This has been a VERY tough month for reading. The three books that took the majority of the time during the month: Canzoniere, Fascist Doctrine, and Proust, have been books I haven’t enjoyed a ton, and consequently taken me a lot more time than usual. Where I read 11 books last month, I’ve gotten through only 4 total this month. Where I’m normally excited to read new books, three have been slogs that I’ve forced myself to keep at.
L’inferno- Dante (1321)
So I’m reading the inferno again, but this time in Italian, and taking my time. Usually I’ll read one book at a time, go until I’m done, then start a new one. While I read this one years ago, I read it in English. This time I wanted to really get into it, so I decided I’ll do one canto per week… or somewhere around that. I’ll translate around one page per day, the cantos are around 5 pages each, then supplement my translation with reading the notes, reading the English translation, and reading a modern Italian version as well so that I’m making sure I catch the meaning.
The poem is really fantastic.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
Tant’è amara che poco è più morte;
ma per trattar del bene ch’i’ vi trovai,
dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.
It’s written in what’s called terza rima, or third rhyme, consisting of groups of three lines.
The first and third line rhyme. The last word of the middle line becomes the rule for the rhyme of the next triplet of lines.
So in the first, vita rhymes with smarrita. The middle line finishes with oscura, which determines the word rhyme scheme for the second triplet, where dura rhymes with paura. Forte is the end of the second triplet’s middle line, so that determines the rhyme word for the third: morte and scorte.
This means that every third line rhymes as well, but in intervals…. Dante maintains this scheme through the entirety of the three books, which is a really impressive feat.
This month I read the first six cantos.
In the first, Dante finds himself, in a mid-life crisis, sort of lost in life. He is wandering through when he is confronted by three beasts: representing lust, power, and avarice. They block his way and won’t let him move out of his funk. But then he meets Virgil, the famed Roman poet of the Aeneid, who offers to guide him through the underworld… well, telling him that it’s really Dante’s only way out of the forest.
In the second, Dante starts to doubt he’s up to the task and questions Virgil about it. Virgil recounts that he himself was visited by Beatrice, a girl Dante loves, from heaven, where the virgin Mary is concerned about Dante, alerts Saint Lucia, who commissions Beatrice to help save Dante. She enlists Virgil to lead Dante through the first parts of the tour. Virgil tells Dante to buck up and Dante, revived by the knowledge of these three women’s concern, commits to the journey.
In the third, Dante and Virgil enter hell. The first group they encounter are those souls that refused to make a choice either for or against God. They are consigned to follow an ever moving standard…. and to be forgotten. They are ferried across the river by the Greek mythological character Charon.
In the fourth, they enter the actual circles of hell. The first is filled with those that didn’t sin, but were born before Christian baptism. Dante meets the great Pagan poets he admires and is admitted into their ranks. Virgil acknowledges that this is where he himself belongs. Dante asks if there is anyone who had ever escaped. Virgil explains that right after Jesus died, he came in and liberated the Old Testament saints, but no one else. They then pass a series of notable pagans and get ready to pass into the circles of actual punishment.
Canto five finds them at the gates to the next circle down, where they are met by the cruel Cretan ruler Minos, judge of the underworld. He consigns each sinner to the proper level of hell. The first level they encounter is for those that sinned by lust. These are carried about, flailing, by a whirlwind.
Canto six- they enter the third circle down, where the three-headed dog beast Cerberus tortures the gluttonous. The sixth canto of each portion of the divine comedy is dedicated to politics: the sixth of inferno is focused on local- for Dante, Florence- politics. As I understand it, the sixth of Purgatorio is Italian politics, and the sixth of Paradiso concerns ‘world’ politics. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the three chapters: 666, make the number of man, and the mark of the Beast in Revelation.
Canzoniere- Francesco Petrarca (1374)
This collection of poems written in the vernacular Italian of the time, became, along with Dante and Boccaccio, the basis for the Italian language. The theme of many of them is the poet’s love for ‘Laura’.
The Italian is seven centuries old, it’s difficult, but not impossible, to understand, but…. it’s poetry. Even in English, I struggle with poetry. I often have to ignore the meter and rhyme in English poetry and just read it through in order to follow what’s happening. If I focus on the rhyme, I lose the subject altogether. It’s even worse in Petrarca’s early archaic Italian. In order to catch it, I used an English translation alongside reading it in the original.
Fascism, Integralism, and the Corporative Society: Codex Fascismo- 4, 5, and 6- HR Morgan
This is a collection of writings from the leaders of fascism, explaining what it is. I will write more about the contents of this in my other blog, where I’ve tended to go more in-depth on political theory books.
This type of thing isn’t much fun for me to read. I don’t agree with the point of view and too much of it was the sales pitch version- focused on how so much of the current situation is bad, and how fascism is the answer for the problems.
The reason I’ve gotten into reading it is because our current political climate is pretty divided, with the left mindlessly calling the right ‘fascists’, and the right mindlessly calling the left ‘commies’. While communism is generally more known, I thought: I doubt most of the people calling the right fascists could really define anything about fascism. Then I realized that I didn’t know enough either, so I decided I would learn, and the best way to do that is to read the source materials from those that advocated it. So I read Fascist material for the same reason I read Marxist material- so I can know what they believe and why they believe it.
