The Esoteric Revue
moving through a world of radical uncertainty with epistemic humility
Friday, June 21, 2024
“Protagoras” by Plato (translated by Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell).
Friday, June 14, 2024
“The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry” by Eric Griffiths
Friday, June 7, 2024
“Septology I-VII” by Jon Fosse (translated by Damion Searls)
This novel is a collection of three volumes, themselves broken into seven sections total, which flow back and forth chronologically. All the action takes place in the countryside of southwest Norway’s coast and its big city Bjorgvin. The narrator, Asle, is a successful painter, who has a doppelganger, also named Asle, a less successful painter. Doubles, twins, reoccurrences, repetitions, and de-ja-vu all play an essential role in the narration, which drifts between first and third person. The novel revolves around themes of art, aesthetics, religion, and duty. Asle admits, “when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me…. once a picture is finished the picture says whatever it can say, no more no less, the picture says in its silent way whatever can be said, and if it’s not finished yet then how it’s going to turn out and what it’s going to say isn’t something that can be said in words, I think.” A converted Catholic and long-since a widow, he muses to himself, “God isn’t anything He is separate from the world of created things, where everything has a limit, He is outside time and space, He is something we can’t think, He doesn’t exist, He’s not a thing, in other words He’s nothing, I say, and I say that no thing, no person, creates itself because it’s God who makes it possible for things to exist at all, without God there’s nothing, I say…. But no one can think their way to God, I say Because either they can feel that God is near or they can’t, I say Because God is both a very faraway absence, yes well, being itself, yes, and a very close presence, I say.” Finally, Asle pontificates more on painting, “now he’ll paint away the pictures he has in his head, but he doesn’t want to paint them exactly how he sees them in his head before his eyes, because there’s something like a sorrow, a pain, tied to every one of those pictures, he thinks, but also a kind of peace, yes, that too, yes he’ll paint away all the pictures he has collected in his head, if he can, so that only the peace stays behind.”
Friday, May 31, 2024
“The New Testament” (translated by David Bentley Hart)
This is a very different translation to the New Testament than the King James version. Hart states, up front, “To be honest, I have come to believe that all the standard English translations render a great many of the concepts and presuppositions upon which the books of the New Testament are built largely impenetrable, and that most of them effectively hide (sometimes forcibly) things of absolutely vital significance for understanding how the texts’ authors thought.” He continues, “This is not a literary translation of the New Testament, much less a rendering for liturgical use…. I have elected to produce an almost pitilessly literal translation.” On the background of the times, Hart adds, “When one truly ventures into the world of the first Christians, one enters a company of “radicals” (for want of a better word), an association of men and women guided by faith in a world-altering revelation, and hence in values almost absolutely inverse to the recognized social, political, economic, and religious truths not only of their own age, but of almost every age of human culture…. The New Testament knows very little of common sense. The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism…. Everything is cast in the harsh light of a final judgment that is both absolute and terrifyingly imminent.”
Friday, May 24, 2024
“Waverley” by Walter Scott
Scott’s first novel, after a successful literary start as a poet, is considered the first book in the genre of historical romance. Set against the backdrop of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, the novel details the coming of age of Edward Waverley. Although descended from a British Jacobite noble family, his father, currying favor with the current regime, buys him a commission in the British army and gets him posted to Scotland, where he comes under the sway of a Highland chieftain, Fergus Mac-Ivor, himself raised in exile in France after his father was executed by the Crown. “These stout idle kinsmen of mine account my estate as held in trust for their support; and I must find them beef and ale, while the rogues will do nothing for themselves but practise the broadsword, or wander about the hills, shooting, fishing, hunting, drinking, and making love to lasses of the strath. But what can I do, Captain Waverley? everything will keep after its kind, whether it be a hawk or a Highlander.”
Before long, Waverley, already a hopeless Romantic and a poet, falls in love with Fergus’ sister, Flora. She explains to the eponymous hero, “A Highland song would suffer still more from my imperfect translation, were I to introduce it without its own wild and appropriate accompaniments. To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain stream. He who wooes her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley, and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall.”
Waverley, himself, at first has some doubts about the honor of the Jacobite cause, “He felt inexpressible repugnance at the idea of being accessary to the plague of civil war. Whatever were the original rights of the Stuarts, calm reflection told him, that, omitting the question how far James the Second could forfeit those of his posterity, he had, according to the united voice of the whole nation, justly forfeited his own. Since that period, four monarchs had reigned in peace and glory over Britain, sustaining and exalting the character of the nation abroad, and its liberties at home. Reason asked, was it worth while to disturb a government so long settled and established, and to plunge a kingdom into all the miseries of civil war, for replacing upon the throne the descendants of a monarch by whom it had been willfully forfeited?”
