if the scattered and hetero­geneous works of the great Greek philosopher were to be at all comprehensible, but Avicenna went beyond Aristotle in provid­ing original arguments for the nature of the existence of God. This made his works relevant for some western theologians but infuriated others who felt that Aristotle's texts were too authoritative to be tampered with. Aristotle's authority was further enhanced by Ibn Rushd, known in the west as Averroes (1126-98), from Cordoba, in Muslim Spain, where he practised as a judge. He was also the court physician to the Almohad caliphate, but his real passion was philosophy. Like Abelard, he came under pressure from conservative theologians for his insistence that theology and philosophy could be used equally as alternative and perhaps divergent approaches to finding the truth (what Averroes termed the 'double truth'). There was always the fear, and it would return in the Paris schools of theology; that philosophy, based on pagan Greek sources, would overthrow theological orthodoxy (whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian), but Averroes, like Abelard, did not believe that it should do so. He admired Avicenna but felt that he had been too radical in diverting from Aristotle's original works. These were the gold standard, 'the highest truth, since his spirit was the highest point of the human spirit - it is justly said that he was created and delivered to us by the providence of God, so that we may come to know everything that can be known'.(p. 145)

In 268 Aquinas returned to Paris to find that a number of the arts teachers had gone further than he had, in preferring Aristotle's views on the soul and the eternity of the world over orthodox Christianity. The two most prominent were masters of arts, Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. They relied so heavily on the Islamic Averroes' adulation of Aristotle that they are known as the Latin Averroists. While they accepted Christian teaching, their support for Aristotelian philosophy as a means of finding the truth was so enthusiastic that it was as if they were ignoring theology. So they argued that God could not do something that Aristotle had shown to be physically impossible. One example was that God could not move the cosmos in a straight line as this would leave a vacuum, and Aristotle had taught (erro­neously, as would later be discovered) that a vacuum could not exist. This contrasted with the orthodox Christian view that God could do anything short of a logical contradiction.

"Marsilius, however, rejects 'natural' hier­archies, in particular the concept that good birth is related to the ability to govern. Within the next few years many of Marsilius's ideas were supported by the lawyer Bartolus da Sassoferrato,(...). Bartolus was as concerned as Marsilius was with the internecine disputes between and within the Italian cities. The two agreed that the sovereignty of the people can never be alienated and that religion should be kept separate from politics. This approach was to prove especially fruitful. In their own time it provided a riposte to those who wished to retain the authority of the Church over secular rulers. Not since the era of the Roman empire had anyone reflected as probingly and effectively as this on the ways in which the citizenry (though only males) as a whole could he involved in government. The influence of Aristotle, with his emphasis on the harmonious order of the city through the collective, and natural, will of the citizens to achieve civil happiness, is clear."

"Petrarch never overcame his detestation of the scholastic obsession with Aristotle. He was responsible for coining the term 'Dark Ages' to describe the medieval period he believed he was still living in following the extinction of the 'light' of classical antiquity. Several of his works dwell on how the moral corruption of his age allowed a lust for wealth to transcend spiritual values. He believed he was restoring the light and continuously harked baek in his writings ro the superiority of Rome. (...) Petrarch championed tolerance, echoing ancient beliefs when he noted that 'many can be forced to confess, but not to believe. No liberty is gre-ater than the liberty to think. As I claim it for myself, so I do not deny it for others ... I am unwilling to be the judge of the human conscience which is something hidden and deep.' This acceptance of intellectual diversity was an important moment in Renaissance thought. It ensured that humanism was never a homogenous movement : rather, it opened up intense debates on 'the condition of man'.

"(Gentili) recognized that there had to be some basis for evolving the rules governing their relationships, but in a falous saying - silete theologi in munere alieno - ' Silence theologian, in matters that do not concern you' - he insisted that theology must be kept out of it. Where Gentili and his followers differed from the theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, was in assuming that natural law was not necessarily to be interpreted as having been founded by God. (...) For Gentili, a legal system needed to be based, pragmatically, on the actual practice of civi­lized nations. Religion was a private matter between individuals and their God. What was important for Gentili was to find a way in which traditional natural law, 'the set of principles that are true for all peoples at all times' and which regulate the desire to live in a peaceful and rational social order, could be incorporated into the law of nations."

"Philosophically, Grotius made an impo·rtant contribution to the concept of natural law. While he was prepared to accept that natural law might show the will of God, he claimed (controver­sially for many of his contemporaries) that its precepts would hold true even if God did not exist. Natural law is so intrinsic to human existence that even God cannot change it. 'Just as even God cannot cause that two times two should not equal four, so he cannot cause that which is intrinsically evil be n.t evil.' As a result Grotius has been seen by some as marking a new beginning in moral philosophy, 'th.e secularization of virtue'. He narrowed the precepts of natural law down to two: the right of self-pres­ervation and the right to live socially with others."

"In the Novum Organon, Bacon elaborates on what he calls the 'idols', the hindrances that come between the mind and reality. The senses, he says, are always unreliable: we can be led astray by information that conforms with what we already believe and we can easily be swayed by the opinions of the marketplace. It is important to separate scientific knowledge from theological belief, which is based on textual authority rather than material evidence. Ultimately, however, there was a place for God in Bacon's system: certain knowledge could be found in 'the true signatures and marks set upon the works of [divine] creation as they are found in nature... all knowledge appeareth to be a plant of God's own planting'. The trick was to mend 'the cracked mirror; of the mind so as to distinguish what God had actually created from what were vain imaginings. (...) Once sufficient material has been gathered to form the basis of a reasonable hypothesis, the hypothesis itself has to be tested. For Bacon, it was as important to find evidence to refute it as it was to find evidence to confirm it. This was one of Bacon's most important contributions to scientific method."

Alvaro Enrigue - Now I Surrender (Penguin Random House, 2026) *****

This is without a doubt one of my favourite books of the year. I loved last year's "I Dream Of Empires" , a novel about the Aztec empire in Mexico, with its fascinating mix of history and fantasy, a recipe that Enrigue further exploits and expands in "Now I Surrender", the title referring to the the words spoken by Apache warrior Geronimo before he accepted his captivity. 

The story starts with a woman fleeing the raid on the ranch where she lives, and the ensuing posse trying to find her back and return her to civilisation. It develops as part Western and real history. Many of the characters are fictional, yet when reading with the internet nearby, many of the characters also appear to be real historic figures, and the entire background is real: the battle between Mexico and the United States for the geography of Sonora, Chihuaha, Arizona and New Mexico. 

