The Philosophers edited by Ted Honderich

Introducing Great Western Thinkers

I grabbed this book from the library hoping to give myself a quick introduction to these guys (and they’re all guys) so many people talk about. There are 28 philosophers covered in this volume, from Socrates to Sartre, and each gets a brief treatment in his own chapter.

Each chapter has a different author, so has a different style and a different focus. Most of them give a little bit about the personal background of the philosopher, a very brief description of his major works, and something about the types of arguments he tried to make. I was hoping to finish my reading with a feeling for what each of these great thinkers stood for, to be able to associate a name with a few iconic ideas or defining quotations.

Unfortunately, my experience didn’t quite go that way. After just one reading, I can’t remember most of the philosophical ideas put forward. I don’t remember who was most associated with logic or mathematics or linguistics or metaphysics or whatever. All that I am able to remember are things like these: Just about everything we know about Socrates comes from the writings of Plato, and it’s hard to tell in these writings where Socrates’s ideas end and Plato’s begin. Descartes concluded that he thought, therefore he was (I’m happy for him), and also invented graphing, which probably separates those of us who love math from those of you who hate it.  Marx is largely misunderstood (especially by Marxists). Kant almost never left his hometown. Bentham looked kind of like Ben Franklin. And Schopenhauer could have benefited from a twenty-first century cocktail of anti-depressants (or, as my husband declares, probably even just a cocktail).

I found myself most fascinated by Spinoza and Sartre, and not much interested in all the arguments about how to prove that we, or anything else in the universe, or in our imaginations, actually exists. I found it interesting to see how, historically, Western philosophy has included science, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, and other fields of knowledge and reason that are now their own branches of study (though I don’t mean to imply that science, psychology, etc. cannot have their own philosophy and philosophers.) These days, most of us probably would agree with the statement at the end of the chapter on Wittgenstein by Peter Hacker: “The goal of philosophy is not knowledge but understanding.”

While I wish I could have committed more to memory from a single reading of The Philosophers, the book has a nearly 15-page “Guide to Further Reading” at the end that seems to be quite valuable. As if I needed to expand my list of Books I Should Have Read by Now.

A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

Favorite Lines Friday

Here is a wonderful description of a view from the observation room on a ship leaving the earth from The Stars Like Dust by Isaac Asimov:

The Earth was suspended there below, a gigantic and gleaming orange-and-blue-and-white-patched balloon. The hemisphere showing was almost entirely sunlit; the continents between the clouds, a desert orange, with thin, scattered lines of green. The seas were blue, standing out sharply against the black of space where they met the horizon. And all around in the black, undusted sky were the stars.

Very nice. We’ve probably all seen a photo or video of this (I doubt anyone reading this has experienced this view from orbit), and Asimov gives a beautiful, detailed description. There’s just one thing: you see, The Stars Like Dust was published in 1950. Sputnik 1, the first anything to be launched into orbit, didn’t go up until 1957. Asimov was seeing this view in his mind’s eye. His very creative mind’s eye.

The Stars Like Dust by Isaac Asimov

My misspent reading youth must have been followed by a misspent young-adulthood. This is the only explanation I can think of for the fact that I’ve read so little Isaac Asimov. I can’t even remember what I knew of Asimov before I met my husband, a true Asimov enthusiast. Eventually, our merged libraries came to contain an overflowing box of Asimov’s work, mostly science fiction, but many, many mysteries and an astonishing array of nonfiction works as well.

Now that my adulthood isn’t so young, I thought I’d begin remedying my inexcusable lack of Asimov experience. (I did read the Foundation trilogy a while back, so I’m not a complete dunderhead!) The Stars Like Dust, a short but full novel, shuffled itself to the top of the “to be read” stack, so I started there.

The Stars Like Dust is the high-flying (as in way, way beyond the earth’s atmosphere) adventure of Biron Farrill, a young man about to graduate from an earth university. The story begins with him realizing that his life is in danger, and he spends the rest of the story running, hiding, hijacking, navigating in spherical co-ordinates (space is three-dimensional, after all), finding out who his real enemies are, and falling in love. He does all of this in the exotic setting of outer space and distant planets, but, since he was created by an author of sound scientific mind, he never seems to break the known laws of physics.

Characters are not who they seem to be. Whole planets, lost and found, are full of surprises. Farrill learns to navigate the political intrigue as well as the darkest nebulae and the deepest psychologies. The complex battle of wits is as exciting as the chase through space, and our hero is revealed to be a particularly good player. Of course, he is also a fairly realistic character, who cannot know absolutely everything about everyone, for “There are depths in feminine psychology, which, without experience, defy analysis.”

