Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Braxton Irvine published The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient in 2019, but nonetheless it seems tailor-made for 2020, the year that pulls the rug out from under your feet again and again.

The book is about how to deal with unexpected setbacks: view them as a challenge, he suggests; this is of course much easier to do with smaller setbacks, although the ancient Roman stoics were famous for applying it in situations like “exile” and “being ordered to commit suicide by the Senate.” It’s also about how to appreciate what you have: imagine what it would be like not to have it, and, well, lucky us! in 2020, you don’t even need to exercise your imagination on this one. If there’s one thing Americans have all experienced this year, it’s suddenly not having things we always expected to have. Movie theaters, restaurants, food and toilet paper on the grocery shelves, being able to see people’s faces, the expectation of a peaceful transition of power after the election in November…

It’s all unpleasant, of course, but I remind myself that historically speaking, we are really only paddling in the shallows of just how bad things can get, as evidenced (in this week's reading) by Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, which has a whole section on his maternal grandparents’ experiences escaping the Holocaust as Lithuanian Jews.

I actually got the book because I was interested in Halberstadt’s experience growing up gay in the Soviet Union. But in actual fact his family left the USSR when he was still a child, so there’s not too much for him to say about it; the most interesting tidbit is that he had his first sexual awakening looking at the illustrations in the textbook Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, a sort of Soviet martyrology of young people dying heroic, gruesome, patriotic deaths. (I imagined this sexually awakened MANY Soviet youths, of all sexual orientations.)

I also learned from this book that in Russian, chanterelles are lisichki, little foxes, which would have been ADORABLE in Honeytrap, oh my God.

Maybe I should stop reading about the Soviet Union for a bit. I seem to have this “that would have been AMAZING to include in Honeytrap” reaction to at least one tidbit from every book.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing on in Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun. I’m enjoying the worldbuilding, particularly the imaginary Victorian theology of the fae (do they have souls or don’t they?), but boy, it would’ve been nice if the incest had been mentioned a little bit in the blurb. I suppose whoever wrote it must have thought comparing the book to Crimson Peak counted as due diligence?

I’m also working on Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer and of course Mary Renault’s The Charioteer, but I’m going to write full reviews for both of them once I’m done, so I won’t take up space talking about them here. (Oh, well, fine, for the Charioteer contingent, I will mention that I got to the part where Laurie, who has just learned that he is soon to be transferred to another hospital, kisses Andrew. Andrew’s reaction is… surprisingly chill??? So either Andrew was already aware that kissing men is a thing he is into and all of Laurie’s I DON’T WANT TO CORRUPT HIM wittering was for naught, or Andrew is just SO innocent that he’s like “A kiss on the lips, that seems brotherly!”)

Another quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope:

The true believers were not only sure of their own triumph, they also thought they were bringing happiness to the rest of mankind as well, and their view of the world had such a sweeping, unitary quality that it was very seductive. In the pre-revolutionary era there had already been this craving for an all-embracing idea which would explain everything in the world and bring about universal harmony in one go. That is why people so willingly closed their eyes and followed their leader, not allowing themselves to compare words to deeds, or to weigh the consequences of their action. This explained the progressive loss of a sense of reality - which had to be regained before there could be any question of discovering what had been wrong with the theory in the first place.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve had Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona (called David Balfour in the United States; the lesser-known sequel to Kidnapped!) lying around for weeks and I really ought to just read it.

Comments

[asakiyume]

"Little foxes" is an adorable name for chanterelles.

That is why people so willingly closed their eyes and followed their leader, not allowing themselves to compare words to deeds, or to weigh the consequences of their action. --Oh man. It's so, so important to keep eyes open, and yet so hard to do, apparently. We see this in things of smaller consequence too, when we have friends or family members maybe going off the rails with things like drinking (okay, that's not of smaller consequence; that's big consequence, but on a personal scale). It's so hard to face things when you really, really, really want things to be okay.

Your comment about the Roman stoics made me laugh. But like, how are you supposed to continue practicing your stoicism after you've been asked to commit suicide by the Senate? "I'm sorry; I'm going to have to decline that order, for while following it would allow for a perfect expression of my philosophy, it would prevent any further expressions of my philosophy." Though as a stoic, you shouldn't be wedded to opportunities to practice stoicism, either, I suppose. I sense recursive thinking in the offing...

