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LRB on Leibniz

Dispersed and Distracted

by Jonathan Rée
Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography by Maria Rosa Antognazza  Buy this book

When Queen Anne died in August 1714, the news was received with excitement in the medieval town of Hanover in Lower Saxony. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement of 1701, Anne’s death meant that Georg Ludwig, the stolid local duke, was about to become the next occupant of the English throne. A month later he was on his way to London with his German-speaking retinue, ready for his coronation in October and a new life as the first King George of Great Britain and Ireland.

But one of the most venerable members of his household had been left behind in Hanover, feeling rather sorry for himself. Geheimrat Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had joined the Hanoverian court under the last duke but one, and apart from occasional absences in Vienna and Berlin, had been supplying the family with legal and political advice for almost 40 years. On state occasions, he still liked to turn out in style; but he was now in his late sixties, and when he draped his arthritic frame in the sumptuous formal dress of an age long past, he was said to look more like a jester than a learned servant of the court. The rest of the time, he preferred to keep to his private quarters, cosseted in fur stockings, felt socks and fur-lined gown, and coiffed with a long dark wig. He would work day and night, surrounded by towers of books and manuscripts, taking meals on his own at irregular hours, and napping at his desk when he was tired. His masters might get exasperated with his serene self-absorption, but he continued to bring credit to the house through his reputation as a philosophical virtuoso, and they still valued his opinions and took pleasure in having him at their elbow as a personal ‘living dictionary’. He distinguished himself from other men of letters, moreover, by keeping himself clean and sweet-smelling and retaining a wistful sense of humour. ‘I have never,’ he reflected, ‘been so old as I am now.’

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Soon after his appointment as court counsellor in 1676 Leibniz had been asked to trace the pedigree of the Hanoverian clan through the house of Brunswick and back to the royal dynasty of Guelfs. But his archival investigations ran into a series of unlucky delays. In the first place, he had to apply himself to technical problems at the family’s silver mines in the Harz mountains, working on geological surveys and experimental designs for wind-powered lifts and water-pumps. In the end his efforts came to nothing – he blamed the intransigence of the miners – but seven years were lost to the project before he could return to his researches in family history. By that time his conception of the task had grown. He had persuaded himself that the Guelf line needed to be traced all the way back to the origins of the Holy Roman Empire, and that the story would be incomplete without two preliminary discourses, one on the history of the earth as a whole, the other on the origins of the nations of the world as evidenced by their languages. The more work he put in on his assignment, it seems, the more remained to be done.

Georg Ludwig eventually lost his patience. ‘Leibniz is nowhere to be found,’ he complained in 1703, ‘and if anyone wants to know why, he always claims to be working on his invisible book.’ The invisible book was more than thirty years overdue by the time the court decamped to London, but Leibniz excused himself on the grounds that he had recently completed three preparatory volumes, comprising medieval legal documents about the Guelfs and Lower Saxony, while making steady progress with his supplementary studies in geology and etymology. Indeed, he suggested that his newly crowned employer might wish to reward his diligence with a promotion: ‘the king would not misuse the honour and the salary,’ as he put it in a plaintive letter from Hanover, ‘if he were to appoint me to the post of Historiographer of Great Britain.’ George demurred: his elderly retainer should not at present entertain any thoughts of joining the British court, and had better not stir from Hanover till the Origines Guelficae was finished and printed and bound; afterwards, of course, he could ‘hope for everything’. In the event the king’s bluff was never called: Leibniz remained in Hanover, working on the family genealogy, till his lonely death two years later at the age of 70; and it turned out that when he laid down his pen for the last time, he had still only got as far as 1005.

Like many other deadline-dodgers, Leibniz was a stranger to anxiety and self-doubt. He had been accustomed to adulation for as long as he could remember: his father, a professor of moral philosophy at Leipzig, claimed to see in him signs of God’s especial grace, and even at his christening in the Lutheran Nikolaikirche he was commended for his exceptional spiritual powers. Afterwards he achieved renown as the child scholar who would browse for hours on end in his father’s library, while the teachers at his Latin school had difficulty curbing his ‘unseasonable and precipitate’ appetite for logic and secular history. When he enrolled in the philosophical faculty at Leipzig at the age of 14 he soon won the respect of his masters with his combination of verbal agility and perfect recollection of everything he read. He went on to excel in law as well, and then mathematics, and in his mid-twenties he was elected to the Royal Society in London after demonstrating an improved design for a calculating machine. He later became a corresponding member of the Académie Royale in Paris and first president of the Societät der Wissenschaften in Berlin, and when he obtained salaried work at the Hanoverian court at the age of 30, he took it for granted that he would continue to pursue his vocation as a universal intellectual and perpetual child prodigy, though by now the spread of his interests was beginning to seem exceedingly broad, even to him. ‘I often do not know where to begin,’ he admitted; ‘I am trying to find various things in the archives . . . I receive and answer a huge number of letters . . . I have so many new results in mathematics, so many philosophical plans, and so many other important literary investigations to pursue.’

Despite his scheduling problems, Leibniz managed to compose hundreds of scientific essays in his spare time. He preferred to keep them to himself, however, and on the rare occasions when he chose to offer something to the public, he withheld his name and omitted crucial details, while hinting that his results were only a few crumbs from his table – fragments of a universal science which, for the time being, the self-effacing author preferred to hold in reserve. In 1684, he published a tantalising account of a new mathematical technique – the infinitesimal calculus – in a Leipzig monthly review; ten years later he offered a suggestive ‘specimen’ of a new science of dynamics, based on conservation of ‘force’ (mv2) rather than ‘quantity of motion’ (mv); and afterwards he constructed a telling critique of the absolutist metaphysics of Isaac Newton, arguing that space and time had no reality of their own, but could be resolved into inherent properties of the objects that are said to occupy them. Newton took offence at these comments, and became incensed by the suggestion – probably correct, as it happens – that Leibniz had beaten him to the invention of the calculus: if the new king did not already have enough reasons for keeping Leibniz away from London, he might have done so in order to avoid a row with an irascible president of the Royal Society and master of the Mint.

As his life drew to an end, Leibniz began to fear that he had not left himself enough time to give a comprehensive account of his intellectual achievements, and asked his secretary to sort through his manuscripts after his death and prepare them for publication. But the archive turned out to comprise some 200,000 sheets of paper – nearly ten for every day of his life – so this last request proved stupendously unrealistic. An authorised version of the Origines Guelficae would eventually be printed in two magnificent folios in 1750, but the definitive Sämtliche Schriften did not start to appear till 1923, and only 50 volumes have been published so far out of a projected total of 120. Leibniz had indeed been interested in ‘too many things’, as he put it in a rare moment of pathos: ‘I cannot say,’ he wrote, ‘how extraordinarily dispersed and distracted I am.’

The life of such a chronic incompletist does not make a promising subject for biography. The novelist and raconteur Bernard de Fontenelle was the first to make the attempt, delivering a eulogy before the Académie Royale in 1717 to mark the first anniversary of Leibniz’s death. But he did not find it easy: his late colleague had gorged himself on books since infancy, and as Fontenelle put it, ‘he was what he read’ – hence his polymorphic productivity not only as a mathematician, philosopher and theologian, but also as poet and orator, diplomat and politician, inventor and engineer, geologist, archivist, historian, linguist and etymologist. But his reputation for brilliance was always shadowed by doubts about his probity. At the age of 20 he had set about insinuating himself into a secret alchemical society in Nuremberg, devoted to the quest for the philosopher’s stone. ‘He procured some books,’ Fontenelle wrote, ‘and picking out the darkest phrases, he sent off a letter that was altogether unintelligible, even to himself.’ The subterfuge was so successful that he was immediately admitted to the society and offered a salaried position as its secretary. We are not told if he took up the offer, but Fontenelle leaves us with a niggling suspicion that the art of constructing bogus arguments – ‘unintelligible, even to himself’ – came easily to the young Leibniz, and that it may later have become a settled habit.

