The Golden Ass

Book Reviews

January 2002

aging authors - Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" & Nabokov's "Ada"
"The Golden Ass" by Lucius Apuleius
"Centuries of Childhood" by Phillippe Aries
"Collected Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges
Cervantes' "Don Quixote"
"The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri
Davenport-Hines "Auden"
"Growth of the Soil" by Knut Hamsun
"De Rerum Natura" by Titus Lucretius Carus
Theodor Mommsen "History of Rome"
Petronius "Satyricon"
Daniel Pipes "The Rushdie Affair"
Plotinus' "Enneads"
Plutarch's "Lives"
Schopenhauer "The Fourfold Root"
Sei Shonagon "Pillow Book"
Lawrence Sterne "A Sentimental Journey"
Sir Ronald Syme "Roman Revolution"
Jeanette Winterson "Boating for Beginners"

"give me a copper and I'll tell you a golden story!"
"The Golden Ass" by Lucius Apuleius

Fans use to hail Lady Murasaki's "Prince Genji" as the world's first novel. Well, if we don't count Petron's "Satyricon" because of its fragmented condition, then Apuleius must be a strong candidate. His book predated Lady Murasaki's by more than 800 years. And of course there is extant an even older example "Chaireas and Callirhoe" by Chariton (some time in the first century BC or AD), followed by the bashfully lewd novel "Daphnis and Chloe" from the 3rd century. (The most interesting aspect of this book is not the sex, but that the two shepherds can see their animals doing it all the time and still be so completely clueless before the last page.) And an expert on Egyptian literature may actually be able to push the advent of the novel even further back into the past.

So the biblical Joseph story could very well be the retelling of an Egyptian original. All that is needed is the mind-set of an urban middle-class, some sort of rudimentary public education, a comparably accessible and inexpensive technology of writing, and a viable network of dissemination. Most of this was present in Egypt, millennia before it fell under the Macedonian protectorate. On the other hand it is not very likely to find tales of novel length written in cuneiform or in Chinese before the introduction of ink and paper. Before that, text, in a painfully slow procedure, needed to be singed on bundled bamboo slabs, with a red hot needle, or had been wedged into little clay cakes. I guess the very earliest novels had been the prompt-books for professional storytellers on the bazaars and marketplaces.

An assumption confirmed by Pliny the Younger and shared by Robert Graves who retranslated "The Golden Ass" for the modern reader. He based his hunch on the outlandish and weirdly archaic diction of the original and compared it to oral deliveries in Wales, which in Grave's time was still a living craft. In Grave's opinion, the author deliberately emulated and travestied the style of oral storytelling. The Bible itself, 1 King 13, gives an example for this sort of thing. In fact we can be pretty certain that Lucius Apuleius of Madaura (124 - after 170) meant to mock an established narrative pattern, and not only because his style is so different from Chariton's and Petronius' elegance and lucidity. But the very source for his story was originally written in a trim and witty diction.

The story of Lucius who brought on himself bad luck by starting a love affair with a slave girl and was transformed into a donkey, has come to us in two versions. The other version is by Lucian of Samosata (c.120 - c.190) a Syrian from Antioch, who traveled widely the Empire before he settled in Alexandria. His tale is much shorter and lacks all the intimate touches and folklore we find in Apuleius. The two writer's outlook on religion couldn't be any more different. Where Apuleius wholeheartedly embraced the worship of Isis, the "Syrian Voltaire" lambasted with equal zest religion in any form. Some scholars speculate that Apuleius got the idea for his novel from Lucian. But if we look at the data of their biographies this seems to be not very likely. In fact if anybody of the two could have been aware of the other fellow's existence, it would have been Lucian rather than Apuleius.

But then again, why should the elegant and cosmopolitan Lucian have bothered of taking notice? Apuleius was then still a fairly obscure Roman writer from the African province. So the inevitable conclusion seems to be, that both authors had used a common source, now lost, from the stockpile of Greek pulp fiction or "Milesian Tales." Knowledgeable scholars mention a certain Lucius of Patra. In Apuleius' hands, despite its episodic structure, this story became a genuine novel. The author used all the narrative ploys and plot cliches available, but he also spliced in materials from his own life, from his travels and spiritual adventures, and presents us with a brew of folklore and biographical detail as the vehicle for a moving story of genuine transformation and penance.

Graves might overdo it a bit when he stresses the moral aspect in Apuleius' story, but it is true: the protagonist's transformation is no less genuine and moral as the story of conversion in St. Augustine's "Confession." Augustine knew his fellow-countryman's book - the title we use today is his. The difference between the two however speaks volumes. The African apologist and saint is utterly lacking in humor. The pagan Apuleius, on the other hand, has no such inhibitions, and invites us to laugh with him, even at the gods. This is good pagan tradition. Just recall the unbelievably uncouth obscenities and ribald insults, which such undoubtedly conservative and deeply religious author as Aristophanes was capable of throwing at his deities. In a different time and under a different religion this would have meant a public barbecue of the author on a slowly turning spit.

The "Golden Ass" though not quite so ribald as Aristophanes' comedies has its moments too, moments that carried over into Boccaccio's "Decamerone." But the allegorical bedtime story of "Amor and Psyche" is recognized as a marvel of its kind. Adlington's Elizabethan translation is still interesting, but surprisingly a bit coy on the sex; Graves' translation remains a reliable staple; J. Arthur Hanson's new rendition in Havard's Loeb Classics is accurate and elegant - none of them reproduces the rough edges of the original. But it is a remarkable fact that all its early translations into French, German, and English had become national landmark events in the development of elegant writing.

* aging authors
"Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce and Nabokov's "Ada"

In imaginative writing an author exhibits a staged or genuine temperament and readers make choices according to their more or less educated tastes. When temperament and taste agree, reader and author embrace each other: "you are mine!" It's a bit like a love affair. It may even lead to a lifelong relationship. But like the relationship of old couples, things can turn sour. Some authors have a tendency to spin out their own private mythology and after considerable time and effort, in their old age and with waning powers, they produce curious monstrosities, which academic cliques and critical hacks (reputations and pay cheques are on the line) never tire to applaud and praise as the ultimate masterpiece.

However the unsuspecting reader, even the trusting fan, usually feels disappointed even cheated, if he made the mistake to trust the editorials on the back of the book cover. I give two examples: James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" and Nabokov's "Ada." About "Finnegan's Wake" it is easy to be brief: it doesn't communicate. End of story. And yes I did my homework, I studied the blasted thing and wasted hours and hours on the interpretation or rather decoding. Over the years, despite the main thrust of early critical attempts to find meaning in the over-bordering mythological allusions, it has gradually transpired that the book is autobiographical with a location in the "real world," which is largely in Triest.

"Finnegan's Wake" is a tirade of hate against Joyce's younger brother ("One-One-One," - you get the reference? Right - Revelations!) whom he accuses of - well everything: cuckolding him with Mrs. Joyce, being stingy, abusing his older brother physically, or just being himself. Stephen Joyce, by the way, wrote a rebuttal to the paranoiac gushing of his older brother, the title is "My Brother's Keeper," and it is a good read. But it is Stephen's diary which provides the key to "Finnegan's Wake" - James unashamedly had had read and exploited it. Once you break through the linguistic barbs, the method in "Finnegan's Wake" becomes transparent and the decoded message is not something I care to know. Joyce was not the inventor of this method: this honor goes to Lewis Carroll, not so much for "Alice," but for his "Sylvie & Bruno."

Nabokov's "Ada" is a slightly different affair, as far as the form is concerned. There are definitely passages in the book where Nabokov's language achieved an elegant edge, his English has thrown off the heavy clod-hoppers and at times just dances along; the complete opposite to "Finnegan's Wake," one should think. Yet look at the book as a whole: this is a juvenile fantasy, a little boy rioting in the old man. This is not a love story, this is a lay story. I admit, with advancing age getting laid can become more important than wasting time on courtship rituals - but the way Nabokov obsesses over speciality brothels with virgins for selected clients, or how incestual lays become sport events of herculean proportions, in fact the whole idea of the protagonists' inexhaustible libido, turn the book into the fantasies of an adolescent in heat.

And that's the common ground where the two books come together. Imaginative writing, especially fiction, can create an alternative world, complete, self-sustained, plausible, very real, yet different from our own and in the final analysis just a wonderful fairy tale. The difference is in the detail. What sets apart a great writer from the merely good writer and the good writer from a hack. who churns out SF and "Fantasy" by the ream, is the quality of vision: it is an alien planet, but a very real, very accurately observed world. "Finnegan's Wake" and "Ada," both have lost touch with this kind of reality. Both are very self-conscious productions "written by the book," but Joyce's "Wake" is barely more than a pathological exposition of his pet-paranoias, a "confession in foreign tongues" (Stephen Joyce), and Nabokov gives us the adolescent obsessions of a rather lonely child or childish old man.

Both books retreat into a splendid isolation, even in the way they had been written. Joyce scribbled 17 years at his last book, he had become a mental recluse in near complete blindness; Nora was not much of a comfort. Nabokov enjoyed the royalties from his "Lolita" and retreated into a Swiss hotel, as the next best thing for an ivory tower - writing novels on index cards, plugging out, chasing butterflies, composing chess problems and playing scrabble with Vera, who seemed to have had much stronger opinions than even her husband. He never returned to America. Both, Joyce and Nabokov, lived in exile and closer to their dictionaries than to the living language. The puzzles in "Finnegan's Wake" are often just a question of having handy the right dictionary. "Ada's" puzzles are more subtle, they are hidden in the structure and challenge the reader to a game of recognition, like Solomon's Song, in remote references, repeating motifs, obscure quotes. It is less of a pain to read "Ada" than "Finnegan's Wake" - perhaps the difference between a fraud and a failure, but the total is the same: not something I care to know. Once it is all figured out, we are left with a shrug and the question "so what?"

