“The Hebrew Bible: Kings” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction by introducing the Deuteronomistic influences that pervade the Book of Kings. “The Book of Kings proper exhibits an approach to politics, character, and historical causation that is quite different from the one that informs the David story…. The Deuteronomistic compiler repeatedly invokes the stipulation that there can be only one legitimate place of worship, which is the temple in Jerusalem—an idea that became firmly entrenched only with King Josiah’s reforms around 621 B.C.E., scant decades before the Babylonian exile…. Again and again, the compiler, with his overriding concern for the exclusivity of the cult in the Jerusalem temple, inveighs against both northern and southern kings in formulaic language for allowing the people to burn incense and offer sacrifice on “high places,” that is, local ritual altars…. It seems likely that a good deal of circumstantial detail about the various kings was deemed irrelevant to this narrative, encompassing four centuries of Israelite history, that is meant to expound the cumulative chain of actions that led to two nationally traumatic events, the destruction of the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. and, 135 years later, the destruction of its southern counterpart.”

Alter begins his textual analysis by going into detail about the Deuteronomistic interpolations in the book, beginning in 1 Kings 2:3-4, “These two relatively long verses are an unusual instance of the intervention of a Deuteronomistic editor in the dialogue of the original David story that was composed perhaps nearly four centuries before him…. The very mention of the Teaching [torah] of Moses is a hallmark of the Deuteronomist, and as phrase and concept did not yet have currency in the tenth century. The long sentences loaded with synonyms are also uncharacteristic of the author of the David story.”

In 1 Kings 3:1, Alter relates the historical political background that is often incorporated into the biblical story. Alter also includes a bit of semantic exposition, “And Solomon became son-in-law to Pharaoh. The Hebrew verb, although it involves marriage, indicates an establishment of relationship between the groom and the father of the bride. The marriage is thus politically motivated and will be the first of many such unions for Solomon in his effort to consolidate the mini-empire created by his father…. took. This ordinary verb often has the force of “marry,” as here.”

Alter describes the defining trait of Solomon, wisdom, which is evidenced repeatedly in the biblical narrative. In 1 Kings 9:2, “the LORD appeared to Solomon a second time. Solomon’s royal enterprise is framed by two revelations. Early in his reign, God appears to him at Gibeon and grants him the gift of wisdom (3:5-14). The wisdom is first manifested in the episode of the Judgment of Solomon and in his composing proverbs. His great building projects, now completed, may reflect another kind of wisdom because they consolidate his rule. Now God comes to him to tell him that the sanctity of the Temple is divinely ratified.”

Alter often informs when the biblical story conforms or contradicts the extant historical records. In 1 Kings 14:25, “Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem. Finally, the biblical text gives us a Pharaoh with a name. An inscription at one entrance of a sanctuary at Karnak in fact offers a list of towns in Judah and Israel that Shishak attacked in the course of a sweeping military campaign in 926 B.C.E. Jerusalem, however, does not appear on the list. The language of the biblical text here is a little vague: Shishak “came up against Jerusalem” and “took the treasures.” This leaves open the possibility that he besieged the city without conquering it and that he extorted the treasures from Rehoboam in return for lifting the siege.”

The prophet Elijah is often cited as a biblical precursor to Jesus. In 1 Kings 17:14 and in 17:24, “The jar of flour will not go empty nor will the cruse of oil be drained. This is the point at which Elijah’s role as a miracle worker becomes explicit…. It is obviously Elijah, not Moses or Isaiah, who establishes the template for many of the stories about Jesus in the Gospels. It was also this aspect of Elijah as a miraculous and compassionate intervener on behalf of the wretched of the earth that was picked up by later Jewish folklore. His other role, as implacable reprover, was not embraced by folk-tradition…. Now I know that you are a man of God, and the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth…. The two aspects of Elijah’s mission—wonder worker and prophesier-reprover—are interdependent, the former demonstrating to skeptics the authority of the latter. This pattern, which will be picked up in the stories about Jesus, does not appear in the reports about the prophets before Elijah.”

In 2 Kings 20:17, Alter again reconciles the historical record with the biblical narrative, “a time is coming when everything that is in your house and that your fathers stored up till this day will be borne off to Babylonia. This dire prophecy is presented as punishment for Hezekiah’s imprudence in exposing all his treasures to the eyes of the Babylonian visitors. Many scholars think that the episode was added over a century later in an effort to explain the despoiling of Jerusalem during the reign of Jehoiakim in 597 B.C.E. or in the final destruction of the city in 586 B.C.E.”