In sharing some of the philosophy with my son, and particularly how I found it not particularly deep, he responded that he didn’t think there was any depth to it at all. But that’s precisely the kind of thing I want to avoid. He has never read one bit of what they wrote, or say they believe, but he’s convinced that he knows enough to comment that what they believe isn’t worth believing. THAT attitude: I don’t know what they believe but I know they’re wrong!, is what I think is wrong with so much of our political discourse. We don’t bother to find out what others actually believe or why… we just assume what they believe on some hearsay or worse, pure conjecture.
For example, my guess is almost anyone would think fascist = nazi = racist murderer, therefore no need to know any more. Well, not quite, fascism grew out of marxism. Marxism saw the world as oppressor v oppressed and wanted the proletariat to develop class consciousness in order to overthrow the system and bring in a new order. Fascism buys the marxist analysis of what capitalism will eventually bring, but thought that marxism’s class warfare was 1) divisive, and 2) not really workable anyway. In order to bring in a new system, one that would fulfill human needs, the more natural alignment would be national consciousness. Fascism sees the ‘nation’ as THE primary thing that people in the nation can rally around. Fascists, like Marxists, HATE the liberal view of the individual as supreme. They want a collective system, where the individual works for the betterment of the nation, rather than for his own betterment.
Now there was a German philosopher, whose name I forget right now, who saw racial consciousness as the important thing, rather than national consciousness, and that particular view developed into national socialism, or Nazism.
Fascism per se doesn’t require racism at all. In fact, it would ideally encompass everyone within the nation, no matter what race. The important thing is that they are submitted to the cause of the nation.
Just below the surface of this relatively benign-sounding idea, is the trouble. HOW exactly does one put such a system into place? And it is precisely in that area that the high sounding ideas that are packaged into the sales brochure turn into the nightmare in everyone’s life… just like it did trying to implement Marxism. Because ultimately, there are as many ideas about how things ought to be run as there are people. And if the marxists or fascists decide that everyone is going to work ‘for the good of the people’ then it really means a very small group of those people are going to have to decide what exactly is meant by that, and consequently, everyone else is going to have to get in line… to the detriment of their own freedom. This is why collectivist ideas always sound good to people, but look terrible in real life.
Much of what is in the book is the sales brochure: they’ll tell you what they think is wrong, and they’ll tell you how it will all be great when we’re working together. But every once in a while, they just tell you the truth: they’re going to have to suppress anything that goes against the program… which means you’ll have the freedom to do what your told, which means… you’re not free at all.
For all this, I think it’s worth understanding where exactly they’re coming from and why. Unfortunately, our current liberal system is running up against problems that have plagued republican systems throughout history: human divisiveness means stuff doesn’t get done AND that brings increasing unrest because the sides up their animosity towards each other. And the answer throughout history has been to choose some strong man who can get stuff done AND bring a measure of peace. Safety and Security starts to look a lot better than freedom when things are unstable.
Being aware of this at least provides me with some insight about what to look for when people with bad ideas start pitching their ideas.
In Search of Lost Time 1: Swann’s Way- Marcel Proust (1913)
This is the first of a seven-novel series that make up the whole novel: In Search of Lost Time. The entire novel is extremely long, around 3000 pages.
The first book is divided into three sections: Combray, Swann in Love, and Place Names: The Name.
In the first section, Combray, it is supposed to be extremely difficult to read. The sentences aren’t difficult, the language isn’t particularly difficult, but it is a series of impressions… recollections or remembrances of the author’s childhood. There is nothing like a discernable plot, and for this reason, you can find yourself having read pages and pages and both not knowing…. and not caring, what you just read.
I have seen one or two interesting bits about memory, but so far, it’s been difficult to drum up any enthusiasm for this work. One example though is that the author, as a teenager, was interested in writing, but couldn’t imagine he had anything interesting to write about. And then he would find some bit in a book by an author he admired that he could recognize as thoughts he himself had. This revelation showed him that his own humble life and the ‘realms of truth’ were no so widely separated as he had thought.
The second section: Swann in Love, takes one of the characters recollected in the first section, Charles Swann, back in time to when he fell in love with Odette, a courtesan who he meets at one of his dinner parties. This section is more of a story, which makes it easier reading, but more than that, there are some very sweet passages about the initial stages of his love for the young woman.
The third section: Place Names: The Name, reverts back to recollections of memory, this time of the author’s interactions with the daughter of Charles and Odette.
Babbit- Sinclair Lewis (1922)
George Babbit is a man of business in Zenith, and he is on the upward path to…. well, he can’t quite figure out what. He assumes it’s going to be great, and everyone around him seems to think so too, but along the way he keeps getting gentle reminders that he, and the others he surrounds himself with, are pretty hypocritical in many of their approaches to things. They mostly deal with this by not thinking too seriously about, or questioning, the things they’ve taken for granted. But at some point, George notices that he isn’t really very happy about it, despite the level of success he has reached. He begins to dream of some outlets, but as he begins to experiment with things his old group considered taboo, and hang out with people considered outside the mainstream, he is increasingly excluded from the in-group. He is then bullied by the people he formerly led. But in a twist, his wife needs an operation and it is the old group that shows up for him. He is welcomed back in, but his boosterism isn’t the same as it was before. He does however realize that there were things among his old life that he loved, but hadn’t properly cherished.