Tag Archives: Joseph Conrad

Barbarian Days

23 Sunday Jul 2017

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“Things changed after that between me and Mark… I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology — in finding a cure — but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. ‘The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,’ Mark told me. ‘I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit — in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.’ Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.”

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From the eighth chapter (“Against Dereliction”) of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

The chapter opens with Conrad, writing in The Mirror of the Sea: “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by too much adulation.”

Keep going:

John Updike on Falling Airplanes and His Faith in a Fallen World

21 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by in Religion

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John Updike

“Early in my adolescence, trapped within the airtight case for atheism, I made this logical formulation:

1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.
2. The world is not a horror-show.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The second premise, of course, is the weaker; newspapers and biology lessons daily suggest that it is a horror show, of landslides and plagues and massacres and falling airplanes and incessant carnivorousness… Yet this and all bad news merits reporting because our general expectation is for good: an instinctive vision of health and peace underlies our horror stories. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we only have to be still to experience. Habit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining under-base. The world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator’s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.

During that same adolescence, I reluctantly perceived of the Christian religion I had been born into that almost no one believed it, believed it really — not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him. Though signs of belief (churches, public prayers, mottos on coins) existed everywhere, when you moved toward Christianity it disappeared, as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it. I decided I nevertheless would believe. I found a few authors, a very few — Chesterton, Eliot, Unamuno, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth — who helped me believe. Under the shelter that I improvised from their pages I have lived my life. I rarely read them now; my life is mostly lived. God is the God of the living, though His priests and executors, to keep order and to force the world into a convenient mould, will always want to make Him the God of the dead, the God who chastises life and forbids and says No. What I felt, in that basement Sunday school of Grace Lutheran Church in Shillington, was a clumsy attempt to extend a Yes, a blessing, and I accepted that blessing, offering in return only a nickel a week and my art, my poor little art…

My writing here about my religion feels forced — done at the behest of others, of hypothetical ‘autobiography’ readers. Done, I believe, in an attempt to comfort some younger reader as once I was comforted by Chesterton and Unamuno… But there seems, my having gone this unfortunately far, still this to say: One believes not merely to dismiss from one’s life a degrading and immobilizing fear of death but to possess that Archimedean point outside the world from which to move the world. The world cannot provide its own measure and standards; these must come, strangely, from outside, or a sorry hedonism and brute opportunism result — a greedy panicked heart and substance abuse. The world punishes us for taking it too seriously as well as for not taking it seriously enough.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Well, it’s beautifully written. That’ll be your initial reaction to Self-Consciousness. No, let me rephrase: Wow, it’s beautifully written. Updike is a writer who pulls the sublime from effortless, conversational sentences, affirming his reflection that “to give the mundane its beautiful due” was the purpose of his writing style. And man, do you feel the power of that impulse in these memoirs.

Typically, a writer’s memoir is not really about his or her lived-life. Writers are not boring people, but they often do, when viewed from the outside, lead boring lives. Sure Conrad manned a steamer in the Congo and Kipling was deployed with a battalion in India and Hemingway drank his way through every bullring in Cuba. But that was a century ago. Nowadays, as writing has become largely professionalized, the pulse of a writer’s life has slowed significantly. A writer’s craft is a solitary and silent one, done with a pen and a pad, at the desk, day after day. So his memoir must concern matters beyond the workaday. Just to stick to some covered on this blog: Martin Amis’s memoir is about family; Christopher Hitchens’s is about friendship; Nabokov’s is about education. John Updike’s is about faith (and sex, as he could never avoid the subject).

At the conclusion of one of the finest contemporary novels I’ve read, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the young protagonist Richard Papen wonders if he possesses a singular fatal flaw. “I have always mistaken beautiful or intelligent people for good” is his paragraph-long confession paraphrased, an admission which, upon reading, spurred within me a pang of recognition (“I’m busted”). And so too it is with writers. Beautiful prose can hide myriad sins of logic. So it’s essential when reading excerpts like the one above (found on pages 230-235) that you do not fall lazily into the ease of the prose, surrendering the critical faculties that such dense epistemology demands.

There is more to say here, but I will leave it for another day. Perhaps for when I post another section from Self-Consciousness. Still, there are two relevant sources concerning Updike’s final point about seriousness which may add some flavor to the discussion:

From Nothing to Be Frightened, Julian Barnes’s memoir about mortality (see: there’s always one unifying theme).

But if life is viewed as… something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell… On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism. [emphasis mine]

There is also Philip Larkin’s exquisite poem “Church Going,” where the writer wanders into a church and in the final stanza muses on its perennial significance:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious

Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but I think the contemporary American Church, with its Hollywood aesthetic and prosperity gospel, has lost much of that crucial, validating seriousness.

Updike, who died in 2009, would have been 82 this week.

