Apologizing in advance to the reader—appropriately, given the sketchiness of his ideas— Selye indulges in some philosophizing at the end. The individual must seek, he says, a balance between an overly stressful life that runs the body down and one marked by effort unexpended and dreams unfulfilled.
Even the index, of all things, bears the author’s stamp. It uses a notation system, of Selye’s design, that replaces words like “relationship between” and “effect on” with graphic symbols.
A curious book that made the name Selye synonymous with stress.
The Greek Way
to Western Civilization
____________
By Edith Hamilton.
First published in 1930
Ever get your Thucydides mixed up with your Pericles? Do Aeschylus and Agathon and Aristophanes run together in your mind like a blur? Then this is the book for you.
The Greek Way renders the ancient Greek mind accessible to the modern reader. It serves up a delectable appetizer of Greek civilization that leaves you begging for the rest of the meal. It is a work of popularization of the highest order.
Hamilton goes to almost any length to ignite in her readers Greece’s glory. For example: There she is, faced with the task of making the great Greek poet Pindar—“hard, severe, passionless, remote, with a kind of haughty indifference”—comprehensible. The peculiar quality of austere literalmindedness that marked his work translates poorly, into English, Hamilton tells us. “One might almost as well try to put a symphony into words as try to give any impression of Pindar’s odes by an English transcription.”
What to do? How to convey this “great sweep of song” so resistant to translation? For starters, she tell us about Pindar—his aristocratic breeding, the “exacting discipline of the gentleman” to which he conformed, his celebration of the heroic in sport. But—and here is her achievement—it is a modern English poet, not Pindar himself, whose lines she reads to evoke in us a sense of the Greek’s rhythms; rather than botch Pindar, she quotes from Kipling! “What Kipling’s poetry says “is not of especial consequence,” Hamilton explains. It is its “great movement [that] holds the attention. The lines stay in the mind as music, not thoughts, and that is even truer of Pindar’s poetry.”
Hamilton takes similar leaps with the great Greek tragedians. Aeschylus evokes the same sense of exalted pain as Shakespeare; so she quotes MacBeth as much as Agamemnon. Sophocles—that “quintessence of the Greek”— reminds her of Milton; she reads a passage from the blind poet and concludes: “It is hard to believe that Sophocles did not write that.”
The Greek Way sets out with firm and overriding purpose to impress on the modern mind the Greek achievement, and never wanders from it. Hamilton doesn’t worry about nit-picky buts and maybes, sacrifices scholarly nuance. Indeed, when the book came out in 1930, she took her critical lumps for bulldozing important distinctions in her rush to get across the message. New Statesman declared that her excesses of enthusiasm would “make the ordinary reader thankful that his son is on the science side at school. The style is that of the direct statement with 75 percent of the statements unsupported by documentation.”
Such carping, though, was buried in praise for what the book so ably achieved. Wrote one reviewer: “We do not know a book which we prefer to this, if we were asked to recommend an introduction to the peculiar quality of Greek thought which gives it value to ordinary people.”
What was that “peculiar quality?” Taking us on a whirlwind tour of other ancient civilizations—India, Rome, Egypt—Hamilton approaches it by contrast to what it was not. The Egyptians, for example, were preoccupied with death, while “Greece resisted and rejoiced and turned full-face to life.” The Egyptians built Pyramids and underground burial vaults; the Greeks played. “The Greeks were the first people in the world to play ...If we had no other knowledge of what the Greeks were like ...the fact that they were in love with play and played magnificently would be proof enough of how they lived and how they looked at life.”
Edith Hamilton, who died in 1963, was a world renowned classicist. She was born in Dresden, Germany. She grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind. She served as headmistress of a Baltimore girl’s school from 1896 to 1922. But her soul was always elsewhere, in the distant past, and far away. On her 90th birthday, King Paul of Greece made her an honorary citizens of Athens.
“Five-hundred years before Christ in a little town on the far western border of the settled and civilized world, a strange new power was at work.” So begins The Greek Way.
“Something had awakened in the minds and spirits of the men there which so influenced the world that the slow passage of long time, of century upon century and the shattering changes they brought, would be powerless to wear away that deep impress. Athens had entered upon her brief and magnificent flowering of genius.”
V
Not Brave New World,
Not Robinson Crusoe:
Lesser Known Classics
A Journal of the Plague Year — Daniel Defoe
The Doors of Perception — Alduous Huxley
Elective Affinities — John Wolfgang von Goethe
Homage to Catalonia — George Orwell
Civilization and Its Discontents — Sigmund Freud
Arrowsmith — Sinclair Lewis
Roughing It — Mark Twain
_________________________________
These days, winners and losers split ever further apart. Publishers abjure “midlist” books and concentrate on a few blockbusters. Books, movies, and rock bands must score big, or not at all; “modest success” verges on oxymoron. So today, when we hear Aldous Huxley, we think Brave New World. Sinclair Lewis? Main Street. Goethe? Faust. The selections here, however, remind us that these and other authors wrote more than the one or two books of their ouevre for which they’re most famous.
