Shunya's Notes

Vacation Break

Tis' the season for travel. Usha and I will be away for 15 days to Northeastern Europe: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Our mutually negotiated itinerary begins in Warsaw and takes in Krakow, Oswiecim (Auschwitz/Birkenau), Zamosc, Bialowieza Forest, Kaunas, Vilnius, Trakai, Riga, Sigulda, Tartu, Saremaa, Tallin, and more. Consequently, new posts may not happen at all (unless of course VP springs into heroic rearguard action).

A terrific book I'm reading in preparation is Walking Since Daybreak by Modris Eksteins. Here is an excerpt:

Death of History

The understanding of human behavior in the past has always been the raison d'etre of history. Because of this, history has prided itself on being a progressive discipline. Historians like to think that they have been to the modern world what theologians were to the age of enlightenment. They have provided meaning. In so doing, they have made the world a better place. History has been not only a subject of study; it has been a moral force. History, one could argue, has been the essence of the Enlightenment project.

Shantaram: A Review

Gregory David Roberts, the author of this semi-autobiographical novel, is an ex-junkie and an ex-con. A one-time gun-runner; dealer in drugs, black-market currencies, and forged passports; favored associated of a Bombay mafia don; escapee from an Australian maximum security prison, Roberts gives us a novel based closely on the events of his remarkable life and calls it Shantaram, "man of peace." You are right to be skeptical. The story's narrator is not a peaceful man and the book is loaded with enough violence to propel the modern Bollywood-styled blockbuster that it's slated to become (starring Johnny Depp and Amitabh Bachchan, directed by Mira Nair, 2009). But then, to get caught up in that is to miss the point; Shantaram is the story of a violent man's search for the man of peace within himself.

The story begins in the early 1980s, with the narrator already a fugitive from the law. Having jumped from the towers of his Australian prison, where he was serving a 19-year sentence for armed robbery, he escaped with the help of friends to Bombay, where he hopes to stay out of trouble and lose himself from the law. He has no plan and little money, nor has he been to India before. But he is almost immediately in love with Bombay and within hours of being in the city, he meets the comically affable, young cab-driver, Prabakar, who, in the course of a day, helps him escape from a scene of mob violence, finds him a cheap hotel, and sets him up with a little dope to smoke. When Prabaker asks to know his name, the fugitive instinctively fishes for a false one and suggests "Lin," short for "Lindsay." Prabakar is tickled by this name, gleefully remarking that it sounds like an Indian word for "dick." Thus, it becomes the appellation for the man who struggles to know himself through the course of the narrative, faltering and stumbling, even as the earnest and loving Prabakar shines ever more brilliantly as the foil to Lin’s depravity.

Within a few days, Lin finds himself settled in Prabakar’s slum, living cheek by jowl with 25,000 of India’s destitute who have migrated from every corner of India to live in this city of dreams. He finds himself cast as the slum “doctor,” dispensing first aid to the stream of humanity that flows past his shanty door, and is quickly drawn into the lives of his neighbors, learning Hindi, making friends, and fully participating in the life of the community. He remains among them for two years, but he never reveals the truth of his past to any of his fellow slum-dwellers.

It is through Roberts’s observations of and attachment to the life of the slum that this book plants its foundation and Lin gropes for his own moral ballast. In vivid detail, Roberts lays out the lives of the slum-dwellers, the everyday mechanics by which they live, aiding each other in times of want, coalescing in a moment into efficient squads to combat floods, fire, and cholera. Justice is reckoned by a headman, who rules solely through the respect of his constituency, and dispensed by the community at large. As Lin is immersed in this cast of characters of every condition and persuasion, each one fully textured and brought to life as individuals with their own aspirations, needs, choices, he marvels at the miracle of it, at its inherent peace. That such a tangled mass of humanity, representing such a multitude of languages, beliefs, and lifestyles, could function as this chaotic, unified whole awes him. It’s only possible, he surmises, because of a kind of love, born of necessity, that fills up the wretched gullies, and spills out on all who come near, even a low-life such as himself.

And this, ultimately, is what Shantaram comes to be about: Love, in all its forms and degrees. The love of our fellows, our parents, our brothers and sisters and friends and mates. The love of ourselves. That most human engagement which drives us, completes us, injures us, heals us, ruins us, saves us. Never pure, simple, or clean, often untrue, it is nevertheless our unavoidable condition and our only hope. For such a tough guy, surprisingly, Roberts never flinches from his subject.