Asimov’s style manages to be to-the-point but never lacking in appropriate levels of detail or even humor. This makes the story skip along without any layovers or delays. Asimov’s sense of setting and perspective, however, make this story mind-bogglingly huge in scope. The universe is big and old and only those who have a firm grasp of that (as well as the politics of a humongous far-future empire) have any hope of finding what they are looking for in the void and dust of space or in time and history.

  

You might also like Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

 

A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

Thursday Thoughts

Hemingway as (dare I say) Role Model

I recently read this passage in an essay by Harry Golden titled “Are Writers Born?” (published in The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing, 1970, out of print, I think.)

Ernest Hemingway did something of a disservice to young writers when he had himself photographed with a bottle of gin and a fishing pole and when he talked of how he cheered at the bull fights and of the adventures he had in Spain, in Cuba, in France and in Africa. Hemingway was a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest of this century, and it would have been just as nice to have had as many photographs of him reading as fishing or hunting. For he did more reading than he did fishing; he did more reading than he did drinking. He read every day of his life in a soundproof room for at least three hours. Pictures of him reading would certainly have done young writers as much good as those pictures of him triumphant over a fallen water buffalo. Ernest Hemingway read everything of consequence as fast as it came off the presses.

My first thought was that perhaps my tendency to desire long periods of solitude in which I can concentrate as much as my distractible mind allows on a book or story or article will lead me to greatness. Then, I thought, perhaps it will lead me to suicidal alcoholism.

I’ll take the risk of revealing my shame by admitting that I’ve read almost no Hemingway. I was “assigned” along with the rest of my class to read “The Big Two-Hearted River” in high school, largely, I think, because it takes place in the same general part of the world* in which we were learning our three R’s. I didn’t really “get it” back then, and a glance at it now still leaves me far less interested or inspired than I would like to be. Still, I can’t help but admire (actually, sit blinking in amazement at) the way the story manages to be minimalist and intricately detailed at the same time.

The point of the above quotation is that Hemingway was smart, well-read, and intensely familiar with the craft of the written word, and those characteristics informed his writing at least as well as his grand adventures did. Who wouldn’t want such a writer as a role model? Assuming one can pick and choose which parts of that model to emulate.

If I am to copy Hemingway in any way it is going to have to be in trying to become a voracious reader, or at least as voracious as my slow and distracted reading abilities allow. Three hours a day? I’m not sure I can make that happen (as much as I would like to), but a big pile of reading material and as much quiet as I can get definitely suit me more than a trout stream or a bullfighting ring. Oh, and I really can’t stand to drink gin.


*Here is a short piece about Seney, MI as related to "The Big Two-Hearted River." Note: the article refers to Michigan's Upper Penninsula as the Northern Penninsula. I've never seen that anywhere else. Nobody who actually lives there calls it that.


Coming next: The Stars Like Dust by Isaac Asimov

Blue Angel by Francine Prose

After reading some good things about writing by Francine Prose (specifically her book Reading Like a Writer and an interview with her in The Writer magazine) I decided to see how she puts her great analysis to work by seeking out one of her novels to read. My local library had Blue Angel on the shelf, so Blue Angel it would be.

Blue Angel is the story of Ted Swenson, a novelist teaching writing at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. He demonstrates early on that he is a bit of a fish out of water, clearly uncomfortable in a tired and tiresome academic setting. The school’s newly-adopted hypersensitivity to political incorrectness and sexual harassment simply adds to Swenson’s irritation. And then (Spoiler Alert!) when one reads, “No, what really bothers him…is that he was too stupid or timid or scared to sleep with those students,” one suspects it will all go downhill from there, and it does.

This novel is almost a self-contained clinic on novel writing. If I hadn’t read Reading Like a Writer I may not have been able to see this and probably would not have cared to follow Swenson on his downward-spiraling journey. The narrative is brilliantly crafted with stereotypical characters that fill somewhat symbolic roles, yet manage to maintain their believability. Prose’s use of language is wonderfully descriptive, ironic, metaphorical and funny, sometimes all at once like in this description of the smoking section of a restaurant:

At the far end of the restaurant is a sort of greenhouse, its windows fogged with the cigar smoke produced by the happy crowd inside, each patron a polluter, a factory unto himself, while the nonsmokers outside can watch the brave cigar puffers slowly -proudly- snuffing themselves, their gradual public suicides like some gladiatorial entertainment.