* the myth of childhood
"Centuries of Childhood" by Phillippe Aries

In the sixties (those were the times!) it was probably the most influential book on education. The book has changed our understanding of the idea of "childhood" and how it had evolved in the West. We, and perhaps even our kids, use to take for granted a sheltered period of prolonged "innocence" and supervision, so it must come as a surprise, how relatively recent, in historical terms, these developments actually had been. In such light, the medieval society and even the Renaissance look very alien, like cultures from a distant continent. There was a custom to hire out one's own children in a network of chartered apprenticeships. Once a little sucker had passed the critical age of five, he was deemed to be ready to fend for himself. It became time to learn the way of the world and to serve in the shops of a guild or at the tables of landed nobility. Only a select few received rudimentary tuition and set out on an academic career, which meant years of vagrancy and the open road between Universities and urban centers of commerce.

As for the pre-school age, the child was a sexless, almost nameless piece of livestock and roamed the townships in street gangs, wore an undistinguished garb, rummaged the trash dumps and contributed to the family's income with petty theft and beggary. It never washed, hunkered down to torture an unfortunate beetle or crank a cat's tail. It learned to drink small beer, the only way to escape the diarrhea that lurked in every well. It was on a race against measles, small pocks, diphtheria, and polio, and the odds weren't good. Parents preferred not to involve themselves too emotionally in the frequent deaths of their small ones. A little thing had died, sad, but a replacement is already under way. Scenes from modern day Calcutta come to mind.

(This condition was not necessarily class-specific. The future emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) had passed his early childhood and adolescence in a Sicilian street-gang. He was heir to the most powerful dynasty of his time and would become one of the best educated and most enlightened rulers in history. Frederick II was fluent in six languages, including Arabic. He coined the notorious phrase of the three con-artists: Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Needless to say, the popes took turns to excommunicate the man, despite Frederick's success to obtain a treaty without bloodshed, which secured free access to the holy land.)

These days, teachers complain over class-sizes. I still recall my first year in primary: we first graders shared the same classroom with the second grade, and one teacher took care of both at the same time. But this is idyllic if compared to the beginnings of the modern school system in the late Renaissance! You had first graders of every age between seven and twenty-five sitting in one room with second, third, and fourth graders. Many of the most renowned educators were practising pedophiles and nobody found anything wrong with it. Only gradually the Jesuit's colleges set a trend for stricter discipline and the separation of the ages.

A new concept of parenthood developed. Up to this point the Church had been too busy with her own agenda of sorting out who is orthodox and who an infidel, to care much about such mundane matters as marriage. Without much ceremony, newly wed couples used to receive an informal blessing under the open sky. But now marriage had became a "holy sacrament," and couples exchanged vows at the altar. The little ones, as the fruit of such commitment, became precious, and their still frequent deaths a source of inconsolable grief. For the first time since Antiquity, we find again infants to be buried in individually marked tombs.

Supervision intensified; early tuition was recognized as a means to keep kids out of trouble. Children wore the same costumes as their parents and from early on displayed the airs of their social class. They no longer exposed their genitals in public and slept in a place removed from their parent's bed. It was not exactly a world of fairies and dreams under soaring larks, there was little time for this and no space to wax sentimental. The kids were on a mission: to grow up as soon as possible and take their share of responsibility for the family's fortunes.

The nuclear family was born out of economic expedience; your own children are more loyal then a hired apprentice and you save on the wages. The emerging educational system served to reinforce this trend and at the same time developed a new sense of parental commitment. Then came the industrial age and mobilized human resources on an unprecedented scale. The sentimental attachment deepened and in the era of Victorian hypocrisy and a slowly growing life expectancy, the biological learning period was stretched even further and a new myth was born: the myth of innocence and of an infancy in fairyland. The industry discovered a new market for age related clothing, the new genres of children's literature were born and parents learned to lie to their children about the birds and the bees.

Has this turned out to be a blessing? History's court is still in session, and the replacement of King Arthur, Cinderella and the Dwarfs by Kermit, the Cooky-Monster and Miss Piggy might turn out to be a rather dubious piece of pedagogic progress. Monsieur Aries' book certainly deserves its rank as a classic.

* the ultimate sky-hook
"The Enneads" by Plotinus & Stephen MacKenna (Translator)

Readers of mine may notice that I rarely speak of fiction and prefer the term "imaginative literature." Plotinus, by trade, was a philosopher, and some of the greatest in this profession, apart from their unusual powers of reasoning, are not exactly conspicuous for their imagination. But others did great and displayed fertile imagination and linguistic felicity. Even if totally refuted in a strictly philosophical sense, their work remains to be a source of inspiration and a joy to read.

Plotinus began publishing in the advanced age of 49. His work became the hidden nursery of Christian theology; something he certainly didn't intend. The Christian apologist Tatian, in his address "Against the Greeks," expressed an increasingly popular sentiment when he said:

"I am not to worship God's creation made for our use. The Sun and the Moon were made on our account. How then shall I worship my own ministers?"

Plotinus, usually never shrill, replied in strong terms:

"Human temerity is only too willing to accept such grandiloquent ravings. The simple folks hear: 'People whose worship is inherited from antiquity are not His children - you are!' So you address the lowest of men as brothers, but you deny this courtesy to the Sun and disown your ties with the Cosmos?"

Plotinus created the last great synthesis of antique philosophy. It combined Plato's theory of Ideas with a doctrine of emanation, a constant flux of creative energy from the primeval One through several agencies all the way down to humans, animals, and matter in various states of lesser reality.

In this vision even the polytheistic pantheon participates in the ultimately undivided unity of the cause for our existence. Plotinus' reasoning is not difficult to follow, but for us modern semi-barbarians, his discerning subtlety often seems to verge on empty verbiage. However the basic premise is endearingly simple:

"It is unity that makes a being. The members of every plant and animal form a unity; separation means loss of existence."

History has been written by the victorious, so our views reflect the dim opinions of paganism's worst enemy; but let me assure you, in their days, the Pagans had the better thinkers on their side.

So, after Constantine's edict of toleration, Christians went on the offensive. In 415 St. Cyril dispatched his mob against Hypathia, the daughter of the mathematician Theon and herself a mathematician and philosopher of note. They stripped her naked, dragged her through the streets into a church where a certain Peter the Reader killed her with his club. Her corpse was cut to pieces and the flesh scraped from the bones with shells and pot shards. Cyril was never called to account, and never de-sainted. A century later, Emperor Justinian, the bigot, switched off the lights, and drove Athens' last philosophers into exile. It took a treaty imposed by foreign powers, that the most prominent of the last pagan intellectuals got permission to go home to their families and end their lives in peace and obscurity.

Plotinus was always honest about the possibility to actually get it wrong:

"Consider sense knowledge: its objects seem most patently artified, yet the doubt remains whether the apparent reality may not lie in the states of the percipient rather than in the material before him."

He even seems to have anticipated the modern concept of gravity:

"The heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or move by circle; all other movement indicates outside compulsion."

In a series of papers on "a Cartography of the Ecstatic and Meditative States," (see also the archive) from 1969-1978, Professor Roland Fischer made explicit reference to Plotinus' description of his mystical ecstasy. Based on controlled experiments with mind-enhancing substances, Fischer mapped out an ascending continuum of nervous arousal that bridges the state of meditative torpor on one end with the surrender to white hot hysteria on the other. Such ecstasy occurs when amphetamine or LSD or some kind of prayer discipline breach the amnesic state boundaries, that structure our memory in separate layers. It causes an overload of data which freezes the mental "hard drive."

In Plotinus' own words:

"Abandon the duality of seer and seen, and count both as one, so that you in your vision do not distinguish, nor even imagine a duality. You have changed, you no longer own yourself, but belong to the One, a center in sync with the center. You will see a solitary light suddenly revealing itself - not from some perceived object, but pure and self-contained. We must not enquire its origin, for there is no "origin." The primal One does not come on cue, it is not like one who enters, but who is eternally present. Like someone who has entered a temple's inner sanctuary and left behind the images, the self is perfectly still and alone. This is liberation from the alien that besets us here ..."

Plotinus enjoyed this experience only four times in the five or six years that his biographer Porphyry knew him. Given the choice, I am not quite sure, whether I really would like to relinquish my distance as separate observer, but it is a noted fact, that everyone who ever "returned" from the bright light of such schizoid stupor (which includes so called "near death experiences") did so with deep regret. It is a fact of our empirical existence, though not effected by some numinous sky hook, as Plotinus would like us to think. Still, the most fantastic of all philosophies could actually be the most realistic description of the mind and its evolution, to date.

"The Universe is organized, effective, complex, lavish, but it cannot be at once symbol and reality. As we look upon the world, its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march, and think of the gods seen and hidden, and the life of animal and plant, let us ascend to its archetype, to the yet more authentic sphere of unsoiled intelligence. That archetypal world is the true Golden Age, age of Chronos, who is the Intellectual-Principle, the exuberance of the One."

Paganism at its best.

* educator of the western world
"Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans," by Plutarch

After the Turks had conquered Constantinople, refugees brought manuscripts of Plutarch to Italy. It was the right time. Secular scholars and enlightened clerics took a new interest in the learning of Antiquity and the Greek language. For the first time since the fall of Rome, Homer was not just a name, but actually read in the original. And Plutarch's "Lives" became the handbook for the European gentleman's higher education. In fact through many channels, Plutarch reintroduced the ancient concepts of republican freedom and democracy to a world that seemed to have completely forgotten that they had ever had existed.

Plutarch became the United States' secret founding father; Thomas Jefferson and the signatories to the constitution, they all had grown up with Plutarch in their curriculum. He taught us the spirit of democracy:

"For all we know, opposite parties or factions in a commonwealth, like passengers in a boat, serve to trim and balance the unsteady motions of power; whereas if they combine and come all over to one side, they cause to overset the vessel and carry down everything."

And he conveyed a grasp of the larger picture:

"Economy, which is but money-making, when exercised over men, becomes policy."

In Plutarch, liberalism and compassion had found a political voice, and he recorded for us a timeless indictment against "conservative values" and "patriotism:

"... The beasts find refuge in their dens, but men who for the safety of their country expose their lives in service, breathe on borrowed air under the open sky. Having no roof of their own, with wife and children, they wander from place to place. Is it not ridiculous to hear generals exhort their soldiers to fight for the hearth of their ancestors, when not any of so many Romans own altar or monument, neither have even a house to defend? They fight and they are slain, but it is for the wealth of other men. Being called masters of the world, they have not one square-inch of land to call their own (Tiberius Gracchus, 163-133 BC)."