A Journal of the Plague Year
____________
By Daniel Defoe
First published in 1722
A leather purse lying in the street bulges with money. For an hour, it lies there, no one drawing near. Finally, one enterprising man scatters some gunpowder over the purse and ignites it, filling the air with heavy smoke. Then, with a pair of tongs, red hot at the tips, he holds the singed purse and shakes free, into a pail of water, the 13 shillings it contains. Such was the care one took, in the terrible year of 1665, to avoid infection by the plague.
At the height of it, 20,000 Londoners died in a week. Each night, carts carried off the corpses to pits into which they were flung. During the day, once-thronged streets went largely deserted, quiet except for the wailing cries of the dying and their families locked inside. The whole story is told in A Journal of the Plague Year by, the original title page has it, a Citizen who continued all the while in London.
The “citizen” tells of a group of women he finds ransacking an abandoned warehouse, “fitting themselves with hats as unconcerned and quiet as if they had been at a hatter’s shop.” He tells how a band of Londoners fled the city, squatting in abandoned houses or building rude lean-tos in the countryside, evading by one ruse or another local townsmen who wanted them gone.
He credits the city fathers with never allowing the dead to accumulate on the street. Of course, he adds, they had little trouble recruiting laborers to cart off the corpses, a dangerous and unsavory job, thanks to many impoverished by the economic desolation wrought by the plague.
From this presumably straightforward account, a surprisingly vivid picture of its author emerges. He feels compassion for the victims, gratitude that he is not among them, outrage at the frauds and quacks who peddle amulets and cures to the desperate and the unsuspecting. He is slow to condemn those fleeing the city and their responsibilities as physicians or clergy, quick to laud the mayor for insuring an uninterrupted flow of food to the poor. He is a scrupulously careful observer, often qualifying his report with “or so I heard it said” or “I did not see this for myself, but believe it true.” And while he fears God,
frequently invoking His name, he never succumbs to zealotry. God’s will is done well enough through nature’s customary workings, he assures us, that we need not invoke supernatural powers.
Of course whether any of this actually describes the man whom history records as the author of A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe, who also wrote Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, we do not know. Because Defoe was, in fact, five years old when the plague struck London. A Journal of the Plague Year is fiction.
Scholars tell us that Defoe’s library was stocked with books like Necessary Directions for the Preventions and Cure of the Plague and London’s Dreadful Visitation, both published in the plague’s immediate wake. And while growing up, he certainly heard about it from family, friends and neighbors. In any event, Defoe inspires supreme confidence, and his account is probably at least as true as any with a greater formal claim to historical accuracy.
(Though called a “journal,” Defoe’s is not a diary or daily account of the kind familiar to us today. Nor is the text divided into chapters. Nor is it broken up in any other way. Instead, the paragraphs arrive without let-up for almost 300 pages, leaving the modern reader, at least, groping for the work’s shape and structure. It is an instructive lesson in the virtues of breaking text into manageable morsels.)
One day, readers learn, the “bills,” or weekly death listings, abruptly drop by 2,000 over the previous week. “It is impossible to express the change that appeared in the very countenances of the people that Thursday morning when the weekly bill came out,” writes Defoe. “A secret surprise and smile of joy sat on everybody’s face. They shook one another by the hands in the streets, who would hardly go on the same side of the way with one another before. When the streets were not too broad they would open their windows and call from one house to another, and ask ... if they had heard the good news.”
Having endured, in these pages, the deaths of a hundred thousand Londoners, the reader can scarcely fail to share the elation and gratitude felt by the survivors.
The Doors of Perception
____________
By Aldous Huxley
First published in 1954
One May morning almost half a century ago, the English novelist, essayist, and critic Aldous Huxley swallowed four tenths of a gram of mescaline, the active ingredient in the hallucinogenic cactus, peyote, used ritually by certain Indian tribes.
Then, he sat down “to wait for the results.”
The Doors of Perception—the title is from a line by the poet William Blake—is an account of his experience. “Visions of many-colored geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation.” Which of these most moved the author? None. They never happened. They are what he expected would happen.
It was not his inner universe that Huxley found enriched by the drug but the everyday world around him. “The other world to which mescaline admitted me was not the world of visions,” he stresses. “It existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open.”
A small glass vase, for instance, contained three flowers which, under the influence of the drug, fairly popped out at him with primeval life. “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” It was Plato, who had confused original Being with the abstraction of Idea, laments Huxley. He “could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light.”
These intense perceptual experiences lead Huxley to embrace the notion advanced by the French philosopher Bergson, among others—and by no means at odds with scientific thinking today—that the brain functions as a filter, sieving out excessive and confusing sensory stimuli that would otherwise overwhelm the organism. Under mescaline, he suggests, this nervous system filter is lacking—letting the world rush in with unchecked force.