I found myself enjoying this book even though I wasn’t enjoying Swenson’s self-destructive story. I was frustrated and irritated that Swenson was “that bored, that weird, that pathetic.” I didn’t want to see what stupid thing he was going to do next. I did, however, want to read what Francine Prose had written next, what language she was going to use to describe something I didn’t want to know. That aspect of this novel was its greatest reward and made it worth my time to read.


Coming soon: The Stars Like Dust by Isaac Asimov (A rather different experience than Blue Angel!)

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

When I read Dracula by Bram Stoker, I figured it was going to be really difficult for any other vampire story to measure up. Dracula set a very high standard, and as a novel it had everything it needed: a strong literary core, mystery, suspense, a perfectly evil, shadowy villain, and smart, tenacious protagonists. I didn’t need to read any other vampire stories, and was not interested in the newer trends in this micro-genre. (I just made up the term “micro-genre.” I hope you like it.) It’s hard to ignore the popularity of the “Sookie Stackhouse” novels by Charlaine Harris, however, so I thought I’d give Dead Until Dark, the first in this series, a try.

Well. Ahem. Perhaps it’s best to say I have “mixed feelings” about this novel. First of all (and best of all), I loved the first chapter. That first chapter is a complete, very good short story that almost entirely stands alone from the rest of the book. I’m not saying that it isn’t relevant to the rest of the book. In fact, it is essential and serves as a fine introduction. It’s just that with the exception of one detail that gets resolved late in the novel, Chapter 1 is a complete, and, I’ll say it again, very good short story. The rest of the book needs Chapter 1, but Chapter 1 doesn’t need the rest of the book.

The end of the book is also pretty good, with a lot of action, danger, and suspense. The greater part of the remainder of the novel, however, confirmed a suspicion about myself that I had not needed to articulate before: vampire erotica is not for me. I enjoyed the setup of Sookie as the point of view character, and her plucky and engaging style as a narrator (reminiscent of Stephanie Plum if you’re a Janet Evanovich fan). I just couldn’t follow her everywhere.

No, while there were some fun things in this novel, and the first chapter was great, you can have Vampire Bill. I think I’ll keep Dracula.


A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

Favorite Lines Friday

Here’s an amusing line spoken by Corwin of Amber in Sign of the Unicorn:

“To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys,” I said, “I wish I had known this some time ago.”



Coming next: Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny

The Amber Chronicles Book 3

I had read Nine Princes in Amber some time ago, but knowing that each subsequent novel in the Amber series by Roger Zelazny is heavily dependent on the events of the previous novel, I broke my rule of only reading books I Should Have Read by Now to read a book I had read before. It was to be a quick re-cap, an introduction to The Guns of Avalon, the second book, but as I got about halfway into that one, I realized I had read it before, too. Oh well. At least I knew for sure that I had never read Sign of the Unicorn, or any of the other Amber novels. (All of the Amber books are available in one volume, by the way, and that's how I've been reading them.)

Sign of the Unicorn picks up very soon after the conclusion (which is rather dramatic) of The Guns of Avalon. Corwin of Amber, the protagonist of these novels, probably sums up the situation best a few paragraphs into the story:

Me, back less than a week. Most things, still unresolved. The court of Amber, full of suspicion and unrest. This, now: a death to further jeopardize the brief, unhappy prereign of Corwin I: me.

Yes, Corwin is more or less in charge in his homeland of Amber now, but he has had quite a struggle against, among other things, a few-hundred-year bout of amnesia, long-term imprisonment, and some rather significant injuries. Okay, so they’re rather horrific injuries. As he implies in the quote above, there’s a lot more to do if he is to be king, and the greatest collective obstacle will be his ambitious, conniving, untrustworthy brothers and sisters.

Corwin’s not that great of a guy himself, but he’s still our hero, with his irreverence coming across as charming and amusing in Zelazny’s light, engaging story-telling style. Sign of the Unicorn was really fun to read (as were the first two books) with plenty of action, stories within stories told by other characters, and a few sort of dreamy sequences as Corwin navigates “Shadow” (everything we think of as the real world and every other possibility as well, all reflections of Amber) and as he goes to a place called Tir-na Nog’th (“reasonable behavior for any Amberite with a serious problem.”).

In Sign of the Unicorn, we get a bit of explanation and gain some more understanding of how serious and complex the conspiracies have been among Corwin’s siblings to take over the throne of Amber. They’re all so nasty, we really want Corwin to win. We’re left hanging at the end of this story, however, with Corwin and his friends lost and confused. But “All roads lead to Amber,” so there is some hope that our irreverent hero will survive to fight the conspiracies at least a while longer.


A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now