Breaking the Galilean Spell

The scientific mind holds it as self-evident that all natural phenomena are bound by the laws of nature. We study such laws in physics and express them in the language of mathematics. The idea that all natural phenomena are also reducible to a sum of their parts, that micro components (iteratively down to sub-atomic particles) both describe and predict macro behavior, is called reductionism. Introduced by Descartes, its current proponents include Dennett, Dawkins, and Pinker.

The idea that reductionism has limits, particularly for highly complex systems like the biosphere and human culture (a wholly natural phenomenon), has also been around since at least Aristotle ("the whole is more than a sum of its parts"). Emergentism, as this hypothesis is called (or holism), claims that the fundamental laws of nature eventually run out of descriptive and predictive steam—not due to the inadequacy of our science but due to irreducible and unpredictable properties inherent in complex systems. Both reductionism and emergentism remain epistemological (as opposed to scientific) claims, though reductionism can boast of some inductive success on the verification front.

Stuart Kauffman, a scientist at the forefront of the idea of emergence, has written a new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, where he fleshes out this concept in more detail. Here is a brief excerpt:

Emergence is therefore a major part of the new scientific worldview. Emergence says that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives. Emergence, already both contentious and transformative, is but one part of the new scientific worldview I embrace.

Even deeper than emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new scientific worldview is what I call breaking the Galilean spell. Galileo rolled balls down incline planes and showed that the distance traveled varied as the square of the time elapsed. From this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with his Principia, setting the stage for all of modern science. With these triumphs, the Western world came to the view that all that happens in the universe is governed by natural law. Indeed, this is the heart of reductionism. Another Nobel laureate physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, has defined a natural law as a compressed description, available beforehand, of the regularities of a phenomenon. The Galilean spell that has driven so much science is the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by such laws. Perhaps my most radical scientific claim is that we can and must break the Galilean spell. Evolution of the biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially indescribable by natural law. This claim flies in the face of our settled convictions since Galileo, Newton, and the Enlightenment.

More here.

When Languages Die

I have previously argued the importance of human diversity, including in the context of languages. Over half of the 7,000 languages in the world today are poised to die in a few decades, an event without parallel in human history. In a recent book, When Languages Die, author K. David Harrison asks: "What is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language's structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever?" Here is a review by David Perlman:

A tiny community of reindeer herders in Siberia holds intimate knowledge of the lives, the foraging and the rutting season of their priceless animals, and it's the kind of information that is vital to anyone concerned by the loss of human cultures -- and to biologists worried about the loss of species diversity anywhere in the world.

Of the 426 members of Siberia's isolated Chulym people, only 35 still speak Tuvan, their ancient language, fluently, and they're all older than 50. Everyone else speaks only Russian, according to K. David Harrison, an adventuresome linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Harrison has lived with the Chulym and hopes to preserve their vanishing language.

The Chulym can fully describe a "2-year-old male castrated rideable reindeer" with only the single word chary, and to Harrison, that not only shows how ancient languages differ from their modern counterparts, but is symbolic of a worldwide loss in important cultural diversity.

More here. 

Additional reviews here and here, an interview with the author, and Colbert's take on the topic. Also check out the ambitious Rosetta Project, "a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers building a publicly accessible online archive of ALL documented human languages."

Of Monks and Ferraris

A couple years ago, a childhood friend who lives in New Delhi, handed me The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma—a self-help book on spirituality and "eastern wisdom", which, curiously, was all the rage in Indian yuppie circles. At first, I attributed this to pride in the author's Indian roots and his huge (financial) success in America.

Readers of this blog will know that I'm deeply suspicious of this genre, replete as it is with New Age charlatans preying on people's angst and insecurities. Still, due to my friend's gushing praise and insistence, I began reading the book. I recall it now as a struggle on every page and often thinking of Dorothy Parker's words from long ago: this is not a book to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force. I finally caved in midway, putting her words into action. It dawned on me that the book's transnational appeal lay in its very fatuousness (it has been published in 30+ countries, becoming a huge seller in the US, Israel, India, Mexico, and Canada, but apparently not in Europe).