On the other hand, Fontenelle found no evidence that Leibniz ever succumbed to greed or corruption, or even to compassion or the temptations of love. There was a credible rumour that when he reached his fifties his thoughts had turned towards marriage, but ‘the person he had in mind asked for time for reflection’, which gave him the chance to reconsider his options, the consequence being that he ‘never got married after all’. It was a life, it seems, without any unifying theme or development, either emotional or intellectual: a case, you might conclude, for lists and analytical catalogues rather than conventional discursive narratives.

But the enigma of Leibniz’s missing personality did not detract from his intellectual allure. In his lifetime, he published only one sustained work of philosophy: the Essais de Théodicée, which appeared anonymously in 1710. It was written, fashionably, in French, but despite its helpful numbered paragraphs and an affectation of ‘a rather informal manner’, it was criticised from the outset as wayward, prolix and extremely difficult to understand. Even the title proved a stumbling-block: Leibniz had coined the term ‘theodicy’ to convey a serene idea of divine justice, but one of his earliest readers missed the point and jumped to the conclusion that the essays were the work of an unknown author called Theodicaeus. Leibniz’s cover was soon blown, however, and in the coming decades the Theodicy was frequently reprinted over the name of the ‘Freiherr von Leibnitz’ (a dignity to which the author was not strictly entitled). Its fabled impenetrability, instead of alienating readers, won it a certain modish notoriety, and gave rise to what was then a novel literary derivative: the simplified introduction to an obscure contemporary philosopher, promising help and reassurance to the so-called ‘candid reader’.

The Theodicy was an elaborate attempt to justify the ways of God to man: having spent a lifetime practising the arts of spin on behalf of the Hanoverian court, you might say, Leibniz was now proposing to perform the same service in the cause of the Almighty. There were two grave challenges that needed to be faced down: first, if God is as benevolent and powerful as he is made out to be, how come we have to suffer so much injustice and grief? And second, how can we be expected to believe in an open future if God is omniscient, and therefore fully apprised of future events, including the actions we have yet to perform of our own free will?

Leibniz’s solution was based on the simple but wholly original notion that the world we inhabit is just one member of an infinite set of ‘possible worlds’. To imagine this world slightly different from what it is, Leibniz says, is in fact to imagine another world entirely. If I had chosen to stay at home today instead of going to the library, then we would all be living in a different ‘possible world’ – a world that contains not me, freely choosing a day in the library, but someone else, exactly like me except for deciding to spend the day at home. And if we accept that the actual world is the creation of a wise and benevolent God, then we have to recognise that it must contain the greatest achievable amount of goodness compatible with the smallest amount of evil, since otherwise God would not have chosen to actualise it in preference to other possible worlds. It follows both that we can be free in spite of divine foreknowledge, and that the world we actually inhabit must be ‘the best – the optimum – of all possible worlds’.

Leibniz invented the word ‘optimism’ to describe his theory of ‘the best of all possible worlds’, and the word has gone on to enjoy a remarkable international career. The doctrine itself, however, is extremely elusive, and – at least in Leibniz’s original conception – a fine example of the kind of philosophical difference that makes no difference at all. Leibniz’s optimism does not imply that evil is unreal, or that the world is better than we might otherwise think, or that it has any tendency to improve as time goes by; it merely suggests – as Leibniz made clear – that however rotten or unfair things are, and even if they are going from bad to worse, there is no point in wishing for anything better. Strictly speaking, Leibniz’s optimism is not so much a counsel of hope as a cry of despair – don’t blame the creator, he’s doing his best.

The Theodicy has the same sort of relation to mainstream philosophising as science fiction to mainstream science, and it is still hard to read it as anything but a deliberate exercise in metaphysical make-believe. Alexander Pope may have tried to take it seriously, but the vapid humanism of the Essay on Man, published in 1733, was a muddled travesty of Leibniz’s lofty and impassive stoicism. (‘Of Systems possible, if ’tis confest,/That Wisdom infinite must form the best . . . /Then in the scale of reas’ning life, ’tis plain,/There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man.’) Voltaire, in a pamphlet written in 1738, tried to defend the sainted Newton from Leibniz’s diabolical ingenuity, and promised to rely on ‘ratiocination alone’, scorning the vulgar weapon of ‘ridicule’. But he could not quite restrain himself, and in 1759 his hilarity blossomed into the perfect satire of Candide, ou l’optimisme.

The hero of Voltaire’s tale is an ingenuous lad who does his best to follow the teachings of Pangloss, a know-it-all Westphalian philosopher whose doctrine of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology supplies him with an optimistic ready answer to every possible question even before it is asked. Both Candide and Pangloss are obliged to leave Westphalia in a hurry, and we then follow their misadventures as they flee across Europe to South America and back, ending up in Constantinople, capital of infidelity. Candide has grown bored with philosophy by now, but Pangloss carries on chattering about Leibniz and the best of all possible worlds, till at last he meets his match in a celebrated Sufi sage – ‘the greatest philosopher in Turkey’ – who demonstrates that there is no point in discussing the reality of good and evil. For the first time in his life, Pangloss is perplexed: ‘But in that case,’ he asks, ‘what is to be done?’ ‘Te taire,’ says the dervish: ‘Just shut up and be quiet.’

Candide is not so much a philosophical commentary on Leibnizian theodicy as a lampoon at the expense of metaphysics as such, and it became the source of a complacent and sometimes philistine tradition that uses philosophical optimism as an example to prove the futility of the ‘conjectural method’ in general, if not of philosophical reflection as a whole. Leibniz’s name, like that of Einstein in the 20th century, had already become a byword for the kind of superhuman cleverness that leaves the rest of us not only open-mouthed in admiration, but also a little nervous, patting our purses to make sure we are not being swindled out of our hard-earned common sense. According to the standard 18th-century work on the history of philosophy, Leibniz was ‘one of those universal geniuses, who at once surprise and benefit the world’, but at the same time his ideas had to be judged ‘too hypothetical to afford entire satisfaction’. In 1821, Dugald Stewart gave a further twist to the tale by linking Leibniz with what he called ‘the continental philosophy’, suggesting that a habit of ‘deference to the authority of Leibniz’, combined with a short-sighted mistrust of honest John Locke, might be responsible for the ‘striking contrast between the characteristical features of the continental philosophy . . . and those of contemporary systems which have succeeded each other in our own island’.

By that time various posthumous collections of Leibniz’s logical, mathematical and philosophical papers had made their way into print, and readers who took the trouble to read the letters about space, time and Newton (first published in 1717), and the so-called Monadology (1721), together with the extended commentary on Locke (1766), were rewarded with much more than the famously inane optimism of the Theodicy. Leibniz came to be noted for, among other things, his ability to discover intellectual treasures in the most unpromising texts, especially the works of the much derided ‘pseudo-philosophers’ of the scholastic Middle Ages; and before long his own works were beginning to benefit from the same kind of creative and anachronistic rereading.