In the more Western style (or spagetti western, or even in the vein of Thomas Pynchon): 

"He was therefore unprepared for the vision he encountered before dawn on the following day: a nun in habit, veil, and rosary, wrapped in a swashbuckler's cape out of Spanish farce and draped in a car­tridge belt with a massive U.S.-made revolver hanging at her left hip. I'm left-handed, don't you know, mi general, she said when she saw Zuloaga's jaw drop. The officer just nodded, thinking: pinche god­damned Chihuahua, as he clapped his hat back on his head, mur­muring that she could call him José Maria. Perfect, she said, and you can call me Sister or Elvis, my stage name." (p. 63)

"They made a timid fire while it was still light. On the prairie, any fire that hadn't burned down to embers by night was a call to attack. Elvira and El Marquez sang a duet as Corredor cooked up a calabaza stew. Watching them from a safe distance, Zuloaga thought they might be the most ridiculous band of irregulars in the entire history of the state of Chihuahua, but they had an impressive ability to enjoy whatever came along. Maybe that would be the key to getting through this with minimal losses." (p.93)

And this against a historical backdrop of real people and real authors, including this unlikely John Bourke, who indeed published a book on poop in different cultures! 

"JOHN G. BOURKE, OF THE 3RD CAVALRY, Fort Craig, New Mexico, wasn't a bad guy. Born in Philadelphia of Irish immigrants, he left home at sixteen to enlist in the Northern Army during the Civil War be-cause he hated slavery. When the war was over, he asked to be posted to the Southwest: its long history and native culture were of genuine interest to him. He reached the rank of captain under the command of General George Crook in the 1870s. Among other roles, he served as press attaché for the 3rd Cavalry. He could write very well. Bourke was present during the Sierra Madre campaign ending with Geronimo's surrender at Canon de los Embudos. In addition to being a competent soldier and a compulsive diarist, he was an amateur ethnologist, sometimes a great one. He wrote a humorless but brilliant volume on poop and pee called 'Scatologic Rites of All Nations'.  

Lately, I've been translating a few chapters of his notes on George Crook's 1883 campaign, published by the University of Nebraska as 'An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre'. 

About the Chiricahuas, for example, he has this to say: "An artist, possibly, would object to many of them as undersized, but in all other respects they would satisfy every requirement of anatomical criticism. Their chests were broad, deep, and full; shoulders perfectly straight; limbs well-proportioned, strong, and muscular, without a suggestion of undue heaviness; hands and feet small and tapered but wiry; heads well-shaped, and countenances often lit up with a pleasant, good­natured expression, which would be more constant, perhaps, were it not for the savage, untamed cast imparted by the loose, disheveled gypsy locks of raven black, held away from the face by a broad, flat band of scarlet cloth. Their eyes were bright, clear, and bold, fre­quently expressive of the greatest good humor and satisfaction."  

Bourke's admiration for the Apaches was monolithically solid, but his manner of describing the Mexicans in his diary - he speaks of my people as a nation of miserable beasts - is particularly noxious and grating. 

I won't prolong the life of his prejudices by transporting them into these notes, but I wonder whether prejudices are unavoidable no mat­ter how we train our sensibilities. I wonder whether I myself am cruel in my descriptions of white Protestants. To lift up one thing is to tear down another, and one must remain vigilant, I suppose. 

Bourke wasn't a terrible person. Probably he was simply trying· to justify to himself his participation in an illegal military operation in Mexico. (p. 68)

Enrigue is on the side of justice and respect. He shows that there is a totally different perspective - from the Mexican and Apache side - on the conquest of these territories, and on the extermination of the native Americans than the ones described in most history books. Despite the fun and the exaggerations, his story is basically a very sad one, with lots of cruelties on all the different sides, with loyalties and betrayals, agreements and deceptions, including within the same camp, where the ones who achieved results were not actually credited for it. 

"At the ranch, Gatewood was waiting for us, and so was a mule train sent from the detachment at Fort Bowie with a load of clean, pressed uniforms. General Miles's secretary had sent them so that at the surrender the general's men would be attired in a form befitting the occasion. As I watched my travel companions opening sacks of clothing like children opening birthday presents, I re􀀙lized some­thing about gringos, something we Mexicans always realize too late: we're the suckers. The Yankees had put one over on us. This was a show, a vaudeville act. They would convince their people via the press that they had fought a war and won it. And meanwhile we, the ones who had actually won it, would be left picking our noses." (p.355)

"Now I Surrender" transcends the boundaries of the novel and the history book, joining forces for a more compelling and entertaining, yet not less serious book. 

A joy to read, a pleasure to check all his source material. Enrigue is a brilliant novelist. 

A triumph! 

Jason Roberts - Every Living Thing (Riverrun, 2024) *****

It's no surprise that this excellent book received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and the 2025 PEN America Literary Science Award.

The author juxtaposes the lives of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and French naturalist George-Louis de Buffon, two men who happened to be born in 1707 and competed to write the catalogue of all living things. The Bible mentions 120 animal species, so both authors tried to list animals, plants and other living things. Linnaeus sets his taxonomy in rigorous categories, static or never-chaning in his opinion, whereas Buffon has a more evolutionary perspective, and in this sense a precursor to scientists of the 19th Century like Wallace and Darwin.

Next to the rivalry itself, Roberts also goes into the right level of detail to give the public and especially the official reaction of the church against the work of both men. 

"Acclaim, however, was far from universal. The same Journal of Trévoux that praised the Histoire as a masterstroke against Linnaeus later published a critique angrily taking issue with Buffon's assertion "that it is possible to descend by almost imperceptible gradations from the most perfect of creatures to the most formless matter." The theological implications, it argued, were disturbing: If life was a continuum, there could be no clear leap between ensouled beings and those without souls. so happily placed as to serve as the imperceptible passage from one to the other" (p. 144-145)

Linnaeus also classified human beings according to race with caucasians at the top of the hierarchy and black people at the bottom, a justification for institutionalised racism for many years to come, whereas Buffon also had different opinions. 

"Buffon had his working definition. The essence of species lay in reproduction, the ability of one generation to propagate another. He logically applied this measure to humanity: Since all ethnic groups seemed clearly capable of interbreeding with one another, they comprised a single species. "The dissimilarities are merely external, the alterations of nature but superficial," he concluded. "The Asian, European, and Negro all reproduce with equal ease with the American. There can be no greater proof that they are the issue of a single and identical stock than the facility with which they consolidate to the common stock". In sum, reproduction was proof that 

'there was originally but one species, which, after being multiplied and diffused over the whole surface of the earth, underwent diverse changes from the influence of the climate, food, mode of living, epidemical distempers, and the intermixture of individuals ... that at first these alterations were less conspicuous, and confined to individuals; that afterwards, from continued action, they formed specific varieties; that these varieties have been perpetuated from generation to generation" (p.183-184)

It is fascinating to see how reason, logic and science manage to revolutionise ancient thinking and stereotypes, how observation and deductive reasoning could overcome ignorance, and even anticipate scientific insights that we only achieved two centuries later. Buffon's 'moule intérieur' or internal matrix is nothing else than our genetic code. 

