A Certain Slant of Light

I finished Caroline Snedeker’s The Beckoning Road, the sequel to Downright Dencey, in which Dencey’s family treks from Nantucket to New Harmony! Snedeker was the descendent of Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen, founder of New Harmony, and the attempted utopian community is an ongoing theme in her books: she also wrote Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community.

I am a complete sucker for books about utopian experiments: I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, based on his experiences at Brook Farm, even though generally I find Hawthorne aggravating. (And indeed he does make some aggravating choices in The Marble Faun! But even so the charm of Brook Farm sometimes glimmers through.) So of course I loved all the New Harmony parts in this, especially the parts about the tension between Dencey’s family’s Quaker principles and the mores of New Harmony, which are so close in some ways but so far apart in others. This comes to a head with regard to the New Harmony dances: Dencey sneaks off to attend one of the dances, and expects condemnation when she’s caught, but her mother has come to see that these dances are part of the community life and as such allows Dencey to go forthwith.

I was also intrigued by the resolution of the Dencey/Jetsam romance set up in Downright Dencey. ( Spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Seth Way: A Romance of New Harmony, which I enjoyed so much that I now want to visit New Harmony, which conveniently is within my own state. Robert Owen attempted to found a utopian community in New Harmony, which he didn’t quite manage, but he did draw together the biggest conglomeration of scientists in the entire United States outside of Philadelphia. I think that’s pretty good for a little town in a state that was less than a decade old at the time.

I also finished Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (in the form of a recent translation by C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks, entitled The Emperor’s Handbook), which I chased down with a book about the modern practice of stoicism, Massimo Pigliucci’s How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life.

Now it must be said that Pigliucci is drawing mainly on Epictetus rather than Marcus Aurelius, so it’s entirely possible that Epictetus just emphasizes things really differently than Marcus, but it’s striking how much less gloomy Pigliucci’s stoicism is than Marcus’s. I don’t think he includes a single meditation as glum as Marcus’s “Everything disperses and vanishes like smoke, both the rememberer and the remembered,” which neatly includes two of Marcus’s favorite themes: the inevitability of death and the foolishness of chasing other people’s opinions, when in one hundred years those opinions and the people who held them will all be naught but dust.

Marcus also likes to remind himself of the cheering fact that suicide is always an option if life becomes too unbearable. This is very Roman. (In fact, I’m trying to think of an ancient Roman suicide that isn’t understood as heroic - you’ve got Lucretia, Seneca, Brutus, random slaves who choked themselves on sponges or cast themselves beneath the wheels of carts rather than become gladiators - but I’m coming up blank.)

But here’s a meditation I liked: “Plainly, no situation is better suited for the practice of philosophy than the one you’re now in.”

Now this is not plain at all - who among us is in a situation well-suited to the practice of philosophy? - but at the same time totally true. There’s no better time to practice philosophy because there is no other time, period. We have no control over past or future, only now.

Also I just like to imagine Marcus Aurelius repeating this to himself while, say, riding through the rain, with water dripping down his neck under his armor, as he and his army head to yet another battle at some godforsaken corner of the empire. He’d rather be home reading BUT NO, the Germans have attacked YET AGAIN and duty calls. “Plainly,” he says to himself, his teeth gritted so they won’t chatter, his thighs probably chafing from endless days in the saddle, “no situation is better suited for the practice of philosophy than the one you’re now in.”

What I’m Reading Now

On missroserose’s recommendation, I’m listening to M. T. Anderson’s Symphony for the City of the Dead, A++ would recommend. It’s a book about the Soviet Union (admittedly I am an easy sell for books about the Soviet Union), as seen through the lens of the life of the composer Shostakovich and his Seventh Symphony, which he composed during the Siege of Leningrad. Totally epic! And highly recommended as an audiobook in particular: not only is Anderson a good reader, but the format allows for excerpts from Shostakovich’s work, which is invaluable in a book about music.

I’ve also started If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, which is a weird book. It’s about a reader (“you”) in quest of a book, only instead of ever getting to read a book, a variety of printing problems and translation issues mean that instead you keep getting the first chapter of one book and then another… which is frustrating because most of them are the beginnings of interesting books, but frustrating in a satisfying way?

And! At last I have the opportunity to finish Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Gypsy Breynton quartet! (These days this series is mainly known as a precursor to Little Women in its tomboyish heroine, but it was pretty popular in its time.) I’ve begun Gypsy’s Sowing and Reaping, which is about Gypsy’s attempt to save her brother Tom from the evil influence of college: tobacco, and cribbing, and slang. There’s something irrepressibly entertaining about the nineteenth century horror of slang.

However, this third book does seem weaker than the first two: it’s focused on Gypsy’s attempts to keep her brother on the straight and narrow rather than her own flaws, and also it doesn’t have any interestingly weird incidents like the first book where Gypsy sleepwalks into a canoe and casts off (still sleeping) and wakes up to find herself floating in the middle of the lake.

What I Plan to Read Next

Symphony for the City of the Dead has inspired me to search out more audiobooks about composers, if they exist and if my library has them. Recommendations welcome!