But, always the realist, and himself living under despotic rule, Plutarch adds:

"in a time when right is weak, we may be thankful if might assumes a form of gentleness,"

because, (and he quotes Cato):

"by nature a king is a man-eating animal."

Plutarch's grasp on human nature was already very advanced, before the barbaric notion of original sin threw society back to the ethical stone age:

"Men by nature is not a wild animal or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not by vicious habit. He is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as wild beasts become tame and domesticated. With good reason, those who train horses and dogs, endeavor by gentle means to cure their angry and intractable tempers, rather than by cruelty and beating."

Without being an atheist, Plutarch's comment on a situation equivalent to Gen. 22:2, reveals a discerning grasp on the motives and sentiments which underpin faith into the irrational and he urges:

"that such a barbarous and impious obligation could not be pleasing to any Superior Being or to the father of gods and men; that it is absurd to imagine any divinities or powers taking delight in slaughter and sacrifices of men; or, if there were such, they are to be neglected as weak and unable to assist! Because such unreasonable and cruel desires can only proceed from weak and depraved minds."

And:

"the worship most acceptable to the gods is that which comes from a cheerful heart."

Plutarch influenced Western art as much as Western politics. For his dramas, Shakespeare lifted entire passages from North's translation. But to fully appreciate Plutarch's greatness, one has to remember, that he was neither a thinker, nor one of the great intellectual luminaries of his period - just a very bright popular writer and educator and a human being of integrity, of culture, and a rare capacity for compassion. At some point in the Persian war, the entire population of Athens needed to be evacuated to Troezen. For lack of shipping space domestic animals and pets had to be left behind. No other writer in all Antiquity would have cared to take notice of the dog who jumped into the sea and swam side to side with the galley which carried his family. The dog didn't quite make it and drowned short of the shores of Salamis.

Often Plutarch conveys a sense of wellbeing, of a Golden Age, and he still is holding court over our imagination. The most interesting chapter for anthropologists, is Plutarch's portrayal of Lycurgus and his laws. Himself a product of a patriarchal society, Plutarch had not a clue, that his accurate description of Spartan customs, would depict one of the last matriarchal societies that had survived the coup de tat of the patriarchs. Utopian fantasies have often become the excuse for totalitarian atrocities, But Plutarch was never part of the posse. As for me I remember him best for the little story about a man of trade in a moonlit night, sailing leeward of the Aegean coast. Suddenly the sailors heard a voice carrying over from the near by shore:

"Travelers, tell the Corinthian's, the Great Pan is dead."

Plutarch was a loving husband and father, an incorruptible administrator and conscientious ambassador for his people, a humanist and a model for liberalism ever since. There are books you want to have in your briefcase, if that is all you can carry away from disaster and war; books that keep you company in your most difficult hour. Plutarch's "Lives" is definitely one of them. It had been of tremendous influence on our civilization, but unlike the Bible, of a wholesome and humanizing influence. Mommsen called Plutarch "mellow and sweet as the honey from Mount Hymettos." Who is to say, that ancient paganism had nothing to contribute to the modern world?

the way things are
"The Way Things Are. The De Rerum Natura" by Titus Lucretius Carus & Rolfe Humphries

Rolfe Humphries was an industrious translator of considerable poetic talent. I think I must have read almost everything of him. His Aeneid looks a bit tired, it seems he just slogged through for the money, but even so, it is far better than Fitzgerald's and at least as good as Mandelbaum's. Humphries is the kind of translator who can be recognized by his own style. His translation of Juvenal or Ovid is as much of Humphries' as it is a work of Ovid or Juvenal. This is not always what we look for when we want to read an ancient author, but it may be the best compromise available. However Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura" undoubtedly is Humphries' labor of love.

Through the dark ages, Lucretius' poem had been the subterranean lifeline for the survival of rational understanding and inquiry. In the renaissance it came out into the open and became the spiritual umbilical cord for the birth of modern science. During Voltaire's era it was the shibboleth among the intellectual opposition to church and religious indoctrination. By a stroke of dumb luck the existence of this poem had eluded its worst enemy because of a fortunate misunderstanding. Christian apologists found it simply inconceivable that Lucretius could have meant their ilk as well, when he fulminated against religious madness, fanatic superstition, and the fear of hell as a means of manipulation. In fact they saw in him an ally from the opposite camp, since he seemed to target only pagan superstition. How could he not? Lucretius died some 85 years before the first proclamations of Christianity.

I must admit, that I always thought this poem to be an unreadable monstrosity. Just think of it: an essay that explains nuclear physics set to twelve tone music. I don't know about you, but people would have to pay me money to listen to that. The best to be expected, would be dry stretches of insufferable boredom. Or so I thought. Well, in the end it was a pleasant surprise. Lucretius did actually produce a real poem. It is a bit on the preachy side, this poet clearly felt that he was on a mission, but it is the mission of a poetic temperament, of someone who beyond the etiological itch sought to find the link between his perception and the ontology of things. Poetry is sensual thought and it speaks of the cosmic harmony and unity into which we fit, because this is our home.

It is a home in constant repair, it has leaking roofs and when the lights go off, furry critters scuttle through the dank basement. True poetry doesn't sentimentalize, and Virgil in his Georgic's isn't holding out on us when it comes to the sheer pain of back-braking labor. Neither does Lucretius close his eyes before epidemics and calamities. Life is good, for the simple reason, that this is the only shot we've got, but this doesn't mean, it has to be fair. It takes courage to unflinchingly face the facts without grabbing for the placebos - be it religion or your therapist. And this is ok, as long as we don't lose sight of the fact that religion and therapists are placebos. But things turn nasty if these hobbies become an obsession and take control of our life: exactly the point Lucretius was trying to make.

In this respect his poem is by far superior to any modern emulation in the vein of T.S. Eliot's "Quartet," which in a typical romantic or post-romantic fashion is more like a desperate hustle for the non-existing fire-escape. The present period is not the most hospitable era for existential honesty and secular sanity; especially Mr. Eliot was not the man to be asked for honesty on this score. But whereas Virgil gives us a hymn of cosmological trust and unsentimental joy in being alive, the much darker temperament of Lucretius permeates his subject with the disillusion of a skeptical seeker.

As a translation we have Humphries at his best behavior which means it comes a tat too slick to account for Lucretius' archaic contortions. Humphries' Lucretius has a lighter touch and a more lucid bearing than the Latin original, but the poetic substance is superbly preserved. The prosodic tit for tat, has produced a happy and faithful marriage and emulates in English blankverse Lucretius' experiments with the epic hexameter. What more could we be asking for?

* Sancho's dream
"Don Quixote" by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra & P.A. Motteux

For the record: there is no such thing as a classic; only authors who ran out of copyright. Literature is not a museum. Books too can become dated and suffer defeat in the eternal war for the spirit of the human race. Only a precious few books really improve with vintage, and become a kind of intellectual haven to fall back upon. The "Don Quixote" is such a book. But Cervantes' objective was to write rough and tumble comedy, not a character study or an essay on modern sensibilities. More than anything else, he aimed for the laughs, and he aimed low. The children and semi-senile still giggle away.

I think there is little disagreement, that all modern literature stems one way or the other from Cervantes' "Don Quixote." Unintentionally and singlehanded, Cervantes had created a new perspective on narrative plausibility, which has educated ever since our tastes for the ingredients of good narrative. From then on, the sorcerers turned in their staffs to the prop department, and necromancers were only permitted to the rear-entrance for certified frauds. Incidentally the evolution of the modern novel went in sync with the development of modern science. Both are products of the printing press and the ascend of a new and economically increasingly powerful middle-class.

Cervantes' period was a time of squalor, depravity and cruelty. It was customary to ridicule the mentally ill, and play practical jokes - the rougher the funnier. It is true the author created one of the great archetypes of world literature, but that has still to be seen in its proper context. "Don Quixote" definitely grew under the author's hand and turned into something Cervantes hadn't anticipated when he wrote the first chapter. The lack of plan in the first part is painfully obvious, we really could do without the inlaid novelettes from Cervantes' pot boiler. But in the end, Cervantes had managed the rarest of all feats: to create the book's own legend almost from the moment it was publicized.

By feigning his attack on the tomes and sequels of the "Amadis de Gaul" romance, an author, for the first time in history, had made an issue of narrative realism itself. Cervantes' novel is no longer a case of simply fleshing out some crack of proverbial wisdom. "Don Quixote" begins with a laugh and the still rather crude humor of the whole situation. It was a truly quixotic thing to do, but from that point on, morals in the narrative universe took a new turn and became increasingly a character issue. Fictional people began to have a life instead of a destiny and would die of natural causes. The simplistic conception of Sunday school and Hollywood, which calls to defend the universe against some sort of supernatural evil, returned to the domain where it belongs - the children's books.

When Don Quixote goes on his errant, his deranged mind refuses to recognize the world for what it is, but all the same cannot escape from the all too familiar humdrum. After every episode, Sancho squares the bills from the Don's purse; it is a slim purse. The first modern novel is the melancholic daydream of a man who knows that he has passed his prime. Well in sight of the final stretch, Cervantes had just found out that nothing really matters and he can see himself doing childish things again. However, unlike his modern reader, Cervantes was not a nihilist. He would rather live in a world where the old rules maintain a modicum of application. So he created Don Quixote, not exactly his alter ego, but an object of his empathy, someone who reacts to Cervantes' own predicament. In the end the Don simply dies a "good" death. He reclaims his sanity, but nothing is resolved.

Not every old translation is outmoded or "bad." Cervantes 'Don Quixote' had been "done" by Thomas Shelton (1612), P.A. Motteux (1743), Tobias Smollet (1763), John Ormsby (in the 1800s), Samuel Putnam, and lately Barton Raffel. But if the reader wishes to read a version that is still close enough to the smells (it stank!), the brutal gusto, the general outlook that takes cruelty for granted, then Motteux's translation is quite a good option. Of course it requires a reader who, instead of wallowing in romantic notions, actually is interested in what the author himself has to say; a reader who understands that despite portions of a more universal appeal, there speaks a distinct voice from the past and a witness to the paraphernalia of a very different world.