[osprey_archer]

I think people often close their eyes to things they feel powerless to change. Like, yes, ideally if you say, "Johnny, are you perhaps drinking too much?" Johnny will go "Gosh, maybe I should try AA," but in real life Johnny might just laugh it off, or there will be a big fight about it, or whatever. If he refuses to see there's a problem, is there value in seeing that problem as a bystander who cannot do anything to stop the slow-moving train wreck, in watching with eyes wide open as he self-destructs?

I think there is, but I can also see why some people just can't face it. (On a broader scale, I think this is part of why some people have adopted basically a strategy of denial toward coronavirus: it's counterproductive, but it's less painful than being afraid.)

A Stoic who is ordered to commit suicide by the Senate is supposed to follow the example of Seneca, the arch-stoic, who accepted the verdict calmly, comforted his friends and family, and opened his veins. In the Roman context there's something deeply metal about essentially telling the Senate/Nero (who was really the force behind this verdict) "You can make me commit suicide, but you can't make me upset about it."

[asakiyume]

I think your analysis of the cost-benefit of eyes-wide-open is right on the nose.

Re: Seneca, yes; he was throwing in their face that he was ultimately free and that their power was confounded, even the power of life and death. That *is* pretty metal. But it's the end of Seneca's strand in the story .... there's no way out of that. The strength that comes from sacrifice requires the sacrifice. I'm merely reacting to the size of the sacrifice--which doesn't really need stating; we all understand what it means to lose one's life.

[ursula]

My experience was that every review of Pendulum Sun I encountered mentioned the incest and none warned for the fairly horrific violence, so I'm interested to see you had a different meta-book experience!

[osprey_archer]

I picked up the book after reading a review that raved about the Victorian theology of the fae, which *is* great, and so exactly up my alley that I did not bother reading other reviews before I got the book, or I might have realized about the incest and/or the Hunt scene.

At the end of the day, though, I don't really think it's on individual reviewers (particularly if they're just writing on their own personal journal, not for some big review site) to warn anyone about anything; if all they want to do is muse about the Victorian theology, they totally can. It's just a little strange that the publishers blurb doesn't make it clearer, especially given that incest & violence are qualities that would draw a lot of readers in!

[ursula]

Huh, I kind of thought there were more obvious "riffing on all the weird stuff in Wuthering Heights" cues than I'm seeing in the Amazon blurb!

[osprey_archer]

There's definitely a lot of riffing on Wuthering Heights in the book itself! Not least of which is Cathy's own name (and her last name, Helstone, is clearly a ref to Caroline Helstone in Shirley). It also riffs on the Bronte's own childhoods: Cathy's sister who died in school, Laon as the beloved brother of whom the family had high hopes who is descending towards... well, unlike Branwell, not alcoholism, but possibly fae-induced madness. (I think the echoes of the Brontes' lives as well as their work is what makes the incest feel especially uncomfortable to me.)

Plus of course Cathy's meeting with Laon when he returns to Thornfield Gethsemane is a clear callback to Jane Eyre's first meeting with Rochester. That was the moment when I went "So the incest vibes are deliberate, then. Good to know."

The Amazon blurb really seems to be describing a slightly different book.

[ancientreader]

Apropos of the Stoics: I always had qualms, or maybe that's not quite the right word -- something in me always recoiled from Stoicism, and I didn't fully understand why till I read Todd May's A Fragile Life. There's a review of it here https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/matters-large-and-small-reading-todd-mays-a-fragile-life-in-the-wake-of-hurricane-harvey/ that discusses May's philosophy in general but the Stoicism-relevant part is this:

What happens, then, when the wipeout inevitably arrives for the Stoic? I’m not sure what James says on this score, but in his new book May offers a compelling (if inevitably imperfect) answer. In the face of emotional, physical, or material wipeouts — and the suffering that follows — May suggests that we can adopt one of two responses: invulnerabilism and vulnerabilism. (He reluctantly coined these terms, pleading that while clunky, they are necessary.) By the former, May means the project to “develop a place of peace in ourselves, a place of detachment that ultimately cannot be touched or shaken.” Along with Stoicism, certain strands of Buddhism and Epicureanism also offer blueprints for such a station. It is proof against pain, if not defeat — a place where we might be shaken, but not overly stirred by suffering. ...