After the defeat of the Jacobites by the Duke of Cumberland’s army, Waverley reflects on the doomed nature of the whole quixotic enterprise, “Here fell the last Vich Ian Vohr, on a nameless heath; and in an obscure night-skirmish was quenched that ardent spirit, who thought it little to cut a way for his master to the British throne! Ambition, policy, bravery, all far beyond their sphere, here learned the fate of mortals.” And as another Jacobite “traitor” the Baron of Bradwardine lamented, “But houses and families and men have a’ stood lang eneugh when they have stood till they fall with honour.” Colonel Talbot, a loyal British soldier, though also a friend of the house of Waverley, was less forgiving in his memories of Mac-Ivor, “Justice which demanded some penalty of those who had wrapped the whole nation in fear and in mourning, could not perhaps have selected a fitter victim. He came to the field with the fullest light upon the nature of his attempt. He had studied and understood the subject. His father’s fate could not intimidate him; the lenity of the laws which had restored to him his father’s property and rights could not melt him. That he was brave, generous, and possessed many good qualities, only rendered him the more dangerous; that he was enlightened and accomplished made his crime the less excusable; that he was an enthusiast in a wrong cause only made him the more fit to be its martyr.”
Friday, May 17, 2024
“The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton
This novel hits at the heart. It is a brutal love story set in old world New York, written by an author who imbibed that milieu. “New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the Archer-Newland-van-der-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure…. You couldn’t have everything, after all.”
The protagonist, Newland Archer, is a man of this world, who ever-so-gently pushes its boundaries beyond their comported norms, before, most often, scurrying back to the safety of habit. “Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammeled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free…. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues.”
And yet, Archer was never quite satisfied with what he sensed he was missing out from life. “Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts. His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.” His unconsummated love, separated by familial propriety, created the tension that was to become his existence. “He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgements and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency.”
Wharton, unsparingly, takes the measure of the man, “He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to contemplate, great things to delight in.” Archer, late in life, was also able to take measure of himself, “Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else…. There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there and wondered. . . .”
Friday, May 10, 2024
“Fragments” by Heraclitus (translated by Brooks Haxton)
Heraclitus was the heir to the throne of Ephesus in the sixth century B.C. His treatise, described as the first book of philosophy, has been lost to history. What remains are these “fragments,” aphorisms that are often cryptic jewels of wisdom. He writes on knowledge, “Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.” And on the unknown, “Whoever cannot seek/ the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way/ is an impasse.” Sometimes it is hard to tell if he is speaking in metaphor, “Men dig tons of earth/ to find an ounce of gold.”
Heraclitus uses fire as one metaphor for the ever-changing elements of human life. “That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure/ as it burns away.” Also, “As all things change to fire, and fire exhausted/ falls back into things, the crops are sold/ for money spent on food.” Change is another recurring theme. “What was cold soon warms, and warmth soon cools. So moisture dries, and dry things drown.” Perhaps his most famous fragment describes the aspects of a river, “The river/ where you set/ your foot just now/ is gone—/ those waters/ giving way to this, now this.” Some of his fragments sound almost like zen koans, “Under the comb/ the tangle and the straight path/ are the same.” The metaphor of the river recurs, “Just as the river where I step/ is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not.”
Heraclitus’ idea of sleep and the dream world is original in its radical subjectivity, “The waking have one world/ in common. Sleepers/ meanwhile turn aside, each/ into a darkness of his own.” He speaks about the gods with a casual reverence, which is hard to tell if it is feigned, “To a god the wisdom/ of the wisest man/ sounds apish. Beauty/ in a human face/ looks apish too. In everything/ we have attained/ the excellence of apes.” However, his reverence for custom, culture, and institutions appear sincere, “People ought to fight/ to keep their law/ as to defend the city’s walls.” However, he was not a fan of democratic mediocrity, “As for the Ephesians, I would have them youths, elders, and all those between, go hang themselves, leaving the city/ in the abler hands of children. With banishment of Hermodoros/ they say, No man should be/ worthier than average. Thus, my fellow citizens declare, whoever would seek/ excellence can find it/ elsewhere among others.”
Friday, May 3, 2024
“Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami (translated by Jay Rubin)
This is one of Murakami’s most straight forward novels. There are no strange dream sequences and no talking cats. His translator makes the claim that it is also Murakami’s most autobiographical work. After all, the protagonist is a small-town boy who is making his way through college in late 1960s Tokyo. He even has a part-time job at a record store. Music, both classical, jazz, and, of course, the Beatles, punctuates much of the plot. It is also a dark work. There are more than a handful of gruesome deaths referenced, most by suicide. In fact, the narrator’s working motto became, “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”
Although a more or less straight bildungsroman, the book is still told with Murakami’s dead-pan flare built into his simple lines, “Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.” In fact, the suicide of his high school best friend would be the defining event of Toru Watanabe’s existence, “Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger. I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult.”