"Just as species passed from existence, he concluded that they must come into existence as well, throughout the expanse of time. In 1753, the fourth volume of Histoire Naturelle had contained Buffon's observation that while humans and horses were greatly dissimilar from each other in outward appearances, the horse's hoof contained the same inventory of bones as the human hand. This was a "hidden resemblance" that evaded Linnaeus's systematics entirely, and which to Buffon "seems to indicate that in creating these animals the supreme Being wished to employ one idea, and to vary it at the same time in all possible ways."

Buffon thought that these resemblances were more than coincidences. If his postulated shaping internal matrix (moule intérieur) could account for individual variations within species, might it not also be responsible for even larger, inheritable changes? Such changes might accumulate, to the degree that they added up to an entirely new species.(p. 198)

He was also visionary enough to see that humanity was able to create much and advance technologically, but also that our own destruction and environmental damage was a possible consequence: 

"In The Epochs of Nature, the 1774 essay both included in Histoire Naturelle and published as a stand-alone volume, Buffon had argued that human-driven environmental change had proceeded to the point that it represented the "seventh and last epoch, when the power of man has assisted that of Nature." This power, he concluded, was not universally positive. "The most despicable condition of the human species is not that of the savage," he wrote,

but that of those nations that are a quarter policed, which have always been the real curse of human nature, and which civilized peoples still have trouble to contain today. They have, as we have said, ravaged the first happy land, they tore out the seeds of contentment ... Cast your eyes on the annals of all the peoples, you will count there twenty centuries of desolation for a few years of peace and repose". (p.353)

Jason Roberts has not only written a wonderful overview of the biological classification of nature in line with the great encyclopedists of the 18th century, but he has positioned it by showing two entirely different approaches to the subject by two fascinating characters, adding tremendous amounts of facts and events that make this a very readible and entertaining read. 

It's not only about two men with differing views, it's about the approach to science in general, and how evidence, facts, methodology and logic are the way forward. 

Brilliant! 

Mircea Cărtărescu - Theodoros (De Bezige Bij, 2025) *****

Van Cartarescu hadden we twee jaar geleden "Solenoid" al gelezen, een donker, ambitieus, bombastisch en bizar verhaal over een leraar in een mythisch Boekarest. Nu is er deze turf in Nederlandse vertaling. Voor het Engels moeten we nog enkele jaren wachten, maar de vertaling door Jan Willem Bos is absoluut schitterend, om vingers en duimen van af te likken, en dat heeft niet alleen te maken met de kracht van het origineel. 

Het verhaal is eenvoudig: een jongeling van lage afkomst uit Roemenië in de tweede helft van de 19e eeuw heeft de ambitie of zijn idolen Alexander de Grote en Napoleon Bonaparte te evenaren. Tegelijk jaagt hij zijn geliefde Stamatina na, die bij de elite van het land behoort. Hij wordt piraat in de Middellandse Zee, wisselt van identiteit met een Ethiopische jongen en wordt uiteindelijk Keizer van Ethiopië. Om dit te bereiken, zijn alle middelen goed: brutaal moorddadig geweld, vleierij, leugens, manipulatie, oorlog, ... zowat elke zonde gekend door de mensheid begaat hij, maar anderzijds wordt hij gedreven door een naïeve ambitie en liefde, zijn geloof en zijn verlangen om de bijbelse Ark van het Eeuwigdurend Verbond te vinden, en houdt hij zijn moeder via leugenachtige briefwisseling braaf op de hoogte van zijn successen. Nu ja, zo eenvoudig is die plot niet. Dit alles is fictie natuurlijk, ware het niet dat Teodoros laveert tussen mensen en feiten uit de geschiedenis van die periode die echt allen hebben bestaan, hoe ongeloofwaardig ze ook zijn, zoals Joshua Abraham Norton, de zelfverklaarde keizer van de Verenigde Staten. 

Dit is een boek om te lezen met de mobiel bij de hand om alle achtergrondverhalen te lezen van de (rand)figuren in de plot of om meer te weten over de historische context. En alle weetjes - hoe onwaarschijnlijk ook - die het verhaal opluisteren, blijken nog te kloppen ook. Maar zo schiet het lezen ook niet op, zeker niet omdat er zowat op elk blad een Nederlands woord verschijnt dat ik voor de eerste keer hoor of toch nog even wil opzoeken. Wat is een 'palikaar', een 'scolopender', 'bojaar', 'barkas', ' of 'archont', ‘opank’ of 'incubus'? 

Als het verhaal al exuberant is, dan is de stijl dat zeker, met hele lange zinnen, met veel adjectieven en bijzinnen, die lezen als een Latijnse vertaling, en het strekt Cărtărescu tot eer dat hij elke zin met dezelfde ambachtelijke kracht weet neer te zetten, met aandacht voor elk woord, voor elke nuance, en dezelfde inspanning volhoudt tot de laatste zin, 650 bladzijden later. 

Dit is een boek dat velen moeilijk zullen vinden, omdat het zo bombastisch is, zo ambitieus om de hele complexiteit van het mens-zijn, goed en kwaad, religie en macht, wereldpolitiek, mythologie en geschiedenis met elkaar te laten botsen in één lang coherent verhaal dat wordt gedreven door ambitie en waanzin, tot op het eind, dat alle verwachtingen overtreft en dat absoluut uniek is in de geschiedenis van de literatuur, er zo ver over dat ik het hier niet ga of zelfs kan verklappen. 

Dit boek is een feest. 

Peter Frankopan - Earth Transformed - An Untold Story (Bloomsbury, 2024) *****

The words that come to mind when reading this book are colossal, gargantuan, massive, monumental, gigantic, not only because the physical characteristic of its 660 pages, but also because of its incredible and erudite picture of the history of our world that is described here, viewed from the perspective of the interaction of our environment with historical events. 

Peter Frankopan is a British historian and writer. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is also author of the best-selling "The Silk Roads". 

I identified over fifty passages in the book that I intended to refer to in my review, but this is simply too much. 