To "translate" this into a "modern" idiom, slick and slangy that would suit our Pavlovian TV-trained giggle-response to silly sound-bites, would be the next thing to publicly performed necrophilia. Not every modern translation is junk, but translating should not replace an author's carefully crafted style with the jargon of another period, even if this should strike the naive reader as catching. But then, this is Cervantes, an author who couldn't care less about the stylistic obsessions that possessed a Flaubert or Joyce. Yet it has at least to be the style of his period to get the right feel for the Don's adventures. And even Cervantes had moments when his dialog spread wings and soared.

* Borges in wonderland
"Collected Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges & Andrew Hurley (Translator)

"Every author creates his own pedigree" says Borges, and it would not be entirely unfair to say that Borges had spent the better part of his life in establishing this pedigree. I think, I have read every single line Borges ever had put to print. Some time in my mid-twenties I got hooked when I read for the first time a tale entitled "The Zahir" and I didn't let go ever after. To my mind especially this story gives the whole Borges in a nutshell. What are those objects which dispense such mysterious power to possess our imagination from the moment we catch sight of them? Isn't it actually just one object that reincarnates through the centuries in all kinds of shapes? Or could it be just a figment of paranoia in a mentally troubled mind with no actual referent in the real world?

Nabokov in one of his (many) grumpier moments complained about Borges' art as being

"all porch and no house behind."

Nabokov has a point. But let's be honest. Instead of churning out a so-so novel and make the reader waste days and weeks over it, it is so much snappier and more interesting to write a mouth-watering review on "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim." Yes, I confess, I searched the central catalog of the British Library for this book. No joy of course. Initially Borges' review had been a hoax, but it spurned a whole new kind of fiction. In a sense all of Borges' short stories are mere summaries of fictional events, and yet manage to say it all in fewer words. The trick is to leave a character's psychology utterly to the reader's intuition and be strictly matter of fact and without frills. Only recently it occurred to me how much Borges' craft actually owes to the old Norse storytellers, a fact Borges himself had never hidden.

The Norse sagas appear to be all surface. For instance, as an advance on his inheritance, a son steals a few implements from his father's cottage, moves away and starts an enterprise of his own, he succeeds beyond expectation, branches out, takes in an apprentice, promotes him as his steward, but disappoints the fellow, because he doesn't offer him full partnership. Tension develops, the steward decides to ... we get the idea. Borges initially looked to Kafka as his most important influence, after he had turned away from Carlyle, but then he discovered for himself the potential of the saga style and found ways to load the deceptively straightforward surface of his texts with a world of subterranean allusions and suggestion.

I guess Borges is the opposite extreme to Marcel Proust, and the difference between the two represents a fundamental polarity in the narrative universe. A polarity which had always been there, we can follow it back to the Norse sagas and their Japanese counterpart, Murasaki's "Prince Genji," or to Apuleius' ribald tale and the sometimes tantalizing glimpses on the rich and minute structure of omniscient realism suggested by the extant fragments of Petron's "Satyricon." It is not so much a difference in subtlety, but more of the narrator's temperament. You either seek completeness and offer life to be swallowed whole, or you prefer to be selective with your effects and to create a mirror cabinet of perspectives as the actual object of your narrative.

Both is a legitimate way of storytelling, the difference lays in the narrator's concept of truth, whether the accent is put on omniscient totality - the whole truth and nothing but the truth - and the artist's capacity to cope and let things permeate his temperament, or whether a more opaque, a more skeptical mentality is making choices and infuses the reader's imagination with alternative views and surprising specters in a slimmer but more suggestive texture. Storytelling of Tolstoian grandeur appeals to the reader's whole spectrum of sensuality, whereas Borges casts little spotlights on carefully chosen events and sensual moments. It is a bit like lovemaking - some people are quite happy just to rub the partner's skin and take it all in, hair, smell and heavy breathing; others need to get their fantasy going, for them, sex is primarily an event in their imagination, even during the act.

In this sense, James Joyce could never make up his mind which way he wanted to go, but apparently you can't have it both ways. And since it affects the artist's entire personality this is more than a matter of capriciously deciding how to tell the next tale. It is one of the crossroads in the life of an artist, and no possibility to retract your steps. Borges of course had not much of a choice. Talent can compensate only that much for impaired eyesight and eventual blindness. Degas in his old age had still a choice and turned to sculpture - but what else is left to do for a writer? Borges' handicap had as much to do with his artistic choices, as has his private discovery of the Icelandic Sagas. Every sensual moment is a precious memory in ways that could never occur to a Marcel Proust or Tolstoy. It raises the sensual glimpse to the height of a symbol. When we read Tolstoy we gorge our appetites, but Borges makes me dream.

* the lord of fantasy
"The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

Medieval illuminators liked to illustrate whole stories in every miniaturesque detail on barely more than a square inch of parchment. We see the bread loaf on the table, bricklayers work on unfinished walls which direct the view to a landing ship. Hunters chase game in a near forest. It is a view into a doll house; there is comfort and cosines and complete self-sufficiency of the mind. It is the mind of a child, a child with not enough supervision. It doesn't wash, terrorizes the streets in gangs, it is illiterate and hysterically credulous, it brutalizes animals and immolates witches; it is a street-wise thug, superstitious like a fox, ill fed, blaspheming and continually drunk, because only beer avoids the ever present diarrhea lurking in every well. Such surrounding calls for hell to be painted in strong colors. And trapped in a lifelong purgatory of ceremony and feudal obligation, the only escape seems prayer and paranoid speculation.

Dante's poem is not a ripping good yarn of conflict and conquest; just a travelogue from an alternative universe. Its philosophical baggage, the ponderous logic, is no longer quantum physics and taxes our patience. The structure appears to be over-engineered and artificial. Only gradually emerges how tightly knit everything falls into place. This is great poetry. A traveler lost in Dante's universe, finds himself in the realm of an absolute power. At its feet a gigantic concentration camp drills into the ground; the victims cannibalize each other and Satan himself is the 'Herr Commandant.' Penal colonies spiral upwards a mountain all the way up to the Lord's own top security compound, and the intellectual opposition lingers in exile: Inferno (Canto 4) is not such a bad place after all.

The visuals are intense and specific. Distant bystanders squint and frown at us when we pass; we address a man who can barely stop scratching his eczema, but is spurred to race along naked - images, a survivor may remember from Auschwitz. A demon (named Dr. Mengele, no doubt), performs life surgery on Mohammed, but forgot to anesthetize. The poem's topography wanders the warped mirror images of parallel but strictly segregated universes, from red-hot iron walls of a city of glowing mosques to the unfolding rose at the center of the empyreum. No other poem makes you hear the Sun's thundering silence; the scattered leaves of an entire universe bundle up in one flame, before everything peels off again in a cloud of starlings and cranes across the skies.

At the entry to Paradise, T.S. Eliot's vendor of criticism tries to sell us Dante's pageant as a "higher dream" of spiritual beauty. Must be me, but a three eyed woman is a troubling sight. So are wings polka-dotted with wide open eyes, or green and crimson skin pigmentations. And this is just the beginning. Subsequently, Dante's encounter with his immutable sweetheart turns into a real nightmare, and despite best efforts by the poet, the two never really warm up to each other. Of course, this is a carnival of allegories and we have learned to frown on allegory (but Kafka uses it anyway). However in the end it comes all together in a visualization of meticulous accuracy and sensual presence. Dante is still the undisputed Lord of Fantasy. (On a more mundane level, his poem is of course a clever way of writing libel against his political foes.)

A final observation: Poor Francesca who ended in hell for loving much, says: "if only the King of the Universe had been our friend ..." It echoes the Iliad, of which Dante himself had no first hand knowledge: "Gods make dangerous company." There is more in this vein and the 3rd part even opens with an invocation of the pagan god Apollo. Maybe at the time, it was merely a convention of learned poetry, but I wonder: why here of all places, at the entrance to Paradise? And what shall we think of this monumental idolatry, which Dante lavished on his fish-blooded sweetheart, (who in real life was neither the first nor the last girl who stuck to the money and married a banker instead of a poet?) The author seems to hold out on us. He revives conventions of bygone days, which had been condemned as heresies when this type of poetry was common fare at the "love-courts" in the Languedoc.

So, how can a reader with English as his only language get an authentic taste of Dante? I am sure, it could be done to produce an Englished Dante in terza rima of utmost clarity and a bearable minimum of padding, but it would take a bilingual and very talented translator and a publisher willing to subsidize a lifelong and single-minded effort. I don't see it happen. So for now, paradoxically, only an accurate prose translation, will preserve the essentials of Dante's poetic substance - his accurate visuals and the wealth of sub-textual counterpoints. A Miltonian barrage of "thee" and "thou" will not do. Durling's translation is very good, Singleton's still the staple, Hollander's rendition appears even to preserve many of the Italian rhyme words. They do not resonate in English, but their position at the closing of a line allows to see how their semantics toss on the ball to their companions. Pinsky is only for people who want to read Pinsky, not Dante.

* Davenport-Jeckyll versus Davenport-Hyde
"Auden" by Richard Davenport-Hines

Like all of us, a writer of imaginative literature interfaces with the world through his language. What sets him apart from the reader is his specific style, the medium through which an author communicates his temperament, and all art is experience filtered and transformed by a temperament. Which makes the writer's language the defining element of his experiences and insights. Therefore the "New Criticism's" approach to "the text alone and nothing but the text" (the way I had been educated) is a tat too narrow, because it leaves out an extra dimension to explain and understand a text. In its isolation it easily leads to unsubstantiated techno-babble, or worse, substitutes for the specific pattern of a text, the kind of meaningless generalizations and mythologizing cabala in the vein of Northrop Frye, which has turned academic criticism into a sort of intellectual masturbation for the initiate. Kafka is an example for this sort of thing: his international reputation coincided with the advent of existentialism and spiritual and religious revivals and this has become the reader's main angle on his work ever since. A closer look on his life could have nipped this nonsense in the bud.