The notion of possible worlds may have originated in some theological delirium, but it has never ceased to suggest new interpretations of the logic of necessity and contingency (‘truth in all possible worlds’, ‘truth in none’ and ‘truth in some’). Moreover, it serves as a prelude to the even more exotic doctrine of ‘monads’, which states that everything that really exists belongs, in the last analysis, in a class of its own, or in other words, that two things cannot be distinct from each other unless they differ in some specific and describable way. This, as Leibniz was glad to acknowledge, was exactly what the scholastic theologians used to say about angels – that, lacking any physical body to individuate them, they must all be qualitatively distinct, or in other words that they are ‘monadic’ as opposed to ‘sporadic’. Once we have finished laughing at Leibniz’s daffy vision of the universe as a disembodied choir of angelic monads, we should remember that his descriptive account of identity has remained an inspiration to subsequent logicians, and was eventually taken up by Frege and Russell and turned into the basis of modern mathematical logic.

The afterlives of monadology and the theory of ‘possible worlds’ may seem specialised and abstruse, but the same cannot be said of the notion of ‘perspective’. Leibniz was the first thinker to pluck it from its original role in the theory of design in order to arrive at the general proposition that every object we encounter – a table or a city, for example – will present different aspects when viewed from different vantage points, and conversely that every act of knowledge or perception takes place within a particular projection or from a specific ‘point of view’. In the course of the 20th century this suggestion declined into a set of murky commonplaces about ‘relativism’, but Leibniz himself used it fastidiously and constructively, to open up the previously unexplored territory of what he called phaenomena bene fundata – the ‘well-established appearances’, confirmed from numerous points of view, that, he suggested, constitute a kind of borderland between the realm of fleeting subjective illusions, on the one hand, and that of immovable objective facts, on the other. Take rainbows: they are, as Leibniz pointed out, too substantial to be dismissed as mere appearances, but not substantial enough to count as enduring realities. They could perhaps be described as real appearances, or apparent realities, and Leibniz was convinced that the same applied to all the objects of everyday spatio-temporal experience: they were mirage-like manifestations of the non-spatio-temporal reality of the angelic monads. Few of his readers have been willing to follow him quite so far, but without his pioneering explorations of the realm of well-established appearances, Kant would never have developed his theory of the phenomenal world and the role of mental activity in it, nor Hegel his account of history as the process by which truth becomes a phenomenon, nor Marx his critique of fetishism and the delusive phenomenal forms of capital.

The trouble for the biographer is that practically all the interpretive possibilities that make Leibniz interesting were unavailable during his lifetime. Fontenelle hedged his bets by praising Leibniz for his range and energy rather than for any enduring intellectual achievements; and the prolific Encyclopedist Louis de Jaucourt, whose laudatory Life of 1734 was frequently reissued throughout the 18th century, deliberately continued the story after Leibniz’s death. The first modern biography, properly wary of anachronism, was published by Gottschalk Guhrauer in 1842, and, dull as it is, it has remained authoritative ever since.

Maria Rosa Antognazza’s heroic labours mean that Guhrauer can at last be sent back to the stacks: she has re-evaluated all the sources and constructed a lively and thoroughly documented story that is unlikely to be seriously challenged, even on matters of detail. She has also done her best to turn the facts of this life-that-was-not-one into a coherent narrative. As a schoolboy Leibniz immersed himself in various works on the reform of logic which he found in his father’s library, and when he was about 12, if Antognazza is right, he became captivated by the idea of an ‘alphabet’ whose characters would correspond not to the sounds of speech but to the ultimate structures of human thought. When he was 19 he carried the idea further in a university dissertation on the Ars combinatoria, suggesting that once the true elements of thought had been identified, there should be no difficulty in generating an infinite range of infallibly accurate judgments, simply through the mechanical manipulation of the symbols designating them. This youthful vision of a universal logical science, Antognazza argues, provided Leibniz with the all-embracing ‘project’ to which he would dedicate himself for the rest of his life.

Antognazza is not wrong: Leibniz did indeed keep dropping hints about his work on a ‘higher science’, and in 1675 boasted that ‘nothing can well be imagined which will contribute more to the perfection of the human mind,’ adding of course that ‘its nature cannot well be conveyed in few words’ and that the time for divulging its mysteries had not yet come. In 1688 he was writing memoranda to himself about the extraordinary utility of a ‘combinatory’ based on ‘the expression of thoughts through characters’, claiming that his techniques, once published, would lead not only to the immediate resolution of theoretical disputes of all kinds, but also to the reconciliation of the various branches of Christianity and the dawning of an age of perpetual peace.

This is my opinion: it will hardly be possible to end controversies and impose silence on the sects, unless we resolve complex arguments into simple calculations, and substitute well-defined symbols for terms with vague or uncertain meanings . . . . Once this has been done, however . . . disputes between philosophers will become as unnecessary as disputes between accountants. All we need do is . . . take up our pens, or sit down at our abacus, and say to one another, calculemus.

Let us calculate indeed: let us calculate the chances of two parties in fundamental disagreement concurring over the translation of disputed terms into ‘well-defined symbols’, and let us calculate, too, the supposed improbability that two accountants could ever disagree. Antognazza may be right in thinking that Leibniz’s calculemus is the secret thread that links his intellectual projects together, but it is hardly going to save him from the condescension of posterity.

Pink Skies!

A very unusual color of the skies and a very strange shape of the clouds mesmerized thousands of New Yorkers, who just like me gawked and photographed this "natural" wonder... The pictures have been taken by my phone camera, so the quality ain't that good, sorry :(