The book starts at the real beginning, around 4.5 billion years ago, takes us over the origin of our species, prehistory, and then through history to our currrent times with a view to the future. The geography is our entire world, with impact and interaction between environment and people in every geography: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, plagues, and other calamities that shaped nations, beliefs and cultures. 

"as societies become larger in size and more specialised in their work, rulers and priests become the interpreters of everything from natural disaster to environmental challenges, from_ resource surpluses to shortfalls, from military defeats to premature deaths, helping explain punishments or bounties that were being administered by unseen gods. Environmental and natural calamities in particular were closely linked to 'moralising gods' who, out of anger or simply from boredom, handed out punishments for transgressions and apparent lack of respect. It is striking, though perhaps not surprising, that regions that were vulnerable to changes in weather conditions - above all droughts, but also floods and storms - developed cosmological systems based on 'moralising gods' who used such events to punish, show their displeasure and teach lessons" (p. 87)

Next to influencing the development of religions of course, the destruction of nature by man has also been something of all times, even if the recent developments are possibly more devastating. Frankopan gives many examples, but I'll just list some from Ancient Europe. 

"deforestation had seriously depleted wood supplies in many regions. The forests in what is now Tuscany had been cut down and exhausted, wrote Strabo around 2,000 years ago, to provide wood both for ships and for houses in and around Rome, including over-the-top villas that were of'Persian magnificence' - a nod to opulence, excess and bad taste. Pliny the Elder, writing not long afterwards, noted sadly that too many people undermine nature with the sole purpose of self-enrichment; it should hardly come as a surprise, therefore, that the earth should occasionally show its displeasure, through disasters such as earthquakes. Rather than content themselves with the bounteous food and natural wealth that the world provides, humans were too busy being overwhelmed by avarice to stop overexploiting its resources" (p. 192)

Despite the endless list of destruction and calamities, the author remains optimistic about man's capabilities of behavioural change and good stewardship, but then with a number of conditions that need to be fulfilled. 

"Some climate sceptics point out - rightly - that forecasts that look into the future can be highly speculative, and they also seek to dampen alarm by noting, again quite correctly, that economic growth, new technologies and adaptation may alleviate the problems that lie ahead and, in some cases, may even s.olve them. 8 That too, however, requires faith and confidence; moreover, what history in general and this book in particular show is that there have been a great many times in the past when societies, peoples and cultures have proved unable to adapt. Indeed, in some respects, the human story of progress is about batons being repeatedly dropped and picked up by others. 

The question, then, is not so much whether to adapt, but how, where and when to do so. And in that sense it is certainly true that there is plenty of good news, much to celebrate and reasons to be optimistic." (p. 643). 

As you can expect, this is a really important book, not only because of its perspectives on our history, but also as great background knowledge that should help us to become more environmentally conscious and especially for politicians to finally act in a meaningful way. This book was of course written before the current Trump administration, which decided to step out of the Paris Agreement, and claiming that global warming is a hoax, promoting "beautiful, clean coal" instead of renewable energy. I hope this short-sightedness will stop soon, yet with the probability that Donald Trump reads this book are zero, prospects become worse. 

Often when reading, I deplored the fact that the sources of all the references are missing in the book. At the end, he explains that there is a dedicated website that contains the 200 pages with his source material. The QR code below leads the reader to the source material. 

Javier Marías - Tomás Nevinson (Penguin, 2024) *****

Another brilliant book by Javier Marías, his last and final novel before his death last year. Marías's prose will not be to everyone's liking: it is slow, repetitive, with a lot of rephrasing, and re-thinking the same topics and issues, looking at them from different sides and perspectives, sometimes touching on something concrete and actionable, but more often than not remaining vague and tentative, approaching reality with a default position of uncertainty and a wide array of possibilities, both as explanations of the past as well as options for the future. 

The lead character is Tomás Nevinson, who we already met in his "Berta Isla" novel, a British/Spanish undercover agent, who gets recruited again by MI6 to go back in service and leave his job at the British embassy in Madrid. His role is to become a teacher in the Basque Region, with the goal to eliminate a female ETA terrorist. The problem is that three women living in the city could be the terrorist, and could also be none of them. Nevinson has to find out and kill the right one. The British secret service gives him the ultimatum that if he is not able to kill the right one, as a measure of precaution all three will be killed. 

Javier Marías's slow prose considers and reconsiders the options, the moral and ethical aspects of his situation and role, he tries to uncover the real truth behind the deceptive characters of the three women, as a kind of mirror for his own duplicity, wondering what is real and what is false, what is truthful or fake. It is also a psychological thriller, deeply carving into the weird situation of the protagonist to act full-time as a fake person, pretending to be what he is not, living the life of a non-existent person with the sole purpose of killing someone else. This duality is what his supervisor uses as the argument to lure him back into the service: to be part of some of the bigger geopolitical happenings, or to be outside of this, and be considered as a nobody who's no longer part of the system. If he wants to be part of the system, he has to relinquish his real self and live the unreal life of teacher Miguel Centurión. He is the non-existent Somebody or the existent Nobody. Either way, he is trapped. 

"'After having been Someone,' he added, 'it's very difficult to go back to being no one. Even if that Someone was invisible and almost no one would recognize him" (p. 51)

This requires of course to be able to disappear in one life, and to create another, fictitious one, with all its challenges: 

"Any­one in hiding, though, if she's smart, must appear to be the opposite of - or as far removed from - what she was and possibly still is. I know from personal experience how difficult this is, and I have, on occasion, allowed my real or my old me to resurface, or have some­times aroused suspicions by not totally rejecting the old me: one's natural tendency is to discourage or avert misfortunes when what you should be doing is fomenting and even precipitating them." (p. 249) 

The reason and the motivation for all these actions is of course to eliminate evil. 

'Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is contagious. Faith is contagious ... It can turn into fanaticism at the speed of light .. .' Now his tone was part assertive, part recollective. 'That's why those attitudes are so dangerous, because they're hard to stop. Before you know it, they've spread like wildfire. That was one of the very first things we were taught, that you need to spot the initial symptoms and nip them in the bud. (...) 'Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious,' he said, complet­ing the list. 

I remembered that list very well, I had all too often found out how very accurate it was. People adopt a faith and grow, first, very ser­ious, then very solemn. They start to believe everything their faith embraces and involves, and then they become stupid. If contradicted, they fly into a rage, they won't accept you calling them stupid or challenging what has suddenly become their all-in-all and their raison d'etre. From that point on, they develop a purely defensive, irrational hatred of anyone who doesn't share their fanaticism. And they treat anyone who openly opposes it with great cruelty. Once they discover cruelty, they embrace it and pass it on to others, and it takes a long time for them to grow weary of putting their cruelty into practice" (p. 104)

The narrator tries to look at his choice to eliminate the alleged terrorist from all possible angles, trying to justify, to rationalise and to question the approach at the same time. 