True enough, it means more work, and we may hate the extra effort to specifically investigate the facts, but an author has a say in this equation, it won't do to ignore him altogether. However this opens a whole new can of worms. Every author is something like a conduit to specific concerns and experiences in his upbringing and to the culture of his learning, and to the circumstances which motivated him to become who he is. Concerns, experiences, and motives which a reader not necessarily shares. It is the good critics job to sort out which part of the writer's personal package is essential for properly understanding his product. Every author addresses a specific context, and he has his own reasons for going public. The part the author prefers to keep to himself, is of importance too, but it is here where the critic's discretion is called upon. It is alright to make explicit the artist's public persona, his act is part of the performance, but once the real person shuts the door into our faces and switches off the lights on the bedside table, an author has the right to privacy like the rest of us and should be left alone.

After such introduction, it should be clear why I detest Mr. Davenport-Hines biography of the leading poet of the 20th century. Of course a biography is not exactly meant to be criticism, but this is not just anybody's biography, it is the life of a writer and poet. In other words if the thing is supposed to be more than merely another journalistic heist on an unsuspecting person's privacy, the highlights and analytical elements have to concern Auden's qualities as a writer and the circumstances that made him the writer he became - which brings us full circle back to criticism. It is not quite the same as a monograph on a politician or Jack the Ripper. It is worth mentioning that Auden was homosexual, because it sheds light on the ambiguities in his expositions on the topic of love, but do we really need to know that he picked his nose in public and wore no undies in his pants? Leave the man alone, for crying out loud. What has this to do with anything Auden has written?

In a free society it is part of our liberties to make an ass of ourselves if and when we feel like it, but it is not (yet) enshrined in the constitution, that the first amendment includes the right to snoop in everybody's private affairs, though libel laws seem to be a bit soft in this country. Mr. Davenport-Hines, the biographer does have important things to say which not only give us a better understanding of Auden the person, but explain Auden the poet. But when this Mr. Davenport- Jeckyll turns into Mr. Davenport-Hyde then the journalist won't give it a rest till he has sniffed out every whiff and stain on the sheets from Auden's romps with underaged teens in Berlin. Is that supposed to be an explanation for Auden's literacy and erudition in German literature?

Auden certainly had a problem to accommodate his by and large Christian conscience with his sexual orientation. Apparently it didn't cause him too much trouble though. And given the legal situation which the aftermath of Oscar Wilde's trial had created in England, Auden was fortunate enough not only to avoid the attention of the law, but to have the helpful excuse to see the exercise of his nature as an act of defiance against an utterly stupid legislation. (Whether I as a parent would have felt comfortable to leave my teenage son to the care of this schoolmaster is a different issue. But for all we know it was always a matter of mutual consent.) But this makes Auden neither a hero nor a martyr and especially not a better talent.

And this talent was exceptional. In my poetry classes I could divide my students roughly in two groups: admirers of T.S. Eliot and such of Auden. In most cases, I found the imitators of Eliot coming across as rather unremarkable. Auden on the other hand always produces a following with at least a modicum of competence. Over the years I have become accustomed to read a poem more for skill than content. If someone absolutely thinks he must put into verse how to sodomize a dog, that's ok with me, but please do it with grace. Auden's poetry has power and grace and is extremely versatile in the prosodic department. One may not like his stuff, but it is always instructive. And nobody in the language has written better elegiac obituaries ever! As for his biographer: "Too much information, thank you very much!"

* Dr. Goebbels' favorite book
"Growth of the Soil" by Knut Hamsun (1859-1952)

Inger, Isak's wife, is a child murderess (it was an untimely girl); in heat with every handsome visitor; yet hard working and devoted to her husband. Not exactly your average idea of a church going redneck. People acquainted with peasants will recognize the type - debts and all - except for the truncated laconism Hamsun has thought necessary to impose on his characters. I am referring to the overall diction of the book. They may not talk a whole lot, but even Norwegians at the polar circle don't speak like taciturn biker types from an Icelandic Saga. "Aye," the ingredient makes the story look more real, than factual reality would. However, himself born to a farmer and without education, Hamsun's own powers of eloquence testify against this phoney rusticity. He was awarded the Nobel Price for it. Ironic, isn't it?

I knew peasants from many countries, and whatever may typify them - it is not a lack of eloquence. In fact Spanish intellectuals assured me that one must listen to the illiterate women in the villages to learn the purest Castilian. In England I met well-spoken peasants with academic degrees, who use to ride their tractor in bow tie, tweed jacket, and wellingtons. What all have in common is a preference for boys as heirs to the estate. That hasn't changed since Jacob had cheated Esau out of his birthright. And my travel's to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, China, confirmed the observation, that peasants, even when they have the means, care little for the interior of their homes.

So when Inger after her absence

"overdoes it a little, maybe, in cleanliness and order,"

it is meant to signal

"that she was going to have things differently now."

Aye, the penitentiary had Inger firmly set on the course to middle-class concerns.

"It was her ambition to see her kids get on in the world."

Soon Inger would be a woman of independent means, a dressmaker, if only she had time to spare; but a healthy dose of domestic violence is going to set her straight:

"Inger had been running off the line for a long time now; and one lift up from the floor had set her in her place again. To think that a man's hard grip could work such wonders!"

says the author with approval. Their oldest son is sent away to become an engineer, and even Isak, the clod, is on the course to entrepreneurship and his own sawmill.

Isak and his family are not exactly farmers - what he really is doing, is squatting on land he doesn't own. Ten dalers annually for ten years to make it legal is a bargain and commissioner Geissler is the Good Lord in disguise, and like all the gods a bit of a con-artist. As in every fairy-tale, miracles are happening: Inger literally had dropped in from nowhere, like Eve on Adam. Livestock comes with prodigious increase, again Inger functioning as the 'deus ex machina.' How did their cow get pregnant? Apparently only Goldenhorn's calving reminded the author that a bull is needed.

For hundred's of pages even the goats seem to multiply like amebas - then Hamsun suddenly remembers and writes the wonderful paragraph on stinky Billy:

"And was there ever anything so solemnly ridiculous to look at? Just now he had a whole lot of goats to look after, but at tirades he would get sick and tired of them all, and lie down, a bearded, thoughtful spectacle, a veritable Father Abraham. And then in a moment, up again and off after the flock. He always left a trail of sourish air behind him."

How Inger could conceal her ugly deed from her husband for months and months "with straw bundles under her shirt," leaves us wondering. Didn't they sleep together?

The cat fight between Olin and Inger had been rehearsed in biblical times: Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Leah. The author keeps focus and like the bible has only ironic concern for human tragedy. However the second part shows signs of writer's fatigue - the holdings proliferate, local politicians haggle over mining concessions, but Inger still is plucking the berries,

"a strong woman full of weakness; it is the glow of autumn in her as in all things else."

She is another Emma Bovary, and like her French sister finding the fear of the Lord in times of withdrawal. However Hamsun is now getting fed up with the blasted book and begins to put paragraphs under headlines - like in the papers. Things become repetitive: another infanticide. Out comes the soapbox.

"Tis Isak, the Margrave ... he rarely knew the day of the month - he had no bills to be met on due date; he knew what was needful. A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a man from the earliest days of cultivation to point the future (sic), eight hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day. Lonely folk, ugly to look at and overfull of growth, but a blessing for each other, for the beasts, and for the earth."

The book's accolades came unanimous. A fan of Hamsun from Germany, a certain Dr. Goebbels, had every German soldier carry a copy into the war. Every second rate author of the "Reich" felt obliged to imitate the book's laconic mannerisms. After 1945, these people hid under assumed names and wrote children's books.

So that is Hamsun's alternative world, a vision made to shine, but not really sincere. How do we know? Hamsun himself had run away from "this kind of life," crossed twice the ocean, and became a writer, not a farmer. Which is putting the lie to all this sweat and soil. And yet, what Hamsun might really have intended, was to write the second part to Virgil's "Georgics" - the perfect poet's perfect poem. How well did he do? Read in sequence Part II chapter 13 and Part III chapter 4 and 5 from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and then you tell me!

a take at Northrop Frye
"Boating for Beginners" by Jeanette Winterson

If you read the author's remarks on her own webpage (http://JeanetteWinterson.com/), then "Boating for Beginners" is supposed to be a potboiler, written for the money in the time of dearth before her "Oranges are not the only Fruit" finally saw the light of day. Should this be true, then Ms. Winterson is even a greater talent than I had given her credit for. The book is a riot and truly funny. Of course there are some purely British insider jokes, and the modern media receive a bit of a flak too. It is the wonderful world of glittering tears and hallelujah-burgers from Genesis all the way to the latest televangelists. Praise the Lord! (And it is true: you can get your orgasms in a supermarket.)

Ms. Winterson sparkles with angular twists and turns and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ideas and jabs, but to the reader's pleasant surprise, it all falls into place, and a real story among "real" people emerges - characters we recognize, even in this warped apparition from an alternative universe. Talent, fantasy and the language, if an author has this - and Ms. Winterson has it in abundance - then even potboilers turn out to be a delight to read; in fact it may even turn out better than more ambitious projects where an author can be a tat too conscious of what she or he is trying to do. (Yes, you guessed it, I am thinking of Ms. Winterson's "Gut Symmetries.") For the seeker of 'profound ideas': the book develops the premise: "What would happen if we took Northrop Frye seriously and used his method as a prescription of how to write narratives?" Need I say more?

Anyway: it is a pleasure to look into the workshop of a rare talent. If this book really had been produced in such a haste, as Ms. Winterson claims, than it is the most transparent example from her workshop so far - and I must say, the most appealing, despite her tremendous "Sexing the Cherry." If you like Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker," then you are in for a treat, because this here is way better, and a good starting point to explore Ms. Winterson's work. Thing is: the book is only sporadically available in the US. and Winterson's own US-publisher doesn't even mention its existence. Why? You tell me!

* could he already be walking among us?
"Roman Revolution" by Sir Ronald Syme

This product of intensive study and thorough research was also written with a view on the situation in 1939. Fascist dictatorships then seemed to hold a franchise on the future. Stalin's purges and the Spanish civil war appeared to reenact the drama which had seen its premiere at the end of the Roman republic, when a party-politician and republican General committed high treason and suspended the constitution. It opened unheard of opportunities and eventually swept the son of a small town banker to the highest office and absolute power.