LRB on Israel

Fantasising Israel

by Yonatan Mendel

At this very moment, long queues are probably forming outside Tel Aviv’s latest culinary thing: the yoghurterias. Even in the middle of the night you have to wait in line to get a cold and refreshing ice-cream yoghurt from the busy shop on Rothschild Boulevard. Springing up like mushrooms after the rain, the ice-cream parlours have allowed the white city of Tel Aviv to experience the white revolution of the yoghurt. It is sweet and sour, made of natural ingredients, both healthy and tasty, with only 1.6 per cent fat, and topped with pieces of fresh fruit freshly cut up. Mangoes and pineapples, kiwis, strawberries, pomegranates, dates, melons and watermelons, red, yellow and green, are generously placed on top of the thick white yoghurt. A small cup of the local delicacy costs 18 shekels (about £3), a medium-size cup is 21 shekels, and a huge cup is 27 shekels. This is the best gastronomic response to the humidity that prevails in Israel’s first Hebrew city’.
The State of Tel Aviv, as other Israelis call it, is a lively, eventful and happy city. It is the centre of Israeli business activity, a relatively liberal, young, educated, secular and rich metropolis, with a long Mediterranean beach to escape to in the summer. It has a wide and diverse range of restaurants, cafés and pubs, more and more of them as demand grows. The city serves everything, from lobsters to falafel, from Weihenstephan to the local brew, Goldstar. According to the Economist, Tel Aviv is ranked 32nd in the list of the world’s most costly cities; it is the most expensive city in the Middle East. It is the home of Israeli opera, the philharmonic orchestra, the national theatre, and Israel’s largest university. Every year it hosts the biggest gay pride parade in the Middle East, as well as some of the world’s most prominent musicians and artists. Depeche Mode just came back from Tel Aviv; Madonna is on her way. However, it seems that it is exactly these positive, normal and likeable characteristics of Tel Aviv that make it a paradigm of the moral and political blindness of Israeli society. Tel Aviv is not only one hour away from a European time zone, it is also one hour’s drive from the Gaza Strip.
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This year the city is celebrating its 100th anniversary. However, it didn’t just emerge from the sand in 1909, as the Zionist myth tells us. Al-Sumayil, Salame, Sheikh Munis, Abu Kabir, Al-Manshiyeh: these are the names of some of the villages that made room for it and the names are still used today – Tel Avivians still talk about the Abu Kabir neighbourhood, they still meet on Salame Street. Tel Aviv University Faculty Club used to be the house of the sheikh of Sheikh Munis. It’s an amazing feat, a tribute to the Israeli imagination, to be able to pronounce the Arab names without making the connection to the original Arab population, to think of Tel Aviv as the first Hebrew city’, and refuse to acknowledge its indigenous non-Hebrew inhabitants. This is a city where people speak French and English, but where hardly anyone speaks Arabic, one of the two official languages of Israel. There is no liberal rhetoric when Tel Avivians need to rent their house to an Arab student or become the neighbours of an Arab family. Tel Aviv, the most liberal and tolerant city in Israel, as its residents like to imagine it, is not only 100 years old, but almost 100 per cent Arab-free.
Then there is Jaffa. Located just a few miles south of Tel Aviv, it was probably the most prosperous and cosmopolitan of all Palestinian cities, with a port, an industry (Jaffa oranges), an international school system and a lively cultural life. In 1949, after Jaffa had been almost completely emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants (only 3600 were left out of a population of 70,000), the Israeli government decided to unite the two cities in one metropolis, to be called Tel Aviv-Jaffa. In doing this, Ben-Gurion not only created a new Tel Aviv that was part of biblical Jaffa, he erased the Palestinian city. As the years passed, it became known that the city of Tel Aviv, which is called Tel Aviv-Jaffa only in official publications, had a beautiful and romantic southern district called Jaffa. Tourist signs on the streets describe its history – in Hebrew, English, French, German and Spanish, but not in Arabic.
I was brought up in a small Jerusalemite quarter called Givat Oranim, which borders the neighbourhood of Old Katamon. In school we weren’t told about the history of Katamon, but we were taken a few times to St Simon’s Park. Beyond the park’s cypress and pine trees there was a small memorial to the Israeli soldiers who died in the 1948 Katamon battle: a battle, we dimly learned, between Haganah fighters and Arab rioters. On the way back we used to see the old Arab houses, now repopulated by Jewish families, but this didn’t trouble us, since the whole neighbourhood was Jewish and, as far as we were concerned, Arabs, let alone Palestinians, had nothing to do with the place.
Besides the licence to fantasise that we received from our teachers – to speak about the Katamon Arab rioters and never the Katamon Arab people – I now believe that the whole landscape of the neighbourhood was recruited to encourage our imagination. The street names, for example, all have to do with the 1948 war. The Street of the Convoys, the Water Distributors, the Women’s Corps, the Guard Corps, the Conquerors of Katamon: these were the meeting points of my childhood. The place had no past prior to 1948, and the people who had lived there had no names. Nobody thought to tell the new kids on the block the story of the people of Katamon, and none of them had any reason to ask.
It was 20 years before I finally toured Katamon, with two foreign friends, using a very old guidebook. Since there is no indication of what used to be there we consulted the pictures in our guidebook as we walked around the old Arab houses. It didn’t take long to find the former Iraqi Embassy, the Greek Consulate, the Czechoslovakian Embassy, the Lebanese Embassy and the Syrian Consulate, all of them now regular residential houses, showing no trace of their past. I also found the house of Khalil al-Sakakini, perhaps the most important Palestinian intellectual of his time, about whom I learned nothing in school. A sign next to the door reveals that it is now a day-care centre run by the Women’s International Zionist Organisation (Canada).
Katamon, I discovered, was once a wealthy, mostly Christian Palestinian neighbourhood with two hotels in its centre: the Semiramis and the Park Lane. I had never heard of them, or heard that in January 1948 Haganah gunmen planted a bomb at the Semiramis, killing 26 people, including the Spanish vice-consul. This was one of the main factors which caused the flight of the Palestinian residents. Today, in the place where the Semiramis used to be, there’s a new house. It is a normal house. Absence can help Jerusalemites fantasise, sometimes even more than presence.
An average Jewish Israeli can live an entire life without personally knowing, let alone befriending, a single Palestinian citizen of the same country. In kindergarten, primary school, middle school and high school, the two education systems are entirely separate: Jewish Israelis study with Jewish Israelis, Palestinian citizens of Israel study with Palestinian citizens of Israel. As teenagers we learned about the great projects of Aliya (Jewish immigration to Israel) and Kibbutz Galuyot (the ingathering of the Diasporas’). We learned about the establishment of the state, and I particularly liked the lesson dedicated to Israel as a society of immigrants’. The Palestinians, I never realised then, had not immigrated to Israel from anywhere. But this didn’t stop us from dreaming. For some Israeli sociologists, the army is the country’s melting pot’, but Palestinian citizens by and large are not inside the pot. They don’t want to fight their Palestinian brothers and sisters, and Israel doesn’t trust most of them to do so. So the melting pot is made up of Jews only. One can argue that this encourages us to dream about a Jewish land for a Jewish people. It also helps us to forget that the Palestinians are part of Israeli society and citizens of the same state.
Tel Aviv University showed the power of its imagination when, in May 2008, the student council decided to hold the fun and enjoyable annual Day of the Student on the exact day that Palestinians commemorate the Naqba. The excuse given by the student council was that we were not told of the problematic timing of the celebrations. This is arguably even more dangerous than saying that it was done on purpose: it makes it plain that for the Jews in the country, even the educated and liberal citizens of Tel Aviv, the Palestinian people are invisible. The bill that would make it illegal for Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel to commemorate the Naqba was initially approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation in May this year. I don’t know if the bill will become law, but the Naqba undoubtedly took place; it is not a day of celebration for many people. A recognition of the Naqba, taking responsibility for the fate of the 700,000 Palestinians who escaped or were expelled in 1947-48, a willingness to try and compensate these refugees, now numbering several million: these gestures, even if symbolic, even if too late, would mean the beginning of the end of Israeli denial. But soon, the bill suggests, anyone who dares to express their feelings on this day will be imprisoned, in the only democracy in the Middle East.
The claim to be the only democracy’, as well as to have the most moral army in the world’: these phrases are great examples of the Israeli fantasising project. Another term that belongs in the twilight-zone, and helps Jewish society to maintain a liberal veneer over a very un-liberal attitude, is coexistence (Du-Kiyum). It is applied to those cultural or sporting occasions when Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel actually meet. In other words, it is used when two very different forms of existence come together. Strikingly, when a school contains the children of Jewish Israelis and new Jewish immigrants from countries as diverse as Russia and Argentina, the term coexistence is never used. The common existence of a Tel Avivian Jew and an Argentinian Jew is apparently obvious. However, when the Tel Avivian student meets a Palestinian colleague from across-the-street Jaffa, it comes under the heading of coexistence. This liberal terminology acts like a sleeping pill for a society that wishes to dream about being liberal and democratic. Maybe it is time for someone to wake it up.
Good morning Israel! It is very late, and you have overslept. One can’t call a country peaceful when it has an extreme right-wing government and Ariel Sharon’s party in opposition. One can’t – not logically – describe any criticism of Zionism as anti-semitism and at the same time concede that 75 per cent of Israeli Jews wouldn’t want to live in the same building as an Arab. One can’t teach high-school students about the dangers of racism and discrimination, and the next day lecture them about the Israeli government project to Judaise the Galilee. One can’t describe ending the military occupation and handing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to its rightful legal inhabitants as a painful Israeli compromise.
A villa in the jungle is how Ehud Barak described Israel’s position in the Middle East. It’s a fantasy that the whole of Israel takes part in. In the heart of Tel Aviv one can find the Ha-Kirya complex, the headquarters of the Israel Defence Forces. The fact that Tel Avivians can calmly walk past this building without making a connection between their army and the occupied Palestinian territories, between their independence and the continued Palestinian suffering, is alarming. Israeli decadence isn’t measured in crime rates or corruption, but in their opposite: in having a prospering society and democratic elections while directly abrogating the Palestinians most basic human, national and political rights.
The way of fantasising another Israel peaceful and moral, Jewish and democratic, not perfect but not harmful has brought into being a virtual reality in which historical and contemporary events are blurred by wishful, deceitful and blinkered thinking. In order to recruit Israeli Jewish society to this mission, no induction orders were needed. Everything has come together Israel's political and religious institutions, its media, its friends’around the world, its borders, its terminology, its collective memory, its imagination and also its ice-cream parlours to enable Israel to reach the stage where it has completely lost any connection with reality.