"They had chosen to help the people they were helping or hide the people they were hid­ing, or serve the cause they were serving and to dedicate themselves to whatever they were dedicated to, although they had sometimes been duped or hypnotized into doing so, as had many inexperienced men. The woman I was charged with uncovering and identifying in that town in the north-west, whichever one of the three she turned out to be, had been responsible for massacres and should pay for that. Or if not 'should', it would be appropriate that she did. Or if not 'appropriate', since she no longer presented any danger and had turned around her unhappy life, it would be best to interrupt that life just in case, and because we were by our nature avengers. If we weren't, who would be, in this forgetful world?  

Tupra was right: hatred was an emotion unknown to us, but we were the archive; the record, the ones who never forgot what every­one else forgets out of weariness or so as not to wallow in bitterness. I don't know if he realized it, but the words he had spoken made us - with all our human, mortal limitations - rather like the God of all those past centuries of belief, or should that be credulity: the God who retained and stored away everything in his motley, moveless time, in which nothing was new or old, remote or recent. 'For us, what happened ten years ago is yesterday or even today, and is hap­pening right now.' This is how that God - now outmoded, but very much a force to be reckoned with for most of recorded history-must have regarded everything. That's why he forgave nothing, for that really wasn't in his remit, for in his eyes no crime has an expiry date or grows less heinous, they are all simultaneous, and all persist. There was, though, another motive behind my decision to return to active service, to accept this mission: the only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and centre, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched. 

Terrorist organizations cannot give in voluntarily, because if they do, an abyss opens up before them, they see themselves retrospect­ively and are horrified by their annulment, and therefore their ruin. The serial killer keeps adding to his series of murders because that's the only way he can avoid looking back to the days when he was still innocent and without stain, the only way he can have meaning. To do otherwise would be to reach Lady Macbeth's horrified realization, something almost no one is willing to do, for it requires great integ­rity, a quality that has vanished from the world: 'Nought's had, all's spent.' In other words: 'We have done infamous deeds and gained nothing.' (p. 138-139)

The undercover agent, the eliminator, has to above all these emotions, and act like a cold-blooded rational being: 

"Justice can obscure, can wrap everything in a mist as time moves on, and when it expires, it can erase and cancel out, can decree that what happened didn't hap­pen or has ceased to happen. We are neither the victims nor the family of the dead, but we are memory, those who never forget. In that sense, and only in that sense, we are like the terrorists and the mafias from whom we differ in one vital detail, as Tupra reminded me on that January day: 'They're also ahead of us when it comes to hatred. But hatred isn't our style, as you know. That's unknown ter­ritory for us.' That's true and as it should be, for we must always remain immune to the five contagions as taught to us by our former legendary instructor Redwood. 'Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is con­tagious. Faith is contagious. Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious. We must avoid all five.' (p. 435).  

And what is true of the need to avoid hate, is also true for love. Tomás Nevinson may be in love with his wife, even if they are divorced, and his alter ego Miguel Centurión may become infatuated by one of his potential victims, this is indeed to be avoided, because he could kill the one he loves. 

He is of course in essence a Spanish author, often referring to Spain's dictatorial past yet linked to the situation in general today of the relationship between electorate and politicians: 

"One must never forget that Spaniards from all over Spain - even those who don't consider themselves to be Spanish - have a deep-seated tendency to elect the worst possible leaders on offer and to cheer on whatever tyrants are imposed on them, as long as they make nice promises and seem pleasant enough, even if they have lar­ceny written all over their faces and are clearly very nasty pieces of work. (p. 498)

I copied some passages that are highly abstract, yet of course the story actually consists primarily of dialogue and interaction of the many characters, their interesting pantomime of possible double roles and the hiding of reality. 

Marías's prose is an absolute delight, although I can understand that it may be too long-winded for many readers. At a certain level, you want the action to move on, but the stalling, the reflections, the analyses and the exploring of all the options is part of the mesmerising power of his style. And it is fun to read that in a book of 634 pages, the following paragraph starts a new chapter on page 532: 

"It seemed that the action, the act, the deed was getting closer. And that I would not escape. One always nurses the vain hope that some­thing will· crop up, that the sentence will be commuted ( even a prisoner on the scaffold has high hopes), that the orders will be rescinded or cancelled, that someone will back off at the final moment. And if that doesn't happen, you appreciate and treasure each day's delay, each hour's deferral, each minute of procrastin­ation, anything that allows you to keep telling yourself: 'It will be, it will be, but not yet, not yet.' (p. 532)

So, reader, beware: the book is not about the final deed. It is about the dilemmas and internal battles leading up to the deed. 

Brilliant!

Sarah Bakewell - Humanly Possible (Penguin, 2023) *****

When reading the short description of the book's content, I was hesitant. I am already convinced of the value of its contents. Second, I have read already so much on the subject that I wondered whether it would convey anything new. The reality of reading proved me wrong. Even if you consider yourself a 'humanist', and maybe because you are, you should read this book. It is extremely well-documented and extremely well-written. Bakewell starts the book with the 'credo' of humanism, as penned by Robert G. Ingersoll in the 19th Century: 

Happiness is the only good. 

The time to be happy is now. 

The place to be happy is here. 

The way to be happy is to make others so. 

Even if I was well aware or vaguely aware of the content of the thinkers and authors that she describes in this book, the real novelty is how these thoughts were received in society and how they evolved to become part of broader political and philosophical thinking. 

Her journey starts in the early 14th Century with the writings of Petrarch and Boccacio ("When his father contemplated training him for the church as 'a good way to get rich' it turned out he had no liking or aptitude for that either"). Both authors raided libraries to re-discover the ancient Latin authors, revived them, wrote about them. Bakewell mentioned that Bocaccio at one stage considered abandoning his literary endeavours because "a monk, Pietro Petroni of Sienna, warned him in 1632 that he would imminently die if he did not get rid of all the non-Christian books in his library and stop writing books himself. This had been revealed to him in a vision". Luckily, Petrarch used smarter arguments to convince him of the opposite: 'ignorance is not the path to virtue". He advocated for knowledge and learning, of a healthy abundance in words and ideas. 

We take it for granted today that we have immediate access to the works of Cicero, Epicurus, Terentius and Democritus, but that is of course not the case. Very few scholars even spoke Greek, so they had no way of understanding or valuing whatever Greek texts still existed in hidden libraries across Italy or elsewhere. The geneaology goes further: Poggio rediscovered Lucretius' "On The Nature of Things". Printing was invented and became a great power to share old and new ideas about broader groups of people. Lorenzo Valla is the next in line. 