Friday, April 26, 2024
“The Language Animal” by Charles Taylor
This is slight departure from Taylor’s usual oeuvre. At first glance, this is a more scientific than philosophic endeavor. The book specifically deals with how, teleologically and historically, humans have used language—specifically how our species has used language to separate our mental representations from other animals. Taylor begins, “Linguistic beings are capable of new feelings which affectively reflect their rich sense of the world…. Linguistic beings can be sensitive to distinctions which are lost on prelinguistic animals. Important among these are distinctions involving moral or other values…. Only language beings can identify things as worthy of desire or aversion. For such identifications raise issues of intrinsic rightness. They involve a characterization of things which is not reducible simply to the ways we treat them as objects of desire or aversion. They involve a recognition beyond that, that they ought to be treated in one way or another…. Being in the linguistic dimension not only enables a new kind of awareness of the things which surround us, but also a more refined sense of human meanings…. Speech is the expression of thought. But it isn’t simply an outer clothing for what could exist independently. It is constitutive of reflective, that is, linguistic thought…. Our power to function in the linguistic dimension is tied for its everyday uses, as well as its origins, to expressive speech, as the range of actions in which it is not only communicated, but realized.”
Taylor makes the case that it is impossible to separate the growth of language from the evolution of human culture. “We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, and introduces a dimension of strong value…. We acquire the range of meanings which make up our world through an interplay of embodied expression, and of articulation…. Language allows us to think in universals, as we might say, using concepts and not just proper names…. To understand reality is to break it down into its component parts, and then map how they combine…. This epistemology stressed that our knowledge of the world was built from particulate “ideas”, or inner representations of outer reality. We combine them to produce our view of the world…. Reasoning is combining, and language helps us to do this expeditiously and on a grand scale.”
Language is more than just a third person-objective scientific description of the outer world and of nature. It is embodied in human reality and as such cannot be entirely separated from the subjective viewpoint. Taylor asks, “Would it be possible for us to drop all these other things: tropes, images, symbols, templates, and of course, gestures and literature, and just have this austere language of description and explanation? (I won’t even ask the question whether this would be desirable.) This is a question about human beings; we are not asking whether some kinds of beings which could be imagined could meet these austere and limiting specifications…. It is one of my basic claims in this book that this kind of restricted language is a human impossibility…. [There is an] impossibility of human language in the narrow sense outside the whole range of “symbolic forms”.”
Human language cannot be completely separated from subjective human expressions. “Possessing a language is to be continuously involved in trying to extend its powers of articulation. In other words, we always sense that there are things we cannot properly say, but we would like to express.” Taylor quotes the polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt, “[There is always a] feeling that there is something which the language does not directly contain, but which the [mind/soul], spurred on by language must supply.” Taylor continues, “This endless striving to increase articulacy is the real point behind the famous Humboldt saying about using finite means to infinite ends. The “finite means” here doesn’t refer to an existing stock of words, as the Chomskian interpretation seems to assume; rather it is the finite stock of sounds at our disposal, with which we can find expression for an unlimited range of phenomena…. What Humboldt is on to here is the experience of wanting to say what we cannot yet satisfactorily express…. We need to find a formula which figures the phenomenon we are trying to disclose, be this through metaphor, or analogy, or creative extension of existing terms, or whatever…. The “right word” here discloses, brings the phenomenon properly into view for the first time…. We devise an expression which allows what we are striving to encompass to appear.”
In using language to map our reality, Taylor is describing a generative process. “To grasp a new meaning is to discover a new way of feeling, of experiencing our world. This cannot precede expression…. The constitutive power of language operates here in different ways, one might say at a different level, than it does in our description of independent objects…. In the realm of metabiological meanings, expression opens new and unsuspected realms. The new enacted and/or verbal expressions open up new ways of being in the world. We are in the domain of cultural innovation…. Many of the meanings in our lives come to exist for us when we mark distinctions heretofore unnoticed in our life experience…. After articulation, it becomes part of the explicit shape of meaning for us…. Articulation here alters the shape of what matters to us. It changes us…. The new articulated descriptions allow the world to impinge on us, to moves us, in new ways. That is why we call them “constitutive”.”
Taylor concludes, “The basic thesis of this book is that language can only be understood if we understand its constitutive role in human life…. I have tried to explain this constitutive force of language in terms of the “linguistic dimension”, where the uses of either words or symbols, or expressive actions, is guided by a sense of rightness…. Linguistic awareness is not limited to that facet of the semantic dimension, where the designative logic prevails; in other words, to that set of language games where we are concerned with accurate description of independent objects…. Language is also used to create, alter, and break connections between people. This is indeed, ontogenetically its “primordial” use…. And language can also open new spaces of human meanings: through introducing new terms, and/or through expression-enactment…. It is through story that we find or devise ways of living bearably in time.”