From the LRB letters page: [ 9 July 2009 ] Moshé Machover.

Yonatan Mendel is completing a PhD on Israeli security and the Arabic language, at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in Cambridge.

Other articles by this contributor:
Diary · How to Become an Israeli Journalist
Diary · Yonatan Mendel at the Herzliya Conference
Imagined Territories · Designing the Occupation

Listening to: Lifehouse

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An Australian band with a very melodic alternative rock. I hear REM, the Crowded House, and many many others - nothing original, but quite catchy...

Мда...

Maurane chante Nougaro

« Nougaro ou l'Espérance en l'homme ». C'est en pensant à cette chanson parmi les moins connues peut-être que Maurane a trouvé le titre du nouvel album qu'elle vient d'enregistrer et qui sortira, chez Polydor, le 24 août. Son contenu: 15 titres. Du Maurane? Pas vraiment, mais du Nougaro réinterprété, pardon caressé par sa groupie à la voix de velours. On regrettera peut-être cette interprétation du « Coq et la pendule », un peu trop mélancolique ici alors que Claude en avait fait une chanson bien pétillante, mais tout le reste est un très bel hommage à celui qui pourtant avait quelque peu remballé la chanteuse belge lorsque, à peine débutante, elle allait le rencontrer pour la première, fois. « Quand je me suis intéressée à son art, nous confiait-elle un jour, j'ai tout fait pour rencontrer Claude Nougaro. Je lui ai d'abord adressé des petits dessins que je faisais et qui étaient nuls au possible!. Et lorsque je lui montrais mes textes, il trouvait que c'était « du tarabiscotage complaisant! ». Et de poursuivre: « Il m'a cassée plus d'une fois, mais il m'a vachement motivée! Et j'ai tenu bon. Jusqu'au jour où il est venu me voir chanter dans un petit café-théâtre parisien, le Tire-Bouchon... Ce jour-là, il m'a proposé d'intervenir au milieu de ses spectacles et de chanter quelques chansons. Et ce fut le début de notre amitié ». Et ce lien, désormais indestructible, Maurane aujourd'hui l'entretient si fort qu'elle a décidé de le graver en ces 15 chansons « triées sur le volet avec le soutien d'Hélène Nougaro », et comme si Claude était encore là, « derrière mon dos »: Armstrong, La danse, Rimes, Dansez sur moi, le Jazz et la java, Tu verras (en duo avec Calogero), Toulouse, Bidonville, Il faut tourner la page, Le coq et la pendule, Gratte-moi la tête (Claude adorait qu'Hélène lui « gratte la tête », ndlr), La pluie fait des claquettes, Allée des brouillards, Il y avait une ville, L'espérance en l'homme. Enregistré avec la complicité d'Alain Cluzeau sur des arrangements (big band, flamenco-jazz) de David Lewis (Paris Combo), Louis Winsberg (Sixun), Fred Pallem (Le Sacre du Tympan) et Dominique Cravic (Les Primitifs du Futur), un bel hommage.

Listening to: Pauline Jean

Biography



Jazz vocalist Pauline Jean is a native New Yorker of Haitian descent. In 2007 Pauline graduated cum laude from the Berklee College of Music and received her BM degree in Vocal Performance. After graduating from Berklee, Pauline returned to New York and immediately became actively involved in the music community. With a new and fresh approach to a classic art form, Pauline’s repertoire includes original compositions, unique arrangements of the standards and traditional Afro-Haitian music fused with jazz. Her musical renditions are performed both in English and in her parents’ native tongue kreyòl. Pauline’s velvet husky contralto instantly draws comparisons to legendary vocalists such as Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone and Phyllis Hyman.

Pauline’s extraordinary performances have led her to share the stage with a variety of music luminaries such as Nina Simone’s percussionist Leopoldo Fleming, Randy Weston, Dave Valentin, Ted Curson, Frank Foster, Terri Lyne Carrington, Luis Perdomo, Miriam Sullivan and Emeline Michel.

Pauline has been featured in many venues such as: Scullers Jazz Club, St. Peter’s Church, Metropolitan Room, Kitano, Chelsea Art Museum, Zinc Bar, Cachaca, SOB’s, Sage Theater, Enzo’s Jazz Room, Berklee Performance Center, as well as the 2nd Annual Women in Jazz Festival, JVC Jazz Festival-New York, Haitian Jazz Festival and St. Kitts-Nevis SAS Jazz Reggae Vibes Festival. She continues to perform locally and internationally.

Pauline’s self-produced debut CD A Musical Offering will be released in June 2009. The recording is earthy yet stirring and best described as swingin’, bluesy, soulful and world. Musicians on this project include: Sharp Radway (piano), Corcoran Holt (bass), Alvin Atkinson, Jr. (drums), McClenty Hunter (drums), Markus Schwartz (perc.), Marcelo Woloski (perc.), Jean Caze (trumpet) and Thaddeus Hogarth (harmonica).

For more info. about Pauline, visit her website at www.paulinejean.com.

Home: New York, NY

Press Quotes


“…Pauline Jean, one of the most talented vocalists in the field.” JVC Jazz Festival 2007, New York

“Shimmery, sensuous Pauline Jean pays tribute to the jazz/soul icon, Nina Simone. --it was clear from the outset that she would lovingly present both Simone's music and her oft-declared-in-song emotional response to being a woman and being black. “ Cabaret Scenes Magazine


“She commanded the audience’s attention…with a voice and stage presence made for jazz, Pauline indeed is a force to look out for.” HaitianBeatz.com