Read on:

  • G.K. Chesterton’s defends his faith from cynics
  • Updike and a host of other thinkers reflect on whether we can simply assume God’s existence
  • Philosopher Alvin Plantinga dissects how evolutionary psychology intersects with Christian docrine

John Updike and Family

The Two Main Traits of Terrorists

04 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Literature, Psychology, War

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Joseph Conrad

“And Mr Verloc, temperamentally identical with his associates… drew them with a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of all kinds of recognized labour — a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of that state, but against the price which must be paid for the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and coil. The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. There are natures, too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.”

__________

A prophetic excerpt from Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale.

In this section, Conrad is speaking about Mr. Verloc, the novel’s protagonist who infiltrates and succumbs to the seductive ideology of an anarchist gang operating in London. But the assessment of the terroristic personality could not be more applicable today.

Conrad observes that there are two major characteristics of those who commit acts of terror – lethargy and vanity.

The terrorist is someone whose sense of self-importance weighs so heavily that he craves attention and recognition to the point that he will even die to see his name live on. Laziness enters the equation through the methods he uses to achieve this notoriety. Instead of applying his energy and intelligence – and make no mistake, most modern terrorists are highly educated – to constructive pursuits, the terrorist instead reverts to the atavistic urge to smash things up, to mutilate, inflict pain, and in doing so arouse emotions inversely proportional to his grandiose conceit.

The explosions, the manhunt, the Time Magazine cover: these are his fifteen minutes of fame. The residual fear is his immortality.

Since 9/11, and especially in the recent line-up of self-radicalized terrorists, we see a definite psychological profile emerge. Osama Bin Laden, for all of his ascetic pretensions, routinely doused his hair in Just for Men as he sat alone, watching and re-watching videos of himself giving speeches; and this vanity threads deeper, from the surface into the soul.

Yet the indolence of particularly anomic terrorists must not be minimized either. Indolence in tactics, first. The youngest of the Boston bombers returned to his dorm room and took a nap, then went to a house party, the night after the marathon explosions, but he and his brother failed to hatch even a rudimentary getaway plan or dispose of any incriminating evidence. Richard “The Shoe Bomber” Reid never tried on his sneakers to test his weapon of choice; as a result, when the fuse became soaked with perspiration, it was no longer ignitable. The underwear bomber couldn’t light his Hanes on fire; the Time Square Bomber got locked out of his carbomb.

Crucially, however, there is also the indolence of strategy. Vanity may compel a person to seek immortality, but the terrorist takes the easiest path to get there. Golda Meir was fond of saying that once Arabs began to love their children more than they hated the Jews, there would be peace and security in Israel. But this phrase, in all its glibness, overlooks the possibility that hatred is a much more intoxicating and gripping emotion than love, and this fact alone may lie at the root of much of our world’s ills. And in this same way, destruction is much easier and much quicker than construction. As Chuchill reflected, while surveying the smoldering rubble of East London after a Blitz: “To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”

Darkness Visible

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Memoir, Psychology

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William Styron

“Since antiquity — in the tortured lament of Job, in the choruses of Sophocles and Aeschylus — chroniclers of the human spirit have been wrestling with a vocabulary that might give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia. Through the course of literature and art the theme of depression has run like a durable thread of woe — from Hamlet’s soliloquy to the verses of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, from John Donne to Hawthorne and Dostoevsky and Poe, Camus and Conrad and Virginia Woolf. In many of Albrecht Durer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.

One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.

For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as ‘the shining world.’ There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.”

William Styron

__________

From the closing pages of Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron’s register of his descent into depression.

Thanks D. for recommending this one to me.

William Styron was born today in 1925. Darkness Visible, his most intensely revealing and personal book, is an utterly haunting chronicle of madness and melancholy — one which drags you, as Virgil does through the inferno, down Styron’s steep and rocky path into the depths of psychological suffering. The book opens with Styron, an acclaimed author of fiction, arriving at a lavish Paris hotel to accept a coveted literary award. This rainy Parisian night, however, is the moment wherein his own “brain storm” emerges over the horizon, bringing with it an enervating disease of the mind which he comes to call melancholia. The remainder of the short text is an utterly brutal yet lucid look at just what this afflication is and is not.

The passage above is the book’s ending, and it finishes Styron’s story, as Dante’s, in the clarity and serenity of a long desired return to sunlight and air. It also illustrates handsomely Styron’s unmatched technical skill as a writer.

From a Spring 1954 interview with Styron in the Paris Review:

Does your emotional state have any bearing on your work?

I guess like everybody I’m emotionally fouled up most of the time, but I find I do better when I’m relatively placid. It’s hard to say, though. If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing done. Actually— though I don’t take advantage of the fact as much as I should —I find that I’m simply the happiest, the placidest, when I’m writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. When I’m writing I find it’s the only time that I feel completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well. It’s fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time—for jittery people. Besides, I’ve discovered that when I’m not writing I’m prone to developing certain nervous tics, and hypochondria. Writing alleviates those quite a bit.

I think I resist change more than most people. I dislike traveling, like to stay settled. When I first came to Paris all I could think about was going home, home to the old James River. One of these days I expect to inherit a peanut farm. Go back home and farm them old peanuts and be real old Southern whisky gentry.

Styron