Friday, April 19, 2024
“The Hebrew Bible: Chronicles” (translated by Robert Alter)
Alter introduces the last book of the Hebrew Bible, “Chronicles, fixed in Jewish tradition as the conclusion of the Bible, is, at least from a modern perspective, the most peculiar book of the Hebrew Bible. In all likelihood, it was composed sometime in the late decades of the fifth century B.C.E., after the Return to Zion…. It was probably written by a priest…. The main focus of the book in on the kings of Judah…. Linguistically, because Chronicles hews so closely to the Deuteronomistic History, it does not exhibit a great many features of Late Biblical Hebrew, as one might expect, though not infrequently it reflects a certain loosening of syntactic and idiomatic norms that is characteristic of this late period…. Most prominently, this is a historical account that is intended to highlight the eternal legitimacy of the Davidic dynasty and its firm integration with the priestly hierarchy, which traces its own origins back to Aaron…. This is, in sum, a representation of David as an exemplary establishment figure, unswervingly virtuous, providing precedents and a model for the political and cultic tradition that he is seen as having founded…. It should also be noted that Chronicles incorporates a variety of narrative details that appear nowhere in the Deuteronomistic History. Where they come from remains a matter of conjecture…. In the end, Chronicles offers an object lesson in how as a tradition evolves it may be prone to domesticate the unruly and challenging traits of its own origins…. The national history is painted in black and white, and the haunting shadows, the chiaroscuro, the sudden illuminations of classical Hebrew narrative, vanish in this work.”
Chronicles is, if anything, primarily a list of names and details of the history of the Davidic dynasty. Alter notes that in 1 Chronicles 1:1, “Adam, Seth, Enosh. Chronicles begins abruptly with a patrilineal genealogical list that runs from the first man to Saul, his sons, and his grandson, at the end of chapter 9…. For the modern reader, this is scarcely an inviting way to begin a book.” In 1 Chronicles 4:9, Alter describes a bit of word choice detail and playfulness, within the original Hebrew, “I have born him in pain. Like many naming-speeches in the Bible, this one features a loose approximation between the name and its purported meaning. The Hebrew of her son’s name is ya’bets, and the word for pain is ‘otseb, the same three consonants that appear after the initial yod but in a different order.” Alter explains the main emphases of the book in 1 Chronicles 6:1, “The sons of Levi. The Chronicler appears to have had two special interests in compiling his lengthy lists—marking out the line of David, presumably in the hope of a restoration of the Davidic dynasty, and accounting for the priesthood, probably because he himself belonged to the priestly circles.”
In 1 Chronicles 12:2, Alter alerts us to a historical tidbit, “with either their right hand or their left. The Benjaminite warriors may in fact have trained themselves to be ambidextrous. In Judges 3, the Benjaminite Ehud is able to kill the Moabite King Eglon because, in a surprise attack, he suddenly pulls out his hidden short sword with his left hand.” In Chronicles 21:1 Alter notes another historical and vocabulary detail, “And Satan stood up against Israel…. In 2 Samuel 24 it is God Who incites David, but the Chronicler, not wanting to represent God as perverse, makes Satan the agent. At this late period, it looks as if “The Adversary “ (hasatan) is moving into becoming a demonic figure, and he appears here without the definite article ha, suggesting it has become a name, not just a function.”
Alter describes a bit of history revealed in 2 Chronicles 30:1, “to all Israel and Judah. Hezekiah came to the throne in 715 B.C.E., six years after the northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed by the Assyrians. If the report here is grounded in historical fact, it provides evidence that, although many of the subjects of the northern kingdom were deported by the Assyrians, substantial numbers of them remained. Hezekiah’s political move, then, is to unite the whole Israelite population, north and south, around the Temple cult in Jerusalem.” In 2 Chronicles 35:1, Alter alerts us to a vocabulary choice, “And Josiah made a Passover to the Lord in Jerusalem, and they slaughtered the paschal lamb. The same Hebrew word, pesah, sometimes refers to the festival and sometimes to the sacrifice of the lamb that is the key element in the celebration of the festival. The meaning must be judged according to context.”
Finally, Alter ends his annotations with 2 Chronicles 36:23, “and let him go. This is a single word in the Hebrew, weya’al, and according to the Hebrew canonical order, which this translation follows, it is the very last word of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish tradition has accordingly made much of the appearance of this word at the very end: it is the verb used for “going up” from the Diaspora to the Land of Israel (and retained as such in modern Zionist usage), and it concludes this story of exile and Scripture as a whole on a literally upbeat note, Cyrus’s urging the exiled people to go back up to its native land.”