New Film of Raoul Ruiz

Depuis trente ans, Raoul Ruiz poursuit une carrière dont le moins quel’on puisse dire est qu’elle est prolifique (plus de cent courts et longs métrages à ce jour). Indifférent aux modes, excentrique, parfois exhibé en majesté dans les grands festivals internationaux, parfois distribué très discrètement dans les circuits d’art et essai, son cinéma est une machine célibataire qui creuse le même sillon avec une souveraineté inébranlable.
La Maison Nucingen n’entretient qu’un rapport lointain avec le livre de Balzac qui porte ce titre. La trame évoque plutôt celle d’un roman gothique anglais, modèle d’un cinéma fantastique auquel Ruiz a voulu visiblement rendre hommage. Un homme, dont la femme est atteinte d’un mal mystérieux, gagne au jeu une maison au Chili. Il s’y rend et y rencontre les habitants, des personnages étranges d’origine autrichienne, aux comportements parfois illogiques, aux impulsions inattendues, aux humeurs changeantes, aux affections bizarres. Le fantôme d’une jeune femme morte récemment, notamment, semble hanter les lieux et s’imposer progressivement au couple de nouveaux propriétaires, incarnés par Jean-Marc Barr et Elsa Zylberstein.
Dès leur arrivée, la maison est désignée par la femme de chambre qui accueille les deux personnages principaux comme un lieu exclusivement francophone. C’est que le langage constitue ici, discrètement, le premier facteur déstabilisant pour un spectateur confronté à un usage inattendu de certaines locutions, à un déplacement microscopique du sens, à une suite de répétitions, à un inachèvement récurrent de certaines phrases.
A cette première sensation de déséquilibre par la parole vont s’ajouter diverses apparitions spectrales et la certitude que la mélancolie dont souffre la femme du héros va se repaître de ces visions surnaturelles, si elle ne les déclenche pas.
Humour omniprésent, très élégamment cadré, se nourrissant de références picturales précises (les préraphaélites), dont il saisit admirablement bien l’essence, le film de Raoul Ruiz se rattacherait bien sûr, à nouveau, à cette tradition surréaliste que l’on accole régulièrement, et parfois un peu paresseusement, à son art. Mais le surréalisme de Ruiz devient, avec ce film,un surréalisme qui remonterait aux sources mêmes de son inspiration, à un irrationnel littéraire dont il parvient, avec un humour omniprésent, non seulement à exploiter la substance, mais également à le déranger et à l’inquiéter lui-même, inquiéter l’inquiétant en quelque sorte.

Bill Maher on AMA

Bill Maher on AMA... BRAVO! Spot On!

Listening to: Eric Hutchinson

TLS on Greeks and money

Money makes the (Greek) world go round

What the ancient Greek anxiety about money has to tell us about our own economic predicaments
by Richard Seaford
What makes the ancient Greeks worth studying is that they are sufficiently like us to be comprehensible but sufficiently unlike us to be worth making the effort to understand. It may be a common theme among enthusiastic modern supporters of the Classics that the Greeks and Romans were very much like us (and that they therefore legitimate the present). Most academics, on the other hand, prefer to emphasize how different and simultaneously how similar they were. The culture of – say – pharaonic Egypt is, despite its fascination, beyond the grasp of all but a few specialists, whereas ancient Greece and Rome are both inside and outside our ken.
Let me explore just one example. A crucial factor in this pattern of “similarity and difference”, and one with tremendous resonance in the early twenty-first century, is money. As I argued some years ago in Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004), the pivotal position of the Greeks in world culture stems largely from the fact that the sixth-century polis was the first society in history (with the conceivable exception of China) to be pervaded by money. Coinage was invented towards the end of the seventh century BC, and spread rapidly in the Greek city-states from the beginning of the sixth. Did not the Babylonians, for instance, use silver as money well before that? On any sensibly narrow definition of money, no they did not.

This new and revolutionary phenomenon of money itself underpinned and stimulated two great inventions in the Greek polis of the sixth century, “philosophy” and tragedy. “Philosophy” (or rather idea of the cosmos as an impersonal system) was first produced in the very first monetized society, early sixth-century Ionia, and – even more specifically – in its commercial centre Miletos. The tendency of pre-modern society to project social power onto cosmology (for example, “king Zeus rules the world”) applies to the new social power of money. And the following description applies equally to money and to much of the cosmology of the early philosophers: universal power resides not in a person but in an impersonal, all-underlying, semi-abstract substance.

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But the relationship of money and tragedy is no less striking. Tragedy was created shortly after the introduction into Athens of coinage. This – though it has no place in the voluminous literature on the subject – seems to me one of the most important facts about tragedy. Greek myth is, of course, largely pre-monetary, but in tragedy it is shaped by the new all-pervasive power of money. It is not only the obsession with money of some tragic tyrants (Oedipus, for example) that I have in mind. An entirely new feature of money is that its possession renders unnecessary in principle all pre-monetary forms of social relationship: reciprocity, redistribution, kinship, ritual, and so on. Money allows you to fulfil all your needs. It provides the power to increase itself. And it tends to promote predatory isolation. Hence the focus of much Athenian tragedy on the extreme isolation of the individual – from the gods and even (through killing) from his closest kin. I know of no precedent for this in literature, certainly not in the pre-monetary society depicted in Homer. This horrifying possibility is embodied in the figure of the tyrant (turannos), who in historiographic, philosophical and tragic texts characteristically kills his own kin, violates the sacred, and is much concerned with money as a means of power. The word “hero”, the preoccupation of so much critical literature on the subject, barely occurs in Athenian tragedy, but turannos (or some form of that word) occurs over 170 times.

Money is so desirable and powerful that some people will do anything for it. Moreover, there is no limit to its accumulation or to the desire to accumulate it. All this is familiar to us, but it was new to the Greeks, who can therefore help us to look afresh at the singularity of money. The unlimitedness of money is described disapprovingly by the sixth-century BC sage Solon and later by Aristotle, and it is brought to life in Aristophanes’ Wealth. This wonderful comedy is (almost certainly) the earliest surviving text on economics, a subject that thereafter has become less entertaining. It describes the homogenizing effect of money (everything happens for its sake) and its omnipotence; and a rapid dialogue reveals that – whereas one can have enough sex, or loaves, or music, or dessert, or honour, cakes, or manliness and so on – money is different: if someone obtains thirteen talents (a lot of money), he is eager for sixteen, and if he obtains sixteen he swears that life is unbearable unless he obtains forty. What, we may add, would have been the point in Homeric society of accumulating a million of those prestige items that embody wealth, such as tripods? Money is different. It isolates the individual, and is unlimited.

But it is not only in tragedy that myth was influenced by money. The most obvious instance of a myth about the (disastrous) unlimited homogenizing power of money is Midas transforming everything by his touch into gold. Consider also the myth of Erysichthon, a full version of which can be put together from a few sources (notably Callimachus and Ovid). Erysichthon cuts down a sacred grove to make himself a banqueting hall and is punished by being made insatiable. No food is enough – whether from land, sea, or air – to satisfy him. He is driven to sell his daughter in marriage, from which she returns to him, and the process is constantly repeated. In the end he eats himself. This myth contains a unique combination of unusual features: the transformation of nature into product, selling to obtain food, and eating the self. The constant return of the daughter from marriage excludes progeny (the future). The Greeks had a myth for many of our central concerns, and here is one for global warming: exploitation of nature produces pathological insatiability, the unlimited need for a source of income that sacrifices the future, and self-destruction.

The Greeks had money but not capitalism, in which constant innovation is a precondition for survival, and in which accordingly – as Marx and Engels famously put it – “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”, producing an age of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation”. Here constant intense desire for novelty means that new fashions and ideas “become antiquated before they can ossify into custom”. Even this we now simply take as part of nature. In Graeco-Roman antiquity, by contrast, investment, and techniques of production and marketing remained crude and relatively static, and a poetic genre, for instance epic, could remain fundamentally the same for a thousand years.

And yet, after two-and-a-half millennia, money remains isolating, unlimited and homogenizing. The Greeks were struck and sometimes horrified by this. Aristotle maintained that using money to make money is – in contrast to other forms of economic activity – unlimited and unnatural. And so he would be equipped to understand the novelty contained in the following typical observation, from a recent textbook of economics. “International financial flows hold out the promise of liberating a country’s rate of investment from the limitation imposed by its savings.”

This liberation is just one element in a universal deregulation or “unlimitedness” that has in the last generation changed the world. This has involved the destruction of limits of all kinds: limits on the movement of capital (once controlled by nation-states); limits articulating cultural space, with the result that a Holiday Inn in Minneapolis is now exactly the same as a Holiday Inn in Mombasa (money homogenizes); limits on the salaries-cum-bonuses that the money-controllers pay themselves; limits on the gap between rich and poor (an unlimitedness that makes common purpose impossible). It has also destroyed the limitation of speculative price by any internal relation to its financial or artistic product (investing in junk bonds is essentially the same as investing in junk art, and done by some of the same people).