I then read its customer reviews on Amazon (I often scan the lowest ratings first for critiques that might disqualify a book from my reading list). Mine was of course the minority reaction, but it was there alright. One person couldn't even get past the title—what's so great about selling one's Ferrari, he asked? Why did the monk not give it away? But it was the hilariously scathing review below that most delighted me.

I was recommended this book because I work too much. Every page that I managed to get through was painful. This book is the saddest and most excruciating way to introduce Buddhist philosophy. It is a "Fable" with a capital "F". Nothing in the book is true. If something in the book has been based on a true concept it has been so badly distorted by this text that it is no longer even close. To summarize for those that don't need the rest of the review to know that this is a book to skip, here is a banal platitude from the book that forced me to emit an audible groan while I was reading it: "Your `I can' is greater than your IQ"

It starts out with this absolute fat jackass womanizing alcoholic unscrupulous lawyer, that would essentially be better off dead, and that I personally hated to read about, and would hate to know, and wouldn't talk to except to make rude noises at if I did know him because I was related to him or something. You are then told that he is basically a good person but unless your "I can" is greater than your "IQ" you aren't fooled even for a second. Then he has a heart attack and goes to India and meets a guru, and turns into this soft and supple bi-curious sounding freak that wears long red robes and pours tea all over a former colleagues wife's Persian rug to illustrate concepts that aren't really true. In essence he's an even bigger jerk that is now ultra self-important because he's this transformed guru come back to bring enlightenment to all the normal people that weren't alcoholic womanizing hoodlums to begin with.

The Other Guantanamo

David Vine, author of the forthcoming Island of Shame: The Secret History of Exile and Empire on Diego Garcia, chronicles yet another sorry saga of American imperialism.

On the small, remote island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean halfway between Africa and Indonesia, the United States has one of the most secretive military bases in the world ... this huge US air and naval base has been a major, if little known, launch pad for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the past year, the George W Bush administration has made improvements that point toward its use in a possible attack on Iran. The administration recently admitted what it had long denied and what journalists, human-rights investigators and others had long suspected: the island has also been part of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) secret "rendition" program for captured terrorist suspects.

More here.

Robert Fagles, 1933-2008

Robert Fagles, translator par excellence of the Iliad and Odyssey, is dead. I have fond memories of reading both nearly a decade ago during my year in Amsterdam, the Iliad while traveling in the Peloponnese, punctuated by visits to the evocative ruins of Troy and Mycenae, cities of the Homeric epics. In commemoration, here are the closing words from Fagles' introduction to the Iliad.

The Iliad remains a terrifying poem. Achilles, just before his death, is redeemed as a human being, but there is no consolation for the death of Hector. We are left with a sense of waste, which is not adequately balanced even by the greatness of the heroic figures and the action; the scale descends towards loss. The Iliad remains not only the greatest epic poem in literature but also the most tragic.

Homer's Achilles is clearly the model for the tragic hero of the Sophoclean stage; his stubborn, passionate devotion to an ideal image of self is the same force that drives Antigone, Oedipus, Ajax and Philoctetes to the fulfillment of their destinies. Homer's Achilles is also, for archaic Greek society, the essence of the aristocratic ideal, the paragon of male beauty, courage and patrician manners—”"the splendor running in the blood," says Pindar ... And this, too, strikes a tragic note, for Pindar sang his praise of aristocratic values in the century which saw them go down to extinction, replaced by the new spirit of Athenian democracy. But it seems at first surprising that one of the most famous citizens of that democracy, a man whose life and thought would seem to place him at the extreme opposite pole from the Homeric hero, who was so far removed from Achilles' blind instinctive reactions that he could declare the unexamined life unlivable, that Socrates, on trial for his life, should invoke the name of Achilles. Explaining to his judge why he feels no shame or regret for a course of action that has brought him face-to-face with a death sentence, and rejecting all thought of a compromise that might save his life (and which his fellow citizens would have been glad to offer), he cites as his example Achilles, the Achilles, who, told by his mother that his own death would come soon after Hector's, replied: "Then let me die at once—€”rather than "sit by the ships ... / a useless, dead weight on the good green earth".

And yet, on consideration, it is not so surprising. Like Achilles, he was defying the community, hewing to a solitary line, in loyalty to a private ideal of conduct, of honor. In the last analysis, the bloodstained warrior and the gentle philosopher live and die by the same heroic, and tragic, pattern.