"His name was Lorenzo Valla, and his 1440 treatise On the Donation of Constantine is one of the great humanist achievements. It combines a precise scholarly assault with the high rhetorical techniques learned from the ancients, served up with a sauce of hot chutzpah. All these assets were necessary to Valla, because he was daring to attack one of the church's central modern claims: its justification for having complete power over all of western Europe. It could be a short step from that to questioning its other claims to authority, too, including the authority it held over peo­ple's minds. Valla seems to have been a man who had no fear and could never be persuaded to keep quiet. He traveled all over Italy, working for a series of patrons and supporters-at this point he was living in Naples-but he made enemies everywhere as well. The poet Maffeo Vegio had already warned him to seek advice before writing things that would hurt people's feelings, and generally to restrain his "intellectual violence." (p.87)

It takes courage to have intellectual curiosity, to be open to ideas that challenge beliefs and established authority: "Dispute and contradiction, not veneration and obedience, are the essence of intellectual life. And crucially, Valla did not merely tell people they were wrong, he gave the reasons why they were wrong" (p.93). 

On Vesalius: 

"He blamed both himself and other anatomists for having been too Galen-reliant: "I shall say noth­ing more about these others; instead I shall marvel more at my own stu­pidity and blind faith in the writings of Galen and other anatomists." He ends the section by urging students to rely on their own careful examina­tions, taking no one's word for anything, not even his own. This was a good warning, since Vesalius himself did not get every­thing right. One error was that he failed to identify the clitoris cor­rectly, misdescribing it as part of the labia. It took another Padua anatomist, Realdo Colombo, to correct him. Realdo even knew what it was for, which implies that he had noticed it in contexts other than the dissection table. He named it ''amor Veneris, vel dulcedo" ("love of Venus, or thing of pleasure"), gave details of its role in women's sexual experiences, and remarked, "It cannot be said how astonished I am that so many famous anatomists had not even an inkling of such a lovely thing, perfected with such art for the sake of such utility." (p. 130)

On education and Erasmus schooling in a monastery: 

Instead, the effect on Erasmus was to implant in him a lifelong aver­sion to cruelty or intimidation of any kind. He would have agreed with a remark made centuries later by E. M. Forster in describing the miseries of his own public-school education: "The worst trick it ever played me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible." That was another reason Erasmus took a poor view of his schooling: the unworldliness and irrelevance to real life of the monks' attitudes. It was a common humanist complaint to say that such institutions were old-fashioned, pedantic, and out of touch with reality. For Erasmus, as for Agricola, and later for Forster, a young mind needs to be liberated from meaningless, useless systems of knowledge as taught by unenlight­ened masters of an outmoded stamp who themselves have no idea how to live." (p. 142) 

Other luminaries who are part of the genealogy: Pico della Mirandola, Leon Battista Alberti, Andreas Vesalius, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Paine, David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, Jeremy Bentham, Frederick Douglas ("There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him"), Oscar Wilde, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm von Humboldt ("The State that enforces a particular belief is denying people the right to be fully human"), Matthew Arnold. Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Ernest Renan, Auguste Comte, Bertrand Russell, ...

Bakewell is also very conscious of the value of humanism to all humans and not only to the male part of it. 

"Pericles (told) Athenian free men in 430 BCE that they are excel­lent because they are harmonious, responsible, and politically active - only to add that this does not apply to women, whose only virtue is never to be mentioned by anyone at all. That continued to be the norm for millennia: instead of the mainstream of human excellence, women were offered a rivulet of negative side virtues: modesty, silence, placidity, innocence, chastity. Each of these is characterized by the absence of some positive quality (confidence, eloquence, active responsibility, experience, and - well, I'll leave it to you to decide what the virtuous opposite of chastity is, but whatever we call it, it is surely more fun)." (p.203) 

There

"Connections, communications, moral and intellectual links of all kinds, as well as the recognition of difference and the questioning of ar­bitrary rules: these all go to form the web of humanity. They enable each of us to live a fulfilling life on Earth, in whichever cultural context we are at home, and also to try to understand each other the best we can. They are more likely to encourage an ethics of worldly flourishing, in contrast with belief systems that picture each frustrated soul waiting hopefully for a correction of fortunes in the afterlife. The modern humanist will always prefer to say, with Robert G. Ingersoll, that the place to be happy is here, in this world, and the way to be happy is to try to make others so.  The old Golden Rule, associated with several religions as well as with secular morality, has much to offer here: "Do as you would be done by." Or, in the more modest, reversed form that is more hospitable to diver­sity: Don't do something to others if you wouldn't like it yourself. It is not perfect, but a good rule of the humanist thumb is to say that, if you don't like being told to stay silent and invisible, or being enslaved and abused, or being unable to get into buildings because no one thought to install a ramp, or being considered less than human, then the chances are that other people are not fond of it, either. Or, as Kongzi said: "The Master's way consists of doing one's best to fulfill one's humanity and treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity." (p 218, 219)

This book is a great overview of humanist thought: inquisitive, inclusive, caring, ethical, motivated by a happiness for all, in diversity of thought and the right of each individual to personal freedom and fullfilment and happiness. For me this overview is the absolute hope and despair of humanity. Hope because it offers a clear perspective and a way of thinking, despair because over the centuries of expanded thinking on the subject, we have not moved significantly further at a global level. Our technology has advanced exponentially over the last two centuries, mainstreaming it across the globe, yet humanist thinking has despite its obvious value and benefits barely created strong understanding and use in most of the world. 

Bakewell is an excellent guide, erudite and entertaining and truly committed. 

Not to be missed. 

Olga Tokarczuk - The Empusium (Fitzcarraldo, 2024) *****

The book ends with this "Author's Note": 

"All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased from texts by the following authors: 

Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Cluny, William S. Burroughs, Cato, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin, Emile Durkheim, Henry Fielding, Sigmund Freud, H. Rider Haggard, Hesiod, Jack Kerouac, D.H. Lawrence, Cesare Lombroso, W Somerset Maugham, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ovid, Plato, Ezra Pound, Jean Racine, Frarnçois de La Rochefoucauld, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, William Shakespeare, August Strindberg, Jonathan Swift, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Semonides of Amorgos, Tertullian, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Wagner, Frank Wedekind, John Webster, Otto Weininger and William Butler Yeats."