Alter notes a final moment of Deuteronomistic insertion into the narrative in 2 Kings 22:8, “I have found a book of teaching. The identical designation sefer hatorah occurs in Deuteronomy 30:10…. For two centuries, the scholarly consensus, despite some dissent, has been that the found book is Deuteronomy. Although attributed to Moses, it would have been written in the reign of Josiah…. The book “found” in 621 B.C.E. was also not altogether identical with Deuteronomy as we have it, which almost certainly included some later elements, and was not edited in the form that has come down to us until the Babylonian exile. The major new emphases of the book brought to Josiah were repeated stress on the exclusivity of the cult of Jerusalem (“the place that I shall choose”) and the dire warnings of imminent disaster and exile if the people fail to fulfill its covenant with God.”

“The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han, for once, delves explicitly into eastern thought, though, as usual, comparing and contrasting its tenets with western philosophy, particularly the Greeks and German idealists, along the way. His focus is on Zen, but he also describes Buddhism more generally. Han begins with the concept of nothingness and the lack of an inner subject in Zen. “The Buddhist nothing is opposed to inwardness…. The Buddhist nothing’s lack of ‘exclusive subjectivity’ or ‘conscious will’ is not a ‘deficiency’ but a strength of Buddhism. The absence of ‘will’ or ‘subjectivity’ is precisely what constitutes the peacefulness of Buddhism…. Buddhism’s foundation is an empty centre that does not exclude anything…. The Zen sayings about Buddha being ‘broken tiles and pebbles’ or ‘three pounds of flax’ indicate the orientation towards immanence in the spiritual attitude of Zen Buddhism. They express the ‘everyday mind’ that makes Zen Buddhism a religion of immanence…. The worldview of Zen Buddhism is not directed upwards, nor is it oriented towards a centre. It lacks a ruling centre. One might also say: the centre is everywhere…. In a single plum blossom, the whole universe blooms…. The nothing of Zen Buddhism does not offer anything to hold on to, no solid ‘ground’ that one could be sure of or ascertain, nothing that one could cling to…. The path does not lead into ‘transcendence’. One cannot flee from the world, because there is no other world.”

Having dealt with both a lack of inwardness and of transcendence, Han moves on to the Buddhist concept of emptiness. “Substance (Latin: substantia, Greek: hypostasis, hypokeimenon, ousia) is without a doubt the fundamental concept of occidental thought…. The central Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) is in many respects a counter-concept to substance…. It empties out all being that remains within itself, that insists on itself or closes itself up in itself. Sunyata spills such beings into an openness, into an open, stretched-out distance…. Emptiness, however, is not a principle of creation; it is not a primary ‘cause’ from which all beings, all forms, ‘emerge’…. It does not mark a ‘transcendence’ that precedes the forms as they appear. Form and emptiness are situated on the same level of being…. Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen…. One individual being reflects the whole in itself, and the whole dwells in this one being…. Emptiness thus does not mean the negation of the individual…. The emptiness or the nothing of Zen Buddhism is therefore not a simple negation of beings, not a formula for nihilism or scepticism. Rather, it represents an utmost affirmation of being. What is negated is only the substance-like delimitation that produces tension…. In just one thing, then, the whole world dwells.”

As is his want in almost all of his books, Han brings in Hegel. “Hegel’s notion of spirit, with inwardness being its fundamental trait, is certainly opposed to the Zen Buddhist notion of spirit. Zen Buddhist practice is an attempt at de-internalizing spirit without, however, immersing it in, or turning it into, a pure ‘outside’ and without hollowing it out by reducing it to a ‘vegetative covering’. The aim is to empty out the spirit, to make it awake and collected without inwardness. Satori [understanding] may well refer to that state of the spirit in which spirit flowers, so to speak…. Satori is the other of selfhood, the other of inwardness…. Spirit de-internalizes itself in an indifference, even in friendliness.”