I said swept, but Syme's monumental study shows that dumb luck and blind opportunity played only a small part in the ascend of one of the coldest, most ruthless, and most calculating minds who ever aspired political power. However considering the youth and inexperience of the young Augustus, and with a look at the staff of first class advisers that surrounded the young man from the very beginning, one wonders whether it was just Augustus' calculation or whether history witnessed to the execution of a master plan by the same man who had had adopted the young Augustus (gossip says, for sexual favors) and who had set him up with means and advisory brainpower. After Caesar's assassination the young fellow acted without hesitation, and succeeded against enormous odds. But the man who despite of his frail physique should become one of the longest ruling heads of state in history, had remarkably few lucky breaks. In 31 BC he again had reached a point where he completely lacked constitutional legality. In order to consolidate his position, Augustus became the first dictator in history to call for a nationwide plebiscite.

With due respect to Mommsen it must be said that Sir Ronald's study helps to straighten out Mommsen's rather curious adulations on Julius Caesar. Yet both historians based their views on the same premise: that democracy inevitably leads to dictatorship, if the conservative forces turn out to be too stubborn and retrograde in terms of social and economical progress, or if they create a situation in which such progress disenfranchises society's weakest without compensating for the inflicted pain. Strange as this may sound: Caesar, Augustus, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Peron, or chairman Mao, at some point, had all started their career as a spokesperson for the people against the pillars of conservatism. When I look at the present scene in America, I wonder whether this lesson is going to be lost again. Who might it be, who is going to hold the people's mandate without an election? I am afraid he is already walking among us.

Legally, as the people's tribune, a Roman emperor depended on his legislative veto-power. It was Augustus who first realized its importance. Of course the commander in chief of the armed forces could ask for whatever he fancied, yet Augustus had enough acumen not to depend on the loyalty of troops if he could help it. He was a Roman, and like the aqueducts his empire was built for posterity. When it suited them Roman emperors could even present themselves as the antique equivalent to the leader of a modern labor union: Domitian, "the most careful administrator of the empire" (Mommsen,) is known for his interventionist economics and he had an inventor of a new material executed because such innovation could have put people out of work. The senatorial gossip surrounding Nero has clouded the fact that his policies were immensely popular with the masses, even after his ignominious death. Ancient Rome had succumbed to military despotism, yet we should keep in mind that the same man who had done most to bring down republican liberty, had also left as his legacy the egalitarian rule of law, which remained to be surprisingly functional until Diocletian's reforms. Many emperors thought it good PR to show themselves below the law like everybody else, and public welfare enjoyed the benefit.

What impresses most in Sir Ronald's study, is the way this historian manages to unravel the entangled messiness of cross-purpose policies, blind chance, and calculated action. Syme avoids to create the picture of an ironclad necessity, which so often mars the perspective of historical writing, but it also becomes quite clear, that in the end timely and better informed decisions succeeded over poorer judgment. Augustus was in no way "destined" to come out victorious, but he did because his opponents missed their chances. Eventually this supreme pragmatist became not only the richest man of his era but also the most opulent benefactor who funneled back most of his billions into the community. Augustus is one of the enigmas of history: an absolutely ruthless politician, completely untrammeled by even the remotest sign of a conscience, and yet at the same time a genuine benefactor, fond of mingling with lower classes at the dog-races; a man who preferred to live, away from his palaces and villas, in a small, rented apartment. Go figure. Not your everyday friendly mobster from the neighborhood.

And this is the other great quality of Syme's study. He clearly advances on Mommsen's anachronistic imposition of latter-day party politics on Rome's political scene. With Sir Ronald we come much closer to the often purely dynastic competition in the Roman senate. However it would oversimplify the situation to dismiss this institution merely as a clearinghouse for perks and prestige without any conflict between principles and policies. The legislation of the Gracci had had introduced issues that really mattered and moved the urban masses to support populist dynasts, like Catilina and Caesar, against provincial upstarts on the conservative ticket, such as Cicero, and even made them vote for military junta chiefs of dubious legitimacy like Augustus himself. Sir Ronald's book, meant to be a warning to politicians of his own time, never compromises on scholarship and profound analysis. Historiography at its very best; an outstanding achievement.

* lucid and quaint
"The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

It is one of the few injustices in Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy," that he failed to appreciate Schopenhauer's thesis for his doctorate. But it is really one of the seminal documents that conclusively closes a debate which had begun with Descartes and included David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Schopenhauer was very much a no nonsense thinker who felt nothing but contempt for people like Hegel (his bête noir) or Fichte. He had an open mind for the sciences, yet came a bit too early for Gregor Mendel and Darwin. So Schopenhauer proposed his philosophy of a blind, but all-pervasive will behind the shifting spectre of never ending changes. In this sense Schopenhauer holds a middle ground like Tycho Brahe had held between Copernicus and Kepler. It is not science yet, but already departing from the realm of pure thought.

There are many ways to understand the meaning of philosophy, but I believe Bertrand Russell had put it best:

"Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside of our thought? If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge from pure thought to things, if not, not."

Schopenhauer's answer to this question is fourfold, i.e. his exposition of the "principle of sufficient reason," and it is as good an answer, as anybody possibly could give, who puts himself under the constrains of Berkeley's idealism. It is not only the epistemological core to Schopenhauer's own philosophy, it really takes the fundamentals through the paces and answers to David Hume's demolition of causality. In essence it says, that causality is a common bias in human and animal sensibility, which 'a priory' enables us to operate on our empirical sensations. It is the way how we structure the world, but not necessarily a feature of the empirical phenomena under scrutiny as Hume had already had observed. Then why does a sensibility based on the concept of causality operate so efficiently?

Schopenhauer is still a classical rationalist of the old school. Like his master, Immanuel Kant, instead of postulating a convenient set of inborn instincts or acquired intuitions, he prefers the premise, that there is a logical reason, a preconceived necessity, for the way we slot and pigeonhole perceptions and employ our operative ideas. So how does this work in the real world? In essence Schopenhauer takes "perception" not to be the product of sensation, but of understanding. In other words what our senses present to our cognition is transformed by the 4 linchpins of common sense: causation, plausibility, geometry, and psychological motivation. So there is a chain of mental events: sensation is converted by an act of recognition to perception. From this it is only one logical step further to Schopenhauer's first premise of his mature philosophy that the world is "my will and representation," because the "objective world" which we naively take to be given to our senses is in fact a transformation from raw data to perception. To illustrate this point just consider how the mind compensates for mild astigmatism: the afflicted still perceives a correct picture of the object. And this is a faculty animals obviously share with us. What makes man different is merely the scope and refinement of his percepts.

Schopenhauer is at his best in his exposition of causation. By shifting it from a relationship between things to a relationship between different states of things, he shows the fallacy in Hume's skepticism. It is not the sun as such that melts the snow but the heat absorbed which causes a change from crystalline to liquid - 2 stages of the same thing: water. This causal relationship between changes we judge to be necessary and not merely to be an incidental regularity. Our exposure to such regularities authorizes what Schopenhauer called a "hypothetical judgment" or in modern parlance a "counterfactual inference." But our absolute trust in such judgments comes from nowhere but from ourselves - it is a feature of our sensibility, because we actually apply it on every event we can imagine, and not just on actual experience. It makes us intuitively and a priory look for things to happen the way it is expected. (That's why modern science had such a hard time to get over the hump into quantum physics.)

Schopenhauer then continues to explain the age old philosophical adage, that no thing ever comes into being or ceases to be. We observe changes. Matter, which always has existed, undergoes certain transformations; it loses certain properties and acquires others, until, at a given point, it presents itself as a flower. Eventually the flower will perish but its matter doesn't simply disappear. It turns to compost, thus feeding the seeds of new plants and so on in infinity, in ever changing configurations of matter. In other words, notions of a "first cause" (and its theological implications) are dismissed as baloney.

"Causation,"

Schopenhauer notes,

"is not like a hired cab which one dismisses once it has arrived at its desired destination."

Modern science since Schopenhauer seems to be on a speeding train away from such quaint exposition of the works of common sense. We have entered the realm of counter-intuitive phenomena and the facts of modern physics require new logical tools. These days the more respectable section of modern philosophy occupies itself with symbolic logic and algorithms. The rest of us like to think that the world fits into our thoughts because we fit into the world, but it is a bit more complicated, and from a perspective of classical idealism, Schopenhauer's thesis presents in a style of great lucidity the final summation for the way the world corresponds to our perception.

a reprint is badly needed
"The Rushdie Affair: The Novel the Ayatollah and the West" by Daniel Pipes

It was January 1989. Muslims living in Bradford, England, decided to show their anger about "The Satanic Verses," Salman Rushdie's new novel because it includes passages supposed to make fun of the Prophet Muhammad. They purchased a copy of the novel, took it to a public square, attached it to a stake, and set it on fire. Scandalized British media and television news splashed pictures of this auto-da-fé across the screens and tabloids for days. It became a topic of discussion throughout the country.

The Muslim immigrants had mostly come from Pakistan. There, after a month's buildup, a mob of some 10,000 anti-Rushdie protesters took to the streets of the capital city of Islamabad. Marching to the American Cultural Center (a fact significant in itself), they employed all their energies, to set the fortified building on fire. But with no success. Six people died in the violence, many more were injured. Pakistan's university-campuses are still the breeding ground for Islamic conservatives and Islamic extremists. It's where the Taleban came from.

These events, in turn, caught the attention of Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader of Iran. On February 14, 1989, he called upon "all zealous Muslims quickly to execute" not just Salman Rushdie as the author of "The Satanic Verses" but "all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content." This led to emergency measures in England to protect Rushdie's person, and for weeks and months the world's politicians and intellectuals debated issues of freedom of speech and blasphemy.

Obviously this, our world, has a problem, and it is not, as politicians like us to think, a minority issue. These days there is a broad consensus - predominantly in the Islamic world, which is in the process of becoming an Islamic block, but also shared by the religious camps of the Christian Right, the Vatican, and certain political parties who seem to have forgotten that they owe their very existence to the separation of state and church and secular values - a consensus which steers towards a return to the Dark Ages.

By looking at the fruits of two millennia, it is hard to find something positive to say about religions in general and the three religions from the Middle East in particular. All of them seem to be on an insane race to get first to the darkest place in the Universe - the mind of a religious fanatic. The best that could be said about religion in general, is, that it is a symptom for mental and intellectual adolescence. Naturally it won't loosen its grip on the human mind just like that. But it is time for the human race to grow up, and stop gorging on the old placebos.