This novel is Tokarczuk's literary game with male supremacy, toying with it, exposing it, but in her usual non-conflictual way, with a deep respect for the opponent, and even sympathy. The main character is a young Polish man, who goes to Germany to be treated for lung problems (tuberculosis), like all the other characters in the novel, to a sanatorium in Görbersdorf, now called Sokołowsko, and located in Poland, the place which inspired Thomas Mann one hundred years ago (in November 2024) to write "The Magic Mountain". Like in Mann's novel, the protagonist meets a set of characters who all represent one or the other ideology of the moment, allowing for lengthy discussions about politics and philosophy. 

But of course there is more going on. The book has many layers. It is a "horror story" as its subtitle suggests, and many other things are taking place, things that fall beyond the discussions among the men. Both cosmic events take place, as well as brutal primitive events. 

"By a twist of circumstance, as Frau Opitz's body was descending on ropes into the open grave, the exact au­tumn equinox took place, and the ecliptic was aligned in such a special way that it counterbalanced the vibration of the Earth. Naturally, nobody noticed this - people have more important things on their minds. But we know it." (p. 82)

 Every so often, yet sparingly, the "we" appear in the novel, described in the Cast of Characters at the beginning as the "Nameless inhabitants of the walls, floors and ceilings", beings that observe, that blend in with the background, yet are always present. The other aspect that is beyond control is brutal human nature: in the woods (outside civilisation) live the coal burners, who have made female puppets of natural materials that they can use as sex dolls. 

The main character, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, feels uncomfortable in this entire bizarre context. He is the odd one out, the neutral person all the other characters want to talk to, to convince him of their opinions, and yet he is also not what he seems. They mystery will not be revealed here, but he sheds a completely new light on the narrative. He engages with the other men, listens to them, talks to them, yet somehow feels alien to their world. 

"The funeral was brief, devoid of unnecessary words, as if it were impossible to say more about this terrible, macabre event that should be forgotten as quickly as possible. And that was what Wojnicz did - he forgot. As they were driv­ing back to the guesthouse, perversely, or mischievously perhaps, he asked Lukas and August if they believed in the immortal soul and what happened to it after death, and thus prompted a veritable pandemonium of ideas, arguments and counterarguments, quotations and refer­ences, so by the time the carriage was passing the nursing home at the start of their village, he did not know what his companions were talking about, and his only thought was of lying down in bed." (p. 82)

Women are almost absent in the novel, with a few exceptions. They are not subjects with a voice or a plot. 

"'Woman represents a bygone, inferior stage of evolu­tion, so writes Darwin, and he of all people has something to say on the matter. Woman is like .. .' - here he sought the right word - 'an evolutionary laggard. While man has gone on ahead and acquired new capabilities, woman has stayed in her old place and does not develop. That is why a woman is often socially handicapped, incapable of cop­ing on her own, and must always be reliant on a man. She has to make an impression on him - by manipulation, by smiling. The Mona Lisa's smile symbolizes a woman's en­tire evolutionary strategy for coping with life. Which is to seduce and manipulate.' (p. 94)

The men are having a great time bouncing off abstract ideas and opinions, arguing with broad philosophical and ideological concepts, but Wojnicz is beyond this. He lives in another world, one that is not delineated by clear rules, categorisations, definitions and constraints. Here he remembers playing chess with his father when a kid. 

"Little Mieczyslaw Wojnicz understood the rules (of chess) and could foresee a lot, but to tell the truth, the game did not interest him. Making moves according to the rules and aiming to defeat your opponent seemed to him just one of the possible ways to use the pawns. He preferred to day­dream, and to see the chessboard as a space where the fates of the unfortunate pawns and other pieces were played out; he cast them as characters weaving complex webs of intrigue, either with or against each other, and linked by all sorts of relationships. He thought it a waste to limit their activity to the checkered board, to leave them to the mercy of a formal game played according to strict rules. So as soon as his father lost interest and went off to see to more important matters, Mieczys would move the chess pieces onto the steppes of the rug and the mountains of the armchair, where they saw to their own business, set off on journeys, and furnished their kitchens, houses and palaces. Finally his father's ashtray became a boat, and the pen holders were rafters' oars, while the space under­neath a chair turned into a cathedral where the wedding of the two queens, black and white, was taking place." (p. 162)

Tokarczuk herself is a majestic player with language, with character, props, sub-plots and scenes. She is the one to colour outside the lines, to use her wonderful imagination to create a special carefully constructed edifice, that you can approach from many different angles and be suprised and perplexed by the wealth of ideas and possibilities for interpretation. Wojnich's closest friend Thilo is a fan of the paintings of Herri Met de Bles, a 16th Century Flemish landscape painter, who is known for the many levels of his work. 

"How is it that from tiny strokes of a brush dipped in paint an entire world with many depths comes into being? De Bles's painting seemed fathomless - when he magni­fied it, he saw even more details, minute spots of paint, very light brushstrokes, indistinct patches and myste­rious flaws. As he wandered about the clouds, supple, rounded lines emerged from them, resembling figures, faces or wings. But when he moved down towards the vegetation, among the leaves he saw eyes and noses, bits of hands and feet, elusive bodies that existed fleetingly, only when his vision brushed against them for a single, unrepeatable moment. In the aerial castle windows, he spied the corners of chambers, and semi-transparent creatures inside them, each connected with a tragedy, a regret. Maybe Abraham's sacrifice was being performed there too, but in slightly different configurations and with different actors? De Bles's canvas seemed to be full of messages, like a detailed map using a language of simple signs that carry branching meanings, a world that proves infinite once one goes deep inside, where one keeps discovering new things" (p. 259)

 You can look at the trees and the details, but you can look at it from a further distance, and you will see something else entirely. This is Tokarczuk at play: inventive, creative, challenging the reader, throwing little hints and pieces of half-formed information, real elements (including pictures of the village and sanatorium) and wild fantasies. She is a true master, writing an entire novel with primarily male characters, yet in truth it's all about women, it's rational in the philosphical discussions, yet in truth it's about the in-between worlds that defy categorisation, that cannot be captured in words even, the world of the senses, a world that is as elusive as the narrator. It's a comedy on the surface, but a deep tragedy at the same time, a horror story. Her language is straightforward, as is her style - indeed Thomas Mann comes to mind - yet its clarity is in stark contrast with the darkness of the novel. The men all have the answers to the problems of the world, the men all believe they are in control, yet they are all ill, weak and brought together in a sanatorium in a desperate and more often than not futile attempt to make them healthy again. You can only appreciate the irony, while outside the sanatorium darkness reigns.

Brilliant! 