Of course, Han also brings in Heidegger, in opposition to the Zen concept of wandering through life and being at home nowhere. “Dasein perceives the world only with regard to itself, to its own possibilities of being…. The heart that dwells nowhere is opposed to the kind of subject whose fundamental trait is the continual return to itself…. Dwelling nowhere, wandering, presupposes a radical renunciation of possession, of what is mine. Basho walks himself and his possessions away…. The temporality of his hiking is without future…. His wandering is free of any teleological or theological meaning. Basho has always already arrived…. Basho is hiking because he strives to be nowhere…. Dwelling nowhere radically questions the paradigm of identity…. The heart that dwells nowhere, that does not cling on to anything, follows the changing circumstances…. In its detachment, the heart is not tied to anything, and it knows neither joy nor sorrow, neither love nor hate. The heart that dwells nowhere is too empty, so to speak, to be capable of love or hate, joy or sorrow…. Emptiness, however, cannot be an object of desire, for it is nothing. It empties out all desire…. Emptiness, however, is not the wholly other of the multiform, manifold world. It is the world…. To dwell nowhere is not to flee from the world. It is not the negation of dwelling in this world.”

Han finishes this short treatise by taking on death and friendship—an odd pairing. “Death does not put an end to what is mine. Instead as my death, it calls forth an intense I am. I am dying therefore means: I am…. In Zen Buddhism, death is not a catastrophe or a scandal, but nor does it set in motion a labour of mourning that works compulsively against finitude…. In the face of death Zen Buddhism cultivates an attitude of letting go [Gelassenheit] that is free of heroism and desire…. Finitude begins to shine, without the brilliance of infinity or the semblance of eternity…. The impermanent world is not transcended towards infinity. You do not move somewhere else. Rather, you immerse yourself in impermanence.” Finally, Han concludes, “Emptiness must be understood as a medium of friendliness. In the field of emptiness, there are no strict demarcations. Nothing remains isolated in itself or within itself. Things nestle up to one another, reflect each other. Emptiness de-internalizes the I into a rei amicae that opens up like a guest house…. Original friendliness is not something that is exchanged between persons; it is not a case of ‘someone’ being friendly towards ‘someone’. Rather, one should say: no one is friendly…. It is a gesture of emptiness.”

“Either/Or” by Elif Batuman

This sequel in Batuman’s chronicle of her narrator, Selin’s, time at Harvard takes the reader through sophomore year. There is her still unrequited love for her now-graduated beau, Ivan, her deep late-night conversations with her best friend, Svetlana, her navigating the living situation with her new roommate, Riley, and her budding attempts at her own career in writing. “Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.” In her creative writing class, at least, she is self-aware, “Everything we wrote was awful. Why did we have to talk about it? All the suggestions felt random and performative.”

Despite her more grownup aspirations, Selin is still very much a college student. “I was still the kind of person who thought it was interesting to see what happened if you only ate cashews for a week.” Her discussions with Svetlana drip with academic jargon. “We talked a lot about whether different things were a content or a form.” Selin also continues to take intensive Russian language classes, “A famous Soviet bard died. All the Russian instructors were depressed…. In his honor, all the Russian students had to memorize poems by Pushkin. This made sense according to Russian people’s logic, where everything always connected to Pushkin.” Much of this novel focuses on Selin’s attempts to get over Ivan and to develop her own love life. “Obviously all the girls, whether they talked about it or not, were on the lookout for any reprieve from the hassle of not having a boyfriend: the way it exposed you to censure and nosiness…. This thing with the boyfriends—it wasn’t a passing fad. Nothing would go back to how it had been. It would become more and more like the way it was.”

Re the title of the novel, there are numerous Kierkegaard-inspired digressions on the nobility of the ethical versus the aesthetic life. “I felt it was the time for stocktaking: for looking back at what I had learned about the aesthetic life…. In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This is what I had learned from books…. What were you supposed to do now: seduce and abandon men? Was that what feminism made possible? Something about the idea didn’t feel aesthetic.”

“Cratylus” by Plato (translated by C.D.C. Reeve)

This dialogue, by Plato, involves Socrates debating both Hermogenes and Cratylus. It focuses on the concept of names, their origins, and their innate correctness. Socrates suggests, “It’s the work of a rule-setter, it seems, to make a name. And if names are to be given well, a dialectician must supervise him…. So Cratylus is right in saying that things have natural names, and that not everyone is a craftsman of names, but only someone who looks to the natural name of each thing and is able to put form into letters and syllables…. This much is clearer than before, that names do possess some sort of natural correctness and that it isn’t every man who knows how to name things well.”