The World Is What It Is

Patrick French has written an authorized biography of VS Naipaul: The World Is What It Is. Outlook India has published three extracts—the first from French's introduction to the book; the second charting how Naipaul's views on India evolved and changed over 30 years; and the third from a later chapter, in which Naipaul loses one wife (Pat) and gains another (Nadira), even as he discards his mistress (Margaret). Here is the tantalizing last paragraph from the third extract, reflecting the complex, turbulent, and messy nature of his relationships:

And then there was Margaret. To avoid the awkwardness of telling her about his marriage, Vidia remained silent; she learned the news of Nadira's existence from the newspapers. Margaret was distraught, a broken woman, but she was not wholly surprised. She had realised at the end of 1995 that something was wrong, and that Pat's death would alter her position. She had long thought that Vidia would not end his life without going back to someone of his own ethnic background. In her view, perhaps rightly, she knew him better than anyone else had ever known him, or would know him. She saw she had become superfluous, believing Vidia needed a woman for sex and to do things for him, but not for any deeper support. And even a decade after their relationship had come to its sad end, Margaret would still write that her years with him had been the most terrible and wonderful of her life, and that he had taught her everything she knew, mentally and physically.

Also read Robern McCrum's essay on meeting Naipaul to talk about this biography.

Coetzee on Marquez

Coetzee reviews Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores:

Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera ends with Florentino Ariza, at last united with the woman he has loved from afar all his life, cruising up and down the Magdalena River in a steamboat flying the yellow flag of cholera. The couple are seventy-six and seventy-two, respectively.

In order to give unfettered attention to his beloved Fermina, Florentino has had to break off his current affair, a liaison with a fourteen-year-old ward of his, whom he has initiated into the mysteries of sex during Sunday-afternoon trysts in his bachelor apartment (she proves a quick learner). He gives her the brushoff over a sundae in an ice cream parlor. Bewildered and in despair, the girl commits unobtrusive suicide, taking her secret with her to the grave. Florentino sheds a private tear and feels intermittent pangs of grief over her loss, but that is all.

América Vicuña, the child seduced and abandoned by an older man, is a character straight out of Dostoevsky. The moral frame of Love in the Time of Cholera, a work of considerable emotional range but a comedy nonetheless, of an autumnal variety, is simply not large enough to contain her. In his determination to treat América as a minor character, one in the line of Florentino's many mistresses, and to leave unexplored the consequences for Florentino of his offense against her, García Márquez drifts into morally unsettling territory. Indeed, there are signs that he is unsure of how to handle her story.

On Imre Kertesz

Years ago when I read Fateless—a Holocaust novel by Imre Kertesz—I was floored by its brilliance. "Kertesz's spare, understated prose and the almost ironic perspective of Gyorgy Köves, limited both by his youth and his inability to perceive the enormity of what he is caught up in, give the novel an intensity that [makes] it difficult to forget." Kertesz won the Nobel Prize in 2002 (read his acceptance lecture) "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history":

In his writing Imre Kertész explores the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which the subjection of human beings to social forces has become increasingly complete. His works return unremittingly to the decisive event in his life: the period spent in Auschwitz, to which he was taken as a teenage boy during the Nazi persecution of Hungary's Jews. For him Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence that like an alien body subsists outside the normal history of Western Europe. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence.

Kertész's first novel, Sorstalanság, 1975 (Fateless, 1992), deals with the young Köves, who is arrested and taken to a concentration camp but conforms and survives. The novel uses the alienating device of taking the reality of the camp completely for granted, an everyday existence like any other, admittedly with conditions that are thankless, but not without moments of happiness. Köves regards events like a child without completely understanding them and without finding them unnatural or disquieting - he lacks our ready-made answers. The shocking credibility of the description derives perhaps from this very absence of any element of the moral indignation or metaphysical protest that the subject cries out for. The reader is confronted not only with the cruelty of atrocities but just as much with the thoughtlessness that characterised their execution. Both perpetrators and victims were preoccupied with insistent practical problems, the major questions did not exist. Kertész's message is that to live is to conform. The capacity of the captives to come to terms with Auschwitz is one outcome of the same principle that finds expression in everyday human coexistence.

More here. I discovered today that a movie based on Fateless came out in 2006 when I was in India (now in my Netflix queue).