Douglas R. Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) *****

This fascinating and genial book was published in 1979, when I was at university. It was a kind of a hype among my fellow-students, and even if I did not understand (or read) half of it, it opened a world, or rather a universe of thinking, while at the same time presenting it in an incredibly creative way. Earlier this year, I decided to read it in full and buy a copy. Fourty-five years later, it is still as enthralling as it was then. Hofstadter explores the boundaries of our thinking, where reason and logic meet their limits in paradoxes, contradictions, self-references and loops. The subject is about cognitive science, logic and computer sciences (and Artificial Intelligence), and he learns us how meaning and meaninglessness exist and how they come to life (or not) in abstract systems, including the human mind and the perception or delusion of the self or the "I". 

I do not think the book would have so much resonated with larger audiences or with us at that time, if it were not for the extensive illustrations of Dutch artist M.C. Escher and his impossible drawings, or the long dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise, occasionally joined by the Crab, and further illustrated by analysing the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, and their inherent structural elements of self-reference and loops, as in the sentence sequence: 

"The following sentence is false

The preceding sentence is true"

The starting point of course are the theorems of German mathematician Kurt Gödel: "The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure(i.e. an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system" (Wikipedia)

On top of this, Hofstadter develops dozens of new ways of looking at familiar or less familiar problems of logic and computation. He creates his own different logical systems in the book to illustrate his points, to take the reader without knowledge of mathematics or the formal language of computer scientists by the hand, and explain whatever elements he wants to demonstrate. 

He describes it as follows: 

"Here one runs up against a seeming paradox. Computers by their very nature are the most inflexible, desireless, rule-following of beasts. Fast though they may be, they are nonetheless the epitome of unconsciousness. How, then, can intelligent behavior be programmed? Isn't this the most blatant of contradictions in terms? One of the major theses of this book is that it is not a contradiction at all. One of the major purposes of this book is to urge each reader to confront the apparent contradiction head on, to savor it, to turn it over, to take it apart, to wallow in it, so that in the end the reader might emerge with new insights into the seemingly unbreachable gulf between the formal and the informal, the animate and the inanimate, the flexible and the inflexible.  This is what Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is all about." (p.26)

or:  

"No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:

• to respond to situations very flexibly; 
• to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances; 
• to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages; 
• to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation; 
• to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them; 
• to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them; 
• to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways; 
• to come up with ideas which are novel. "

"This little debate shows the difficulty of trying to use logic and reasoning to defend themselves. At some point, you reach rock bottom, and there is no defense except loudly shouting, "I know I'm right!" Once again, we are up against the issue which Lewis Carroll so sharply set forth in his Dialogue: you can't go on defending your patterns of reasoning forever. There comes a point where faith takes over." (p. 192)

On the origin of life:  

"A natural and fundamental question to ask, on learning of these incredibly intricately interlocking pieces of software and hardware is: "How did ever get started in the first place?" It is truly a baffling thing. One has to imagine some sort of a bootstrap process occurring, somewhat like that which is used in the development of new computer languages - but bootstrap from simple molecules to entire cells is almost beyond our power to imagine. There are various theories on the origin of life. The run aground on this most central of all central questions: "How did Genetic Code, along with the mechanisms for its translation (ribosome_ tRNA molecules), originate?" For the moment, we will have to content ourselves with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than with an answer and perhaps experiencing that sense of wonder and awe is more satisfying than having an answer-at least for a while". (p. 548)

 Or using nice examples to make the reading easier to digest: 

"Here is a well-known children's joke which illustrates the open-endedness of real-life situations: 

• A man took a ride in an airplane. 
• Unfortunately, he fell out. 
• Fortunately, he had a parachute on. 
• Unfortunately, it didn't work. 
• Fortunately, there was a haystack below him. 
• Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork sticking out of it. Fortunately, he missed the pitchfork. 
• Unfortunately, he missed the haystack. 

It can be extended indefinitely. To represent this silly story in a frame­based system would be extremely complex, involving jointly activating frames for the concepts of man, airplane, exit, parachute, falling, etc., etc." (p. 675)

His ultimate endeavour is to link the world of abstract logic with the physical reality we live in, and of course especially our brain and its capacity to for abstract thought, to cross the levels set by scientific disciplines and to come to an more holistic understanding of the interactions. 

"My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our brains-for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will-are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between dif­ferent levels-quite like the Henkin sentence which, by merely asserting its own provability, actually becomes provable. The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself. 

 This should not be taken as an antireductionist position. It just implies that a reductionistic explanation of a mind, in order to be comprehensible, must ring in "soft" concepts such as levels, mappings, and meanings. In princi­ple, I have no doubt that a totally reductionistic but incomprehensible explanation of the brain exists; the problem is how to translate it into a language we ourselves can fathom. Surely we don't want a description in terms of positions and momenta of particles; we want a description which relates neural activity to "signals" (intermediate-level phenomena)-and which relates signals, in turn, to "symbols" and "subsystems", including the presumed-to-exist "self-symbol". This act of translation from low-level physical hardware to high-level psychological software is analogous to the translation of number-theoretical statements into metamathematical state­ments. Recall that the level-crossing which takes place at this exact transla­jon point is what creates Gödel's incompleteness and the self-proving character of Henkin's sentence. I postulate that a similar level-crossing is what creates our nearly unanalyzable feelings of self. In order to deal with the full richness of the brain/mind system, we will have to be able to slip between levels comfortably. Moreover, we will have to admit various types of "causality": ways in which an event at one level of description can "cause" events at other levels to happen. Sometimes event A will be said to "cause" event B simply for the reason that the one is a translation, on another level of description, of the other. Sometimes 'cause" will have its usual meaning: physical causality. Both types of causality-and perhaps some more-will have to be admitted in any expla­nation of mind, for we will have to admit causes that propagate both upwards and downwards" (p. 709)

And of course also the existence of free will. Are we the consequence of algorithms (historical/cultural/social/genetic/contextual/...) or not. 

"One way to gain some perspective on the free-will question is to replace it by what I believe is an equivalent question, but one which involves less loaded terms. Instead of asking, "Does system X have free will?" we ask "Does system X make choices?" By carefully groping for what we really mean when we choose to describe a system - mechanical or biological - as being capable of making "choices", I think we can shed much light on free will." (p. 711)

We will come back to this topic when reading Robert Sapolsky's "Determined". 

Even if in some respects the book is a little dated, especially when describing Artificial Intelligence or genetics, it remains one of the milestone books on cognitive science and logic, absolutely unique in terms of content and form, incredibly complex yet fun to read, even if it is impossible to understand everything, as most readers such as myself will have to confess.