... The vulnerabilist might well use this or that gadget from her philosophical toolbox in order to patch what can be patched: exercises that focus our thoughts on the here and now, for example, or efforts to place our losses in their proper perspective. But, ultimately, the vulnerabilist “concedes — indeed embraces — the idea that we can be shaken to our very foundations.”

Why should we want that? Wouldn’t we all prefer to “secrete [a word May uses more than once] a certain distance between us and what happens to us”? That is certainly the case for what May calls “Small Matters.” Ranging from one’s train running late for a business meeting to running one’s car into a malfunctioning garage door, such matters are small enough to be defused by run-of-the-mill spiritual exercises. It is enough to remind ourselves that, while we cannot control the reasons for the train’s lateness or the door opener’s failure, we can control our response to such glitches.

But what about Large Matters? Matters of life and death, irreparable loss and inconceivable grief? At this point, May rightly parts company with those who cultivate, as their life’s project, invulnerability. His discussion of the ways in which those who try to make themselves invulnerable — especially in the face of Large Matters — undermine what makes us most human, is clear and bracing. Importantly, May underscores that it is not that we wish to grieve, or be saddened, by the death of a loved one. Instead, “each of us wants to be the kind of person [May’s italics] who can suffer at certain misfortunes. Being able to suffer in the case of Large Matters is an expression not only of who we are but of who we want to be.”

I can't wait to see what you make of The Charioteer's resolution!

[osprey_archer]

I realize that this is going to sound weird given how many of my novels could accurately be entitled Vulnerability: A Dialectic, but the rah! rah! vulnerability philosophers and psychologists (see also Brene Brown) tend to make me twitchy, because it rarely seems to occur to them that vulnerability sometimes doesn't work out well for the vulnerable person. It's difficult to wholeheartedly embrace "the idea that we can be shaken to our very foundations" when you know that people sometimes do not recover from that process.

It's also weird to me that May seems to assume that being "the kind of person who can suffer" is a state to be desired, rather than the baseline experience of being human. We're all vulnerable to suffering! That's just the way we're built!

[ancientreader]

That's a fair point, certainly, about vulnerability not always working out so well. All the same, even if it costs me dearly I would rather be brokenhearted at my wife's or my best friend's death than not have experienced so significant a relationship.

FWIW, in the context of the book May's not arguing for being defenseless, but against the Stoic (etc.) idea that emotional disengagement from "the things [and people] of this world" is desirable -- it's always been my sense, too, that however the Stoics try to gussy it up, there's an essential coldness at the heart of their position. So I think May wants to claim that remaining attached is desirable in contradistinction to a Stoic withdrawal from desire and attachment, which is often presented as if it were a sort of higher state.

A comparison I might draw is to the way certain forms of religion are hostile to sexual desire. I think most people's baseline is that sexual desire is part of their experience of living in the world, and that it also makes sense to argue that sexual desirefulness is a condition to be cherished rather than something to be quashed and mortified. But of course you're right, one doesn't in general need to do anything in order to be vulnerable to suffering; that's the factory setting.

[evelyn_b]

You know, it's been a while since I read The Charioteer, but I feel like with Andrew it could easily be both. But then, I do nOT like Laurie's "must not CORRUPT the innocent BABY" attiude one bit.

[osprey_archer]

I can see how Laurie ended up at that attitude given the time period, but I also really felt that Ralph Lanyon had a point when he said something to the effect of "Laurie, you're going to meet Andrew again in a year and he'll have a boyfriend." Someone will corrupt him! He probably wants to be corrupted! It might as well be you!

OTOH, given Laurie's "he is a cinnamon roll, too pure for this world!" attitude toward Andrew, maybe it's better if he's not Andrew's first boyfriend. That's a LOT of pedestal to be put on.