Personally I must say Salman Rushdie's novel didn't make much of an impression on me. I found absolutely nothing in the book that could have been even remotely offensive to anyone who is in the habit of reading fiction and has a sense of humor. But that exactly is the problem, isn't it? Laughter and Biblical or Koranic religion just don't pair very well. The lack of humor in both faiths is of extra galactic proportions. But as far as Rushdie is concerned he was merely a designated scapegoat, the fatwa's patsy, because he is a soft target.

And considering the height of learning and civilization already achieved under pagan laissez-faire, before the world "grew gray in the breath of the Galilean" and bloodshot in the eyes of the man from Mecca, I wonder whether the madness of the last 2,000 years really was merely a symptom for the pains of adolescence. Coming to think of the losses in culture, learning, and art - it seems more of an epidemic, a clinical case of mental regression; a point we already seemed to have had passed, before even paganism jumped on the bandwagon of a "new spirituality."

In the final analysis, it was probably initiated by the same doomsday club we see at work today, and for the same reason: anxiety of what future may have in store for us. Naked fear by the functionaries of organized religion and disintegrating state power, that the happiness of decent people who don't share this preoccupation with life after death and are quite content with living a better life before death, may erode the shamanistic awe before the hallowed uncertainty, and deprive it of the despotic leverage over their conscience. An incapacity to comprehend ethics beyond the pattern of divine sanction and retribution.

People who like to point out the historic achievements in Baghdad and Cordoba, when Islamic culture had kept the flame alive, while Europe huddled in wattle huts around the ruins of a past greatness, conveniently overlook, that this flame depended on the rediscovery of Hellenistic learning, science and art, which once had already been around and flourished before it was deliberately destroyed by Christian posses on the trail of "heresies" and pagans.

No question, the Islamic honeymoon was beautiful - but it also was brief. Then the same kind of forces as in the Christian world began to act on their (justified) suspicion that all this knowledge and all this science can only corrupt the mind of the faithful. The urge to live in the dark became overwhelming. Daniel Pipes provides a thorough exposition on the root causes of Islamic fundamentalism. He also provides a breakdown of Rushdie's work, and explains the difficulties for translators which may have added to misunderstandings about the book's actual content.

In the light of recent events, Daniel Pipes' book is a must read and urgently in need of a reprint. Even back in 1990, it didn't come out a moment too soon - yet nobody took heed: shortly after its publication, the Japanese translator of the "Satanic Verses" was murdered.

* travel, love, and charity
"A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick" by Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768)

"... When we had got to the door of the Remise, she withdrew her hand from across her forehead, and let me see the original - it was a face of about six and twenty - of a clear transparent brown, simply set off without rouge or powder--it was not critically handsome, but there was that in it, which, in the frame of mind I was in, attached me much more to it - it was interesting;"

(hear, hear)

"I fancied it wore the character of a widow'd look, and in that state of its declension, which had passed the two first paroxysms of sorrow, and was quietly beginning to reconcile itself to its loss - but a thousand other distresses might have traced the same lines;"

(take note you vain creatures of Elizabeth Arden!)

" ... and in this disposition ... , was I left alone with this lady with her hand in mine, and had held it so long, that it would have been indecent to have let it go, without first pressing it to my lips:"

(and now he talks himself into it:)

"This certainly, fair lady! said I, raising her hand up a little lightly as I began, must be one of Fortune's whimsical doings: to take two utter strangers by their hands - of different sexes, and perhaps from different corners of the globe, and in one moment place them together in such a cordial situation as Friendship herself could scarce have achieved for them had she projected it for a month -"

"And your reflection upon it, shews how much, Monsieur, she has embarrassed you by the adventure - When the situation is what we would wish, nothing is so ill-timed as to hint at the circumstances which make it so: you thank Fortune, continued she - you had reason - the heart knew it, and was satisfied; and who but an English philosopher would have sent notice of it to the brain to reverse the judgment? In saying this she disengaged her hand with a look which I thought a sufficient commentary upon the text."

"It is a miserable picture which I am going to give of the weakness of my heart, by owning that it suffered a pain, which worthier occasions could not have inflicted - I was mortified with the loss of her hand, and the manner in which I had lost it carried neither oil nor wine to the wound: I never felt the pain of a sheepish inferiority so miserable in my life. [but] the triumphs of a true feminine heart are short upon the discomfitures. In a very few seconds she laid her hand upon the cuff of my coat, in order to finish her reply; so some way or other, God knows how, I regained my situation.

"I forthwith began to model a different conversation for the lady, thinking from the spirit as well as moral of this, that I had been mistaken in her character; but upon turning her face towards me, the spirit which had animated the reply was fled - the muscles relaxed, and I beheld the same unprotected look of distress which had first won me to her interest - melancholy! to see such sprightliness the prey of sorrow - I pitied her from my soul; and though it may seem ridiculous enough to a torpid heart - I could have taken her into my arms, and cherished her, though it was in the open street, without blushing.

(you dirty old man -)

"The pulsations of the arteries along my fingers pressing across her's, told her what was passing within me: she looked down - a silence of some moments followed. "There wants nothing, said I, to make it so, but the comic use which the gallantry of a Frenchman would put it to - to make love the first moment, and an offer of his person the second.It is supposed so at least - and how it has come to pass, continued I, I know not: but they have certainly got the credit of understanding more of love, and making it better than any other nation upon earth; but for my own part, I think them arrant bunglers, and in truth the worst set of marksmen that ever tried Cupid's patience. - To think of making love by sentiments! I should as soon think of making a genteel suit of cloths out of remnants: - and to do it - pop - at first sight by declaration - is submitting the offer and themselves with it, to be sifted with all their pours and contres, by an unheated mind."

"The lady attended as if she expected I should go on. "Consider then, madam," continued I, laying my hand upon hers - "that grave people hate Love for the name's sake - that selfish people hate it for their own - hypocrites for heaven's - and that all of us, both old and young, being ten times worse frighten'd than hurt by the very report - what a want of knowledge in this branch of commerce a man betrays, who ever lets the word come out of his lips, till an hour or two at least after the time, that his silence upon it becomes tormenting. A course of small, quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm - nor so vague as to be misunderstood - with now and then a look of kindness, and little or nothing said upon it - leaves nature for your mistress, and she fashions it to her mind ..."

"Then I solemnly declare, said the lady, blushing - you have been making love to me all this while."

Here is a true writer! All he needs is two strangers of opposite sex and a locked door to which the key is missing, and the scene is ready. No special effects, no stage props, just the magic of the word and a fertile imagination. I don't know about you people, the man is something else. No wonder Sterne's "Tristram" is the crown jewel of English literature.

**)forbidding price, but it's worth it
"History of Rome" by Theodor Mommsen

First a word about Theodor Mommsen. He came to Roman history with a background at the bar and as an MP and legislator. His position in the house was that of a - how shall I put it - radical liberal nationalist, a rare color these days, where liberalism has become a term of abuse. He fiercely opposed the policies of Otto von Bismark, who just had defeated France and reunited Germany. So the perspective on constitutional law that underpins Mommsen's entire work, came naturally to him, the old Roman understanding of history as the "custom of nations" had found a kindred soul and a speaker of supreme eloquence. In 1902, Mommsen received the Nobel-prize for literature.

Being an outspoken opponent to centralization, bureaucracy and anti-Semitism, Mommsen had the misfortune in his "Roman History" to coin a phrase which later should cast a shadow on his reputation. He described the Jews in exile as "an element of national decomposition," and of course didn't anticipate that extremists would be able to pick up on this and send Jews to the death camps. He was spared to witness the damage. Mommsen's most important contribution to Roman history is the editing and publishing of the monumental "Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum." We lesser mortals are not likely to see this on our bookshelves at home, but for the archaeologist and historian it is an indispensable tool.

It is a complete survey of all the epigraphs and inscriptions unearthed anywhere in the Roman Empire and an ongoing project since 150 years and for as long as we continue to discover more inscriptions. Through it we know, for instance, that Pilate was not, as the gospels claim, a procurator, but a legate, and hence not accountable to the legate of Syria, which explains a good deal of the reckless atrocities during Pilate's tenure. From this collection we also gain statistical insights in the average distribution of epigraphs and, corresponding to it, the degree of literacy in different parts of the empire at different times.

Mommsen himself considered as his main contribution his studies on Roman constitutional law and his editions of Roman law codices. He also discovered, edited, and published the "queen of all inscriptions," Emperor Augustus' 'Res Gestae:' the 'Princep's' resume of his deeds and accomplishments. But what Mommsen made famous and earned him the Nobel-prize had originally been a mere pot boiler, produced with incredible speed. Then Mommsen stopped in the middle of the work, only to take it up many years later for a two volume appendix on the Empire's provinces. And yet this "Roman History" is the thing to have on your shelf, if you are interested in the subject.

I still can recall my awe when I turned the pages for the first time. Don't get me wrong, this is not exactly a thriller, more a series of political and legal deductions on historical facts with a view on shifts and amendments in the Roman constitution. The story hovers in the background and Mommsen explains the meaning. But what explanation it is! The first few pages introduce us to Italy's prehistory and deduce the paraphernalia of Indo-European migrations and early Roman society "simply" from the dictionary of the Latin language! It is mind-boggling suggestive. We hear of the early institutions, of King's counselors who eventually formed the Republic's senate, but under the Etruscian Kings merely had the "right" to say "yes." Not much of a right you may think and it did not include the right to say "no," but one can always keep silent. ("You disagree?" -- "Yes!!" Blimey.)

Then Mommsen moves on to the Punic wars and to the elder Cato's prosecution of a foreign cult on Italy's soil, which created a legal precedent that affected the prosecution of Christians some 200 years later. Mommsen discusses in great detail the introduction of the revolutionary office of the tribune and how the Gracci used the 'tribunicia potestas' to blunt the executive powers of the Senate and briefly managed to assume the position of an (elected) head of state who was not a consul. Their revolutionary legislation however was soon to be overturned in Sulla's conservative counter-revolution, which in turn mobilized the popular parties to bring a certain Caesar into power. But even in Mommsen's glowing eulogy, Caesar is little more than a gifted politician and general whose political ambition made him commit high treason and suspend the constitution.

