Christopher Columbus’s illegitimate son tried to create a library “that would collect everything.” He collected 15,000 items. Only 4,000 remain: “As the library grew, it became “a Borgesian labyrinth of ‘baffling marvels’. Wilson-Lee describes it with verve and strews his account with Rabelaisian lists, incantatory and almost magical in effect, of the sort Hernando loved. The protagonist emerges as an obsessive-compulsive who bought books by the thousand, compiled meticulous catalogues, labelled every item frenziedly, kept everything possible in triplicate, and planned all details of the library – including the view from the windows and the cage bars that were interposed between the books and potentially light-fingered readers. Yet beyond the lust for detail, Hernando was a visionary fantasist who wanted to conjure a place where everything in the world was visible, like Borges’s Aleph (or, as Wilson-Lee points out, the Palace of Aletia in Columbus, a poem by the 18th-century Jesuit Ubertino Carrara). The scholar would be able to master it intellectually and his king could control it politically. ‘A memory bank in which the thought of the world was stored’ could become, Wilson-Lee argues, an instrument for forging a universal empire. A further purpose emerged from Hernando’s response to the insecurity of the time, with its dizzying turns of fortune’s wheel, its shipwrecks, wars and book-burnings: to create a ‘doomsday vault that would prevent human culture from being lost’.”
The meaning of Seinfeld: It’s not a show about nothing but about “stumbling and staggering and sailing through not-so-early adulthood in a world with few trusted guidelines: one where you have to make it up as you go...Doing good for others is a worthy thing, but not the answer for a directionless life, nor an automatic path to redemption. A plan to do volunteer work with senior citizens backfires, as our heroes are clearly not ready for even the most minimal self-forgetfulness. Attempting to address any class divide or inequality results in disaster as well; considerately providing a rocking chair for a security guard on duty leads to a robbery, and befriending a resentful doorman only unleashes more resentfulness...None of the lead characters can be relied on for anything, as they often disappoint each other and wreck one another’s plans.”
How dumb is this list of “Top Twenty Books By Women That Changed The World”? Pretty dumb, says Sam Leith. “What does it say...that of these books half or a bit more than half are specifically concerned with the experiences of oppressed women qua oppressed women – as if, bless their fluffy little heads, the main way in which women can be influential in the public sphere is writing about the lot of women in the public sphere? If you strip out ‘personal experience’ and ‘like, feelings’ – the other thing women are good at, right? – in the form of fiction ( Jane Eyre but no Middlemarch? And no Sappho?) and memoir, you’re left pretty much with Naomi Klein, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Rachel Carson as cheerleaders for the female contribution to intellectual history. Does Constance Garnett effectively bringing 19th-century Russian literature to the English-speaking world not count? Has even Frankenstein really had more of a world-changing influence than, say, Married Love by Marie Stopes? Are the achievements of women in science, mathematics, history, philosophy, literary criticism, poetry and any number of other fields to be set at nothing?”
Sublime mathematics: “David Stipp’s short book, A Most Elegant Equation, aims to persuade the ‘math-averse’ that ‘great mathematics is as provocative, beautiful, and deep as great art or literature.’”
T he solution to crony capitalism isn’t more of it: A new book identifies the many problems of governmental intervention in the economy and then argues that more of it will somehow fix it.
Essay of the Day:
Dostoevsky’s Idiot “violates every critical norm and yet somehow manages to achieve real greatness.” Gary Saul Morson explains why:
“In her memoirs, Anna Grigorievna described how, exasperated by her husband’s absent-minded generosity, she disguised herself as a beggar, got a handout from her oblivious husband, and confronted him with the donation. When she married Dostoevsky, she thought he had overcome his gambling addiction, but abroad he could not resist roulette, and, of course, always lost. They pawned her dowry, then their clothing. In one letter Dostoevsky begged Katkov for another advance, saying they would otherwise be forced to pawn their linen. It sounds like exaggeration, but he wrote to a friend confessing that he had understated the case, because he could not bring himself to say that they had already pawned it.
“In such conditions, the novel Dostoevsky was working on, to be called The Idiot, did not progress well. Five times, the couple was forced to move when landlords would extend no more credit. Dostoevsky was plagued by epileptic seizures, incapacitating him for days. When Anna Grigorievna went into labor with their daughter Sonya, he suffered an attack, and it was hours before she could rouse him to go for a midwife. When the baby died, he experienced guilt as well as grief because, he believed, if they had been in Russia, Sonya would have survived.
“Dostoevsky simply had to produce a novel, but refused to cheapen his work. ‘Worst of all I fear mediocrity,’ he wrote to his niece. ‘I assure you the novel could have been satisfactory,’ he explained to his friend, the poet Apollon Maikov, ‘but I got incredibly fed up with it precisely because of the fact that it was satisfactory and not absolutely good.’ At last he abandoned his drafts. Nothing mattered more than artistic integrity.
“Dostoevsky resolved to start over with a new premise. The old Idiot dealt with a rogue who committed crime after crime, including rape and arson, but eventually found Christ and goodness. The problem was that Dostoevsky could not make the conversion psychologically convincing, and he was unwilling just to assert it. As it happened, at this very time, Tolstoy was serializing War and Peace in The Russian Messenger—has any publisher been so fortunate as Katkov?—and Tolstoy’s hero Prince Andrei does come to love his enemy in a way that is believable beyond doubt. No novel had ever achieved this feat before, and only one more would do so: Tolstoy’s next work, Anna Karenina. All the more galling, religion was Dostoevsky’s specialty, and so Tolstoy had beaten him at his own game.
“Dostoevsky wondered: what if he were to begin with an Idiot who was already a perfect Christian soul? Suppose the novel should ask not whether the Christian ideal is possible but whether it is desirable? Without supernatural powers, would a true Christian do more harm than good in a world of real people with damaged—Dostoevskian—souls?
“Dostoevsky proposed ‘ to portray a perfectly beautiful man.’ He could think of only three novelists who had tried: Cervantes succeeded with Don Quixote and Dickens with Pickwick, but only by making them ridiculous, rather than psychologically deep. Hugo’s Jean Valjean (in Les Misérables) captures our imagination not by his realistically portrayed inner life but by his prolonged suffering. None of these books tested the Christian ideal itself.”
Photos: Disappearing jobs
Poem: Ernest Hilbert, “Air & Water”
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