Aristotle might also recognize the concomitant deregulation of the subject, the liberation of signs from the limits imposed by reality. The myth of Midas marked the replacement of money as a means of exchange by money as the primary but strangely unreal object of aspiration. Aristotle cites the myth to illustrate the nonsensicality of money, the arbitrariness of the monetary sign; and so he would be equipped to understand the claim that money has now been joined (or even replaced) in the unlimited realm of hyper-reality by the images purveyed by media and advertising.

Greeks of the classical period were anxious about the potentially unlimited scope and power of money, and this anxiety contributed to their explicit privileging of limit over the unlimited, especially but not only in metaphysics and ethics. For instance Plato in the Philebus states that limit should control the unlimited, and that the introduction of limit brings safety in countless spheres, notably in health and music. Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that “bad is of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans surmised, and good is of the limited”. This persists into the Pythagorean and Platonist philosophies that remained popular throughout antiquity.

But these Greek ideas are not confined to philosophical texts. If I was forced to characterize the outcome of Aeschylus' Oresteia in a single abstract formula, I would call it the victory of limit over the unlimited, in various respects that include the limitation of the potentially unlimited cycle of revenge and of the potentially unlimited accumulation of wealth. Among the ancient Greeks there is what I call a culture of limit. By contrast, our culture is characterized by hostility to closure (limit) in various spheres: economic, metaphysical, conceptual, narrative and others.

This opposition is related to an opposition in basic forms of life. For the Greeks, the realm of freedom (economic and ethical) was stable self-sufficiency; and this determined the manner in which they (or at least those whose voices have survived) reacted to the unlimitedness of money. But we react to it in a manner determined by the fact that for us the realm of freedom is constant exchange. “Metaphysical categories”, wrote Adorno, “are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about it and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences”. The same is true of the modern theoretical hostility to metaphysics, the postmodern fetishization of fragmentation, depthlessness, and indeterminacy, and its sublimation of the universe of free-floating images.

The postmodern devotion to abolishing “Western” (that is Greek) metaphysics would be illuminated by considering the economic conditions of its genesis. Just as our politico-economic discourse assumes the maximization of earning and expenditure (even of borrowing) by groups and individuals alike, so our theoretical discourse is hostile to all forms of closure. But to turn again to global warming, which our own culture of the unlimited makes it so difficult for us to confront. The myth of Erysichthon lacked a central element of our own contemporary predicament, that is our knowledge that our actions will cause our self-destruction. For this we look to tragedy, Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes. During the siege of Thebes, the chorus implore King Eteokles not to go out to fight his own brother. But he is compelled to do so by his father Oedipus' curse, which doomed the brothers to divide up their inheritance with the sword. He rejects the possibility that he can be saved by ritual or helped by the gods, and rushes out for the mutual fratricide. As he does so, he claims that the curse is telling him to put kerdos (selfish gain) first, death afterwards (kerdos proteron husterou morou).

This implies that kerdos, in this case the inheritance, is worth dying for. Kerdos has replaced honour as the one thing more powerful even than the desire for life. Here is the typical tragic individual, completely alienated from the gods and from his closest kin. A mysterious and terrifying power of pre-monetary myth, the curse, has been adapted to express a new mysterious and terrifying power, the unlimited isolating passion for individual gain, more powerful even than the instinct for self-preservation. With global warming the unlimitedness and conscious self-destructiveness of money reaches a logical conclusion. We are still, now as a species, under the curse of Oedipus.

What did the Greeks have with which to combat this horror? The original ending of the play is, it seems, lost, but its last extant authentic words indicate – in contrast to Eteokles' rejection of ritual – the founding of a ritual for the whole polis. The polis had communal ritual to save it from unlimited individual greed, but we do not. Such (fragmented) rituals as we do have tend, like ancient Greek ritual, to sustain existing myths and patterns of belief. But they may also, in contrast to their ancient function, serve the agenda of the unlimited. Our contexts of powerful decision-making tend to be ritualized – by reassuring familiarity of dress, seating arrangements, syntax, tone of voice, body language and so on. And ritualization tends to foster the unconscious formation of “group-think”. How can politicians continue to assume the desirability of unlimited economic growth that is patently inconsistent with preventing global warming? One small but unremarked factor is the power of ritualization, now and in the past, to efface inconsistency of belief. A meeting on economic policy or to plan the expansion of aviation is ritualized, and ritualization generates and confirms its appropriate beliefs and decisions. On the Titanic as we are, we should be ridiculing not the rearrangement of the deckchairs but the formal dress and reassuring protocols of the captain’s table.

In the final year of the First World War, the Presidential address to the Classical Association was given by Gilbert Murray, then Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford. He was, unsurprisingly, gloomy. The “horizon looks dark” for classical studies, he said. And he ended with an attack on “the enemy”, he “who has forgotten that there is such a thing as truth, and measures the world by advertisement or by money . . . whose innermost religion is the worship of the Lie in his Soul . . . . From him and his influence we find our escape by means of the Grammata into that calm world [of the Greeks], where stridency and clamour are forgotten in the ancient stillness”.

Some thirty-five years later, after the Second World War, Murray gave a radio broadcast in which that view of Ancient Greece as a refuge from the present had been transformed into Ancient Greece as inspiration for the future. “The old Hellenistic world had three great aspirations”, he observed. “It aimed at a hellenizing or humanizing of the brutal world; it longed and strove for Homonoia, Concord, between community and community, between man and man; lastly, it proclaimed a conception of the world as One Great City . . . .” And he urged support for what he called “the same aspirations . . . at work in the modern world”, especially through the work of the United Nations. American readers may be pleasantly surprised to learn that, despite his pessimism about Europe, “there is waiting across the Atlantic a greater Rome which may at the best establish a true world peace, and will at worst maintain in an ocean of Barbarism a large and enduring island of true Hellenic life”.

This was broadcast in 1953, the year in which British and American secret services – well below Murray’s radar – replaced the democratically elected government of Iran by a dictatorship that, though savage, was favourable to the British and American oil interest, thereby initiating a new world order. This was called “Operation Ajax”, a name not alas symptomatic of true Hellenic life but inspired by the household cleansing liquid.

The politics of Gilbert Murray now seem as loftily unrealistic as does his political and cultural ambition for Hellenism, and not only because of his tendency to overlook the shortcomings of ancient Greek society. But he was the last prominent proponent of the idea that Hellenism has implications for every sphere of life, including politics. And this I cannot help admiring. Did not Pericles say, in the supreme expression of the culture of ancient democracy, the funeral speech reported by Thucydides, that the Athenians “regard the person who does not participate in politics as useless”? Can the understanding of the ancient past still contribute, as it did for Murray, to an active engagement with the present?

We cannot use the systematic Greek respect for limit to subvert the systematic unlimitedness of our own self-destructive culture. But the Greek culture of the limit provides a place that allows us to see the oddness, the historical contingency of the lethally limiting unlimitedness in our economy, social practices and theory. Hellenism is one of a number of precious resources – a way of being, understanding and perceiving – that can help to liberate us from the homogenized sensibility of our hyper-monetized, atomized and self-destructive culture of the unlimited.



This is a version of the Presidential Address to the Classical Association, delivered in Glasgow earlier this year.



Richard Seaford is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and tragedy in the developing city-state, 1994, and of a commentary on Euripides’ Bacchae, 1996.