Just as it rushes, uncontrollably, into the consciousness of the schizophrenic: At one point, Huxley observed strong shadows cast across a garden chair. “That chair—shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but flowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire ... It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.”
“So you think you know where madness lies?” Asks the scientific investigator at whose suggestion Huxley had tried the drug. He replies, unhesitatingly, “Yes.”
Compared to the onrush of sensory color he encounters with mescaline, everyday reality seems grey indeed. Even as glimpsed by artists. Huxley opens a volume of Van Gogh reproductions of “The Chair.” (Would a Van Gogh original, one wonders, have been different?) Under the influence of the drug, it seems to him a flop. “Though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact.” The artist had failed to communicate the sheer reality of the chair.
Which leads Huxley to ruminations on Cezanne, Botticelli, Vermeer, the significance of drapery in painting, the ties between Zen and Chinese landscape art ...
Aldous Huxley experimented with mescaline ten years before the world had ever heard of LSD or Timothy Leary. He was, at the time, sixty years old, a distinguished man of letters. Indeed, his slim book became a minor classic which, during the subsequent decade, many chose to read as apologia for the drug revolution then raging.
But one need not accept the values of that revolution to read with unflagging interest what this immensely perceptive man, and first class writer, had to say about one afternoon’s experience.
Elective Affinities
____________
By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
First published in 1809
A middle-aged married man falls in love with a young girl. His wife is irresistibly drawn to her husband’s boyhood chum. Fireworks ensue.
The scene is a lush estate in the German countryside during the time of Napoleon. The man is Eduard, pampered and self-indulgent. His friend is known simply as The Captain. Eduard’s wife, Charlotte, is a woman of refined intelligence and uncommon good sense. The object of his infatuation is Ottilie, a quiet, ascetic child who attends the same boarding school as Charlotte’s daughter from a previous marriage. Ottilie is all silent mystery, giving what could be a soap opera of a story its haunting power.
As a title, Elective Affinities risks reinforcing the stereotype of Germanic abstraction and pedantry. Goethe himself admitted it was strange. The reference, made clear in an early chapter, is to how each chemical substance exhibits its own affinity for other substances, showing up as a greater or lesser tendency to combine or react with them. Thus, as one character explains, the two great classes of compounds known as the acids and alkalis, though ‘mutually antithetical, and perhaps precisely because they are so, most decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance.’
Lest it be lost that all this may refer to more than chemistry, Charlotte observes, in a foreshadowing of the rest of the story, that the combining substances “possess not so much an affinity of blood as an affinity of mind and soul. It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.”
This novel, almost two centuries old, smacks not at all of musty age; its freedom of content and form makes it seems thoroughly modern. Sometimes, in mid-paragraph, the past tense abruptly gives way to the present: “Eduard returns and learns what has happened, he rushes into the room, he throws himself down beside her, clasps her hand and bathes it with silent tears ...” The sense is that of stage directions, of critical intellect suspended, leaving only bare act
ion. At other times, an otherwise straightforward account yields to diary entries, letters, even to a brief story-within-a-story reminiscent of those of Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook.
Goethe’s world of the German gentry is vastly freer in matters of sex and marriage than anything we associate with the equivalent time in America, which corresponded to Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. Divorce was common, unsanctified liaisons not unknown; for 18 years, Goethe himself “lived together,” as we say today, with a younger woman and had five children by her, before marrying her at the age of 57. Then, two years later, he fell in love with an 18-year-old. The ensuing turmoil provided the material for Elective Affinities.
In it, the principal characters freely discuss serial marriage. Sexual tension runs at high fever throughout. And a partner-swapping scheme involving divorce and remarriage is the aim of most of the principal players.
In one respect, though, the novel reveals anything but modern sensibilities. Goethe confines his attention to the mansion on the hill and its aristocratic denizens, consigning the hundreds huddled in the town below to obscurity. Inn owners occasionally appear, and servants, and nameless physicians. And for comic relief so does the unforgettable Mittler, who serves as professional mediator, family therapist, and general busybody, quick to intrude at the first sign of domestic trouble. But all these function as so many worker ants, there to satisfy the everyday needs and passing fancies of the gentry. Meanwhile, Charlotte, Eduard and the others celebrate birthdays, indulge their passions, comment intelligently on matters of the heart and the mind, or debate the landscaping merits of one path up the mountain versus another.
Goethe, author of Faust and German literature’s surest claimant to the mantle of genius, is no spinner of light romances. Elective Affinities is a story of both lust and love, of passions silly and grand, of suffering self-indulgent and noble. But for all its echoes of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, it is not apt to be picked up, consumed greedily, and forgotten.
Vintage Reading Page 11