Later on in the discussion, Socrates considers the history of naming, “We are most likely to find correctly given names among those concerned with the things that by nature always are, since it is proper for their names to be given with the greatest care…. If we ever get hold of a name that isn’t composed out of other names, we’ll be right to say that at last we’ve reached an element, which cannot any longer be carried back to other names…. And if primary names are indeed names, they must make the things that are as clear as possible to us…. We said that the correctness of a name consists in displaying the nature of the thing it names…. Now, a name is an imitation, just as a painting or portrait is…. Both convention and usage must contribute something to expressing what we mean when we speak…. When you know what a name is like, and it is like the thing it names, then you also know the thing.”

Socrates concludes by assessing whether the name or the thing itself is what must first be comprehended. “The name-giver might have made a mistake at the beginning and then forced the other names to be consistent with it…. That’s why every man must think a lot about the first principles of any thing and investigate them thoroughly to see whether or not it’s correct to assume them…. It seems like it must be possible to learn about the things that are, independently of names…. It’s really the case that one can learn about things through names and that one can also learn about them through themselves…. It is far better to investigate them and learn about them through themselves than to do so through their names.”

“The Way We Live Now” by Anthony Trollope

This standalone novel, by Trollope, originally published in serial form, is much to do about money in Victorian England—who has it, who is making it, and who needs it. It is about an aristocracy with land and titles, but short on ready cash and a speculative merchant class with seemingly unreserved flows of new wealth, now hungry to also increase their status and rank within polite society. Marriage was often the most common way of uniting these two needy factions. Debts, mortgages, stock shares, speculations, and leverage were the coin of the times. “He never for a moment thought of paying his bills. Even the large sum of which he had become so unexpectedly possessed would not have gone far with him in such a quixotic object as that; but he could now look bright, and buy presents, and be seen with money in his hands. It is hard even to make love in these days without something in your purse.”

Melmotte, the wealthy financial speculator, is viewed by much of society as the greatest man of his age, while others never let him forget his common origins and his ignoble profession. “I look upon him as dirt in the gutter. To me, in my old-fashioned way, all his money, if he has it, can make no difference…. No one pretends to think that he is a gentleman. There is a consciousness among all who speak of him that he amasses his money, not by honest trade, but by unknown tricks—as does a card sharper. He is one whom we would not admit into our kitchens, much less to our tables, on the score of his own merits. But because he has learned the art of making money, we not only put up with him, but settle upon his carcass as so many birds of prey.”

The aristocracy maybe in want of money, but still lives within the bounds of its own eccentric code. “I’m not very good at saying my prayers, but I do think there’s something in that bit about forgiving people. Of course cheating isn’t very nice: and it isn’t very nice for a fellow to play when he knows he can’t pay; but I don’t know that it’s worse than getting drunk like Dolly Longstaffe, or quarreling with everybody as Grasslough does—or trying to marry some poor devil of a girl merely because she’s got money. I believe in living in glass houses, but I don’t believe in throwing stones…. I often think I shouldn’t have been the first to pick up a stone and pitch it at that woman. Live and let live—that’s my motto!”

In the battle between new and old money the tides were quickly shifting within society. “Augustus Melmotte was becoming greater and greater in every direction—mightier and mightier every day. He was learning to despise mere lords, and to feel that he might even domineer over a duke. In truth he did recognize it as a fact that he must either domineer over dukes, or else go to the wall. It can hardly be said of him that he had intended to play so high a game, but the game that he had intended to play had become thus high of its own accord. A man cannot always restrain his own doings and keep them within the limits which he had himself planned. They will very often fall short of the magnitude to which his ambition has aspired. They will sometimes soar higher than his own imagination. So it had now been with Mr Melmotte. He had contemplated great things; but the things which he was achieving were beyond his contemplation.”

But in this time of speculation and castles of wealth built on foundations of sand, the faster one’s rise, often, the harder one’s fall. “A failure! Of course he’s a failure, whether rich or poor—a miserable imposition, a hollow vulgar fraud from beginning to end—too insignificant for you and me to talk of, were it not for that his position is a sign of the degeneracy of our age.” Eventually, even those in society who initially praised the bold men of business would begin to question this method of acquisition of wealth. “Hazily, as through a thick fog, Lord Nidderdale thought that he did see something of the troubles, as he had long seen something of the glories, of commerce on an extended scale, and an idea occurred to him that it might be almost more exciting than whist or unlimited loo.” The men of business, themselves, had always been clear-eyed from the start. “Fisker was not only unscrupulous himself, but he had a thorough contempt for scruples in others. According to his theory of life, nine hundred and ninety-nine men were obscure because of their scruples, whilst the thousandth man predominated and cropped up into the splendour of commercial wealth because he was free from such bondage.”