Mommsen stopped here. Characteristically the end of the Republic and its democratic institutions was for him the end of history proper. Mommsen could never bring himself to write about the emperors. In his eyes this would have amounted to little more than a gossipy chronicle of court scandals; and for this we have Gibbon. Still, it would have been interesting. But

"it is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the homes of vine-dressers on the Moselle, in the flourishing townships of the Lycian mountains, and on the margins of the Syrian desert, that the work of the imperial period is to be sought and to be found."

At times opinionated and irate, Mommsen had a knack for outrageous statements and we catch glimpses of it in his later survey on the Roman provinces. He called Domitian, who according to Tacitus had been the best hated Emperor of his period, "the most careful administrator who ever graced the empire." Or read Mommsen's comment on Euripides and what he thinks about the poet's influence on Hellenistic humanitarianism. It makes you put down the book and pause for a moment: "Is he serious?" I could go on and drool endlessly, it would never do justice to Mommsen's work. If you can't shell out 600 bucks, then go to your library and borrow it through the interlibrary exchange, but make sure you have enough time at your hand, really to sink your teeth into it.

* from scraps of naughty readers
"The Satyricon" by Petronius & William Arrowsmith (Translator)

The Satyricon has reached us in a particularly bad shape. What we still have is the concoction of modern scholarship. The long lost archetype for such endeavor was already removed from the original script by many centuries; and who knows whether the author's own script had been free of errors. To produce a manuscript was slow and costly. Before the invention of the codex, scrolls could be a cumbersome affair of 90 ft. in length and up to 30 pounds of weight. Once a column had disappeared in the interior of such scroll, the author, even if he needed to refresh his memory, would be very reluctant to go through the trouble of unscrolling.

Worst of all, we look at a book that in all likelihood had never been disseminated very widely. Most copies seem to have been private notes, little bits and pieces from here and there. Since it is a frank and unashamedly lewd text, our copyists must have been a bunch of schoolboys, who copied out only the juicy bits for later uses in the dormitory. This has saddled the modern reader with a collection of snippets that under-represents the entire text by 90% and over-represents the sex in it by 100%. Of reportedly some 20 books, only portions of book 14, 15, and 16 have survived in loose snippets from all over Europe, but nobody has yet established an undisputed order for all the fragments.

For all we know, prior to the surviving part, the story starts at Marseilles. The first person narrator Encolpius, for unknown reasons, had fallen foul of the god Priapus and goes on a quest to regain his erection. He may had been exiled from the city (after a year's entertainment at public expense) or ran away from the plague, travels by sea to Italy and at some point is rescued from the gladiatorial arena in Rome. Freeloading and thieving, Encolpius moves down through Italy, until a Tarentine ship owner, Lichas, is attracted to him and picks him up. Encolpius however seduces Licha's wife and commits some terrible outrage on his benefactor in the porticoes of Hercules at Baiae, a famous pleasure resort in south Italy. He also steals the robe and rattle of the goddess Isis from Licha's ship.

About the same time, the famous courtesan Tryphaena becomes his mistress in a love triangle between him, her, and the handsome slave Giton. Grown jealous, Encolpius disgraces his mistress in public, and he and Giton gang up with another low life character, Ascyltus. The three are involved in the murder of a certain Lycurgus, rob his villa and saw up the proceeds in a ragged tunic. During a separation, perhaps while stealing an expensive cloak, Encolpius loses the garment with the stolen money inside. Mutual suspicions of dishonesty and jealousy over Giton shake up the trio, before it barges in into some secret Priapean rites conducted by the priestess Quartilla. Finally we find the three in Puteoli and associating as men of culture with a teacher of rhetoric, Agamemnon, who has a school there. It is here, when the surviving text opens in the middle of a discussion on the time's rhetorical education.

So, if the condition of the fragments is such a sorry affair, why bother at all? (For the lewd bits you certainly can substitute from your friendly XXX video store.) Well, to begin with, the author obviously had been a linguistic genius with an ear for common people's speech-patterns. For all we know, Petronius was a member of the inner circle surrounding the emperor Nero. Tacitus gossips over Nero's incognito forays into the streets and taverns of the capital, even after his coronation which occasionally got him in fist fights with his subjects who didn't recognize him. Sometimes this earned the teenage emperor a black eye and the subject trouble with the law. So Petronius, as his companion, had had ample opportunity for first hand observations on Rome's seedy side and indeed much of this material found its way into his novel.

But it is an unusually rich presentation, that straddles the entire scale from the vulgar to the mockingly sublime, interspersed with poems and sometimes deliberately bad poetry, and with an uncanny eye for trifles and little sensations. Just notice how the eye follows a drifting bird feather, sinking down to the sea and floating there in narrow circles before being sucked under by the whirling pool of the little waves that dimple the surface - most unusual for practically the entire literature of the period, before and long after. An incredibly rich tapestry unfolds, of local customs, idiosyncratic character traits, the smells and gusto of real people's life.

In 65 Ad. Petronius's alleged involvement in Piso's conspiracy, did force him to commit suicide. So in a last letter, he gave the Emperor a piece of his mind. According to Roman custom the public reading of a deceased's will was often used to settle old scores in a piece of unanswerable libel. Considering the enormous length of the novel, Petronius's death may very well have left unfinished this product of insomnia by a notorious night-owl. What had survived, has found in William Arrowsmith a very able translator - it is a hard act to do, and Arrowsmith gave us as good a rendition as can reasonably be expected.

* "a man's heart is a shameful thing"
"The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon" by Sei Shonagon (965/6-after 1000)

Can and should literature change our life? I really don't know. But I do know that some books convey a sense of magic and add a hidden grace to our life. And this might even become a question of life and death, if, say, war drives you out of your home and you roam the streets with all your belongings fitting into just one briefcase. Or if you are an astronaut, ready to launch for the inner moons of Jupiter, and the manifesto allows only one paperback per crew-member (hey use our CD library if you absolutely must read of all things). So, which book, my friend, would you take with you? My choice is pretty clear, certainly not the Bible, but it would be a tough call to decide between Montaigne's Essays and 'The Pillow-book' of Sei Shonagon. (Maybe it should rather be Virgil's "Georgics"?)

"Carpenters have such peculiar customs of eating their meals."

(in a soft spoken voice that conceals so perfectly a subtle intellect:) It was a time when burly raiders in double-horned helmets steered their longboats towards America, fought halitosis with generous amounts of raw onion, and drank nothing but beer from the sculls of their enemies (because of the diarrhea lurking in every well). Europe wallowed in filth and unchecked religious fanaticism had almost succeeded to blow out the lights and bury civilization under piles of manure around the Roman arches of fortress-like cathedrals. In the West mud-huts and storm-tossed wattle-fences ducked meekly behind infested moats, but Lady Shonagon had nothing better to do than to record that under-robes of red silk were especially impressive, or how she placed a bet on the out of season survival of an artificial snow-mountain.

"A lover that in the morning rushes about to collect his kit and mutters under his breath grabbing under the mat for his socks how I hate him."

(Oh, oh, he blew it!)

The delight I have received from Lady Shonagon's Pillow-book is beyond comparison. Her book is so much more than merely a code of etticete , and how to do things gracefully. It is her quick wit, the sensitivity for the most minute sensations in her surrounding - the monotonous creaking of a carriage axle, the swishing of a curtain in the dormitory - it is her thoroughly artistic temperament, her eye for paraphernalia, little gestures and the crease in your trousers. She takes note of the tick in someone's way of holding a book to the dim light. Her temper sometimes appears to have a short fuse and the sheer boredom of "spiritual" sessions at the annual retreat into a monastery was not her cup of tea.

"The most boring time of all is when it rains."

But then, the gentleman next door looks so cute when he chants his prayers.

Lady Shonagon's Japan was still a world apart from the super-hygienic land of Toyota and Toshiba and the fully computerized toilet seat next to the Tatami matted living room and the wide-screen telly. The Ladies and Gentlemen at the Heian court slept on rolled out straw mats, shivered through the winter and sweated through the summer, scratched the lice-bites, dressed in fumigated silk robes, and bathed once a year if at all. The ladies plucked their eyebrows and colored their teeth in black and would never show themselves naked, even not in their most intimate moments. But handwriting was expected to be neat, and a thunderclap shall hit you on the loo, if you ever forget to follow up on your latest tête-à-tête with a proper love letter (preferably hanging from a dew dripping twig of a plum-tree and to be delivered only minutes after departure - about 4.30 am).

The Courtiers seemed to have found little sleep in those days and rotated on a schedule through the roster of their mistresses. Perhaps once a year they even visited their own wives, but let's not turn family life into a boring habit. And if they did, they better made it snappy:

"I cannot bear a man staying to eat, when he comes to visit ladies in the palace."

My problem is, I don't speak or read Japanese. I depend on translations. I have translations into three languages of her book and a vague idea which might be the best of the lot. The most complete and almost unbearably pedestrian edition in English is translated by Ivan Morris. Sei Shonagon must be a very great writer indeed, still to come across the way she does despite her translator's attempt of literary murder. The annotations thrown in are good and scholarly, but I recommend to ignore them for a first reading.

Then there is Waley's translation. It testifies to the fact that an undoubtedly gifted translator can be incredibly insensitive to the artistic merits of his text. In the name of a dubious ideal of documentary correctness, Waley rearranged the order of the entries and restored their chronological order; he also destroyed all the natural charm and grace of the original. Boo! The best translation and the least complete of them all, is by the Japanese translator Mamoru Watanabé, and it is not into English. Lady Shonagon had a trait of irreverent sarcasm in her personality, it was not easy to impress her. She liked to be in control, and she knew that she was endowed with better brains than most of us. But listen to this:

"We arrive after nightfall in an unfamiliar place. For fear of being too conspicuous, one refrains from lighting a lamp but prefers to sit near the other people, even though they are hidden in the dark ..."

It is her temperament, her cultured sensitivity and grace that makes her book a treasure of world literature.

[A] [B] [C] [D] [E] [F] [G] [H] [I] [J] [K] [L] [M] [N] [O] [P] [Q] [R] [S] [T] [U] [V] [W] [X] [Y] [Z]

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