Cocaine Sharks

Sharks filled with cocaine were seized by police in Yucatan on June 16

Photo du jour

Travel: Zurich

In the City






Getting to the top of the Mt. Pilatus...



On the top of the mountain Pilatus. As the guidebook claims: "according to medieval legend, the corpse of Pontius Pilate was thrown into a small lake on this mountain. Dreams and fantasies come true on this peaceful Alpine peak. Nowhere do the stars sparkle more brightly or the sunsets more stunning than on the Pilatus Kulm. With a little luck you can spot ibex, chamois, colorful Alpine roses, arnica or gentian on your journey to and from the mountain."






Lake Lucerne

Photo du jour

Just Read: Colm Toibin's Brooklyn

from London Review of Books
by Ruth Scurr

Brooklyn is Colm Tóibín’s most beautifully executed novel to date. Like The Heather Blazing (1992) it is an intimate portrait of a sad life, built up steadily from simple descriptive sentences, laid down with precision at a controlled pace. Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect.
Beginning in Enniscorthy in the south-east of Ireland in the early 1950s, Brooklyn centres on the young adulthood of Eilis Lacey, who lives with her mother and elder sister Rose, after their father’s death and three brothers’ departure to England in search of work. There are no prospects for Eilis in the town. She studies bookkeeping and longs for a good clerical post and smarter clothes like Rose’s, but the best on offer is a Sunday job in Miss Kelly’s grocery shop:
"Miss Kelly stood back, her attention divided between the door and Eilis. She checked every price Eilis wrote down, informed her briskly of the price when she could not remember, and wrote down and added up the figures herself after Eilis had done so, not letting her give the customer the change until she had also been shown the original payment. As well as doing this, she greeted certain customers by name, motioning them forward and insisting that Eilis break off whatever she was doing to serve them."
Eilis’s escape comes in the form of another job offer: this time on the other side of the Atlantic. Father Flood, back visiting his hometown after emigrating to the United States, is shocked to discover a young woman of Eilis’s potential crabbed inside Miss Kelly’s corner shop, so promises to find her work and lodgings in Brooklyn. “Parts of Brooklyn are just like Ireland. They’re full of Irish”, he reassures Eilis’s mother. “It might be very dangerous”, she replies, eyes fixed on the floor. “Not in my parish”, Father Flood continues, “It’s full of lovely people. A lot of life centres round the parish, even more than in Ireland. And there’s work for anyone who’s willing to work.”

Eilis’s journey to America is one of cumulative grief. First she goes to Liverpool where her brother closest in age meets her and takes her for a good meal, in case the food on the boat is “not to her liking”. She does not know whether or not to embrace her brother, they have never embraced before. She hugs him and he blushes, saying, “That’s enough of that now”. Jack works at a warehouse for spare car parts. She asks if he sees their other brothers, Pat and Martin, much. He tells her it’s a pity she’s not going with them to Birmingham, “there’d be a stampede for you on a Saturday night”.
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This stilted exchange of sibling attachment gathers its full poignancy in retrospect, after Eilis boards the ship to New York, to find herself utterly alone among passengers selfish enough to lock a seasick person out of the lavatory. After a harrowing journey, she arrives in Mrs Kehoe’s Brooklyn boarding house, where she will live alongside a Miss McAdam from Belfast, Patty McGuire (born in upstate New York) and Diana Montini, whose mother was Irish.

These loose connections of provenance only serve to illuminate the home Eilis has lost:

"She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything . . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday."

Tóibín does not write about the supernatural: the ghostly in his novels is an all-too-human projection of psychological distress. Grief especially evokes the space ghosts would inhabit if only it were possible to believe in them. There is a memorable example of his use of this device in his novel about Henry James, The Master (2004). James has returned to Venice after the death, and probable suicide, of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson. He goes out in a gondola to dispose of her clothes in the lagoon. The clothes of the deceased are laid reverentially on the water as though on a bed, they darken, then disappear, but suddenly:

"In the gathering dusk it appeared as though a seal or some dark, rounded object from the deep had appeared on the surface of the water . . . . And then Henry saw what it was. Some of the dresses had floated to the surface again like black balloons, evidence of the strange sea burial they had just enacted, their arms and bellies bloated with water."

In Brooklyn, Eilis is young and vital enough to move beyond the experience of black despair to find friendship, even love, in her new life. She works at a fictional version of the famous Abrahams & Straus department store on Fulton Street. Clothes are the centre of her working life, a subject of intense discussion among her fellow lodgers, and, most importantly, a reminder of her sister Rose, whose poise and elegance used always to seem beyond Eilis. On the voyage out, Eilis is struck suddenly by the inappropriateness of her going to America instead of Rose; then, in a moment of awed horror, she realizes the extent of her sister’s sacrifice: someone has to stay at home, and Rose wanted Eilis to be free.

Brooklyn stands comparison with Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Both books share a preoccupation with the conflict between personal freedom and responsibility, or duty. They both evoke feminine sexual inhibition, or fear. Despite her brother's reassurance, Eilis is a young woman with no confidence or understanding of her own sexual allure. She attends dances at home and in Brooklyn and feels like an awkward wallflower, always thinking of an excuse to leave early. When she finds a boyfriend in Brooklyn, she doesn’t know how to slow him down and explain that marriage and children are not necessarily what she wants; she doesn’t really know what she wants, but is too polite, too well schooled in the habits of kindness and embarrassed repression, to say so outright.

Eilis’s social position is far more modest than Isabel Archer’s: Tóibín’s portrait is of a 1950s shop girl, rather than a nineteenth-century heiress. But both writers are concerned with describing in intimate and intricate detail the emotional content of a young feminine life that leads to a stark, distressing, dead end. In explaining Isabel Archer’s epiphany about her marriage, James writes It was not her fault – she had practiced no deception; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and where it served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Isabel Archer’s prison is constructed by the Machiavellian motives of her sophisticated acquaintance. Eilis Lacey’s is rather the result of inherited social expectation, combined with bad luck and failure of nerve. She might have been free, she might have reached those high places of happiness – that certainly was her sister Rose’s intention – but instead she finds her life trapped on a course she has not really chosen; her only comfort to close her eyes and try “to imagine nothing more”.

With Brooklyn, Tóibín has transcended the homage he paid to James in The Master. He has returned to the themes of melancholy and grief that ran like dark threads through his earlier novels, especially The Blackwater Lightship (2000). Homesickness and rupture are the seminal experiences of Eilis’s life. The fact that what she is missing so much, even to the point of illness, is so painfully limited, only increases the pathos of her loss. Tóibín, more like Hardy than James in this respect, knows what it means to want something modest and simple at the centre of your life, but not be able to have it. Whether it is another person, society or fate, that is responsible for the deprivation, scarcely matters. There is in fact too much sorrow in the world, and Tóibín, better than any of his contemporaries, knows how to capture its timbre in fiction.



Colm Tóibín
BROOKLYN
252pp. Viking. £17.99.
978 0 670 91812 6



Ruth Scurr is Fellow and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is the author of Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, 2006.

Poem du jour

Diva, Retired
by Terese Coe


She keeps a cockatoo out on the porch
where it can see the jungle. A fragile chain
droops from its claw, runs through the open window
to the study. In the hilss above Chiang Mai,
the undaunted diva settles at her Steinway
to recompose the aria once more.
He said my voice was gone,
but I know I still can hit the money notes.

The captive alien lets go piercing shrieks
that echo through the house all day.
Beverly, she calls it, sometimes Sills.
Every lurid screech works her release from
memories of maddened Salomé.
Hell means going forward, now or then,
and everything is aria in the end.

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