“The Hebrew Bible: The Song of Songs” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction, “The Song of Songs stands out in its striking distinctiveness—a distinctiveness that deserves to be called wondrous. The delicate yet frank sensuality of this celebration of young love, without reference to God or covenant or Torah, has lost nothing of its immediate freshness over the centuries: these are among the most beautiful love poems that have come down to us from the whole ancient world…. Famously, the erotic nature of the Song constituted a challenge for the framers of the canon, both Jewish and Christian, and their response was to read the poems allegorically…. Both religious traditions, however fervently they clung to this allegorical vision, never succeeded in entirely blocking the erotic power of the text…. Little is known about the origin of these poems…. The book as a whole has an anthological look.”

Alter continues by discussing the poetry. “These poets are finely aware of the long tradition of Hebrew poetry, but notably there is little in the way of allusion to earlier Hebrew texts…. The formal system of parallelism between versets—that is, parts of the line—that governs Hebrew poetry from its earliest extant texts going back to around 1100 B.C.E. is still very much in evidence…. What is remarkable is how consistently the figurative language of these poems evokes the experience of physical love with a delicacy of expression that manifests the poet’s constant delight in likening one thing to another. (The Hebrew verb damah, “to be like,” is repeatedly flaunted.)”

In Song 2:2, Alter describes the simile that introduces the two lovers in these poems, “Like a lily among the thorns. This particular poem unfolds through statement and response in a lovers’ dialogue. She announces herself as a flower; he goes her one better by answering that she is like a flower among the thorns in comparison to other young women.” Next, Alter gives a bit of historical context to Song 2:11, “the winter has passed. The love poetry of the Song of Songs is preeminently poetry of the verdant world of spring. Jewish tradition fixed it to be read on the Sabbath of springtime Passover because of the allegorical interpretation in which the two lovers are identified with God and Israel celebrating their nuptials after the exodus from Egypt, which occurred in early spring.”

Alter details the use of poetic technique in Song 4:4, “Like the tower of David your neck. This simile, like a good many others in the poem, is “Oriental,” reflecting an aesthetic in which the poet pursues the momentum of the object of comparison, half forgetting the thing to which it is compared.” Alter also details the probable provenance of the composition of the book. From Song 6:5, “Your hair is like a herd of goats. This line, together with everything in verses 6 and 7, is a reprise of 4:1-3, though here 4:3a does not appear. This sort of near verbatim recurrence of lines may reflect the anthological nature of the Song of Songs, in which two or more lines of poetry might have migrated from one poem to another.”

Finally, Alter relates what has been a notable absence in this book’s themes. In Song 8:6, he points out, “a fearsome flame. The word for “flame” has the theophoric suffix yah, but this translation follows the scholarly consensus that it is used here as an intensifier, with no theological implication. This would be consistent with the rest of the Song of Songs, where God is neither mentioned nor at issue in the poems.”

“The Maniac” by Benjamin Labatut

This book is classified as fiction, but it is based on fact. It is a bit of a weird book, broken up into three parts. It has no storyline, but is more like three potted biographies. The first section is on the Austrian physicist, Paul Ehrenfest. He went crazy and killed his own son, Vassily, who had been living with Down Syndrome, before shooting himself in the head. The ideas of quantum physics were deeply unsettling for Paul. He mused, “Reason is now untethered from all other deeper, more fundamental aspects of our psyche, and I’m afraid it will lead us by the bit, like a drunken mule…. We lie on our knees, praying to the wrong god, a childish deity who hides at the center of a corrupted world that he can neither govern nor understand.” Labatut reports, Paul “tried to calm down and develop his ideas serenely, but his enthusiasm, and the joy of working once more, free from the heavy fog of melancholia, was simply too much for him to contain. It was this work, and this alone, that would tie his name to history; a solution to the irregular and unpredictable behavior of turbulence, a law behind its irreducible randomness.”

The bulk of Labatut’s book is about John von Neumann. Each chapter in this second section is told in the voice of one of his friends or family members. It is a subjective imagining of the facts of Neumann’s life. The first chapter is told by Eugene Wigner. “There are two kinds of people in this world: Jansci von Neumann and the rest of us…. Did I know what went on inside the mind of Janos von Neumann? No, I can’t say that I did…. Jansci was trying to make sense of the world. He was searching for absolute truth, and he really believed that he would find a mathematical basis for reality.” Theodore von Karman expands, “What von Neumann had tried to do was to find the purest and most basic truths of mathematics, and to express them as unquestionable axioms, statements that could not be denied, disproven, or contradicted, certainties that would never fade or become distorted and so would remain—like a deity—timeless, unchangeable, and eternal. On this solid core, mathematicians could then construct all their theories, unfolding the diverse beauty of quantity, structure, space, and change without fear that they might encounter a monster, some awful chimera born of paradox and contradiction that, once awakened, could tear their tidy, ordered cosmos apart.”

Kurt Godel ripped this dream apart. At the Sixth Congress of German Physicists and Mathematicians, according to Neumann, he said, stuttering, “I b-believe that we can p-postulate, within any consistent f-formal system, a statement that is t-true but that can never be pr-proven within the rules of said system.” The remarks were informal so the exact record is lost to time. According to Wigner, “It was the end of Hilbert’s program…. Janos never worked on the foundations of mathematics again. He remained in awe of Godel for the rest of his life.” Neumann, himself, gushed about Godel, “His achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental…. It will never be possible to acquire with mathematical means the certainty that mathematics does not contain contradictions…. Godel is irreplaceable; he is the only mathematician alive about whom I would dare to make this statement.” Wigner concludes, “From Godel onward, I was always afraid of [Neumann], because once he abandoned his juvenile faith in mathematics he became more practical and effective than before, but also dangerous. He was, in a very real sense, set free.”

Later, Wigner summarizes, “I have always resisted condemning Jansci, or judging him too harshly, because I believe that a mind like his—one of inexorable logic—must have made him understand and accept many things that most of us do not even want to acknowledge, and cannot begin to comprehend. He did not see the way the rest of us do, and this colored many of his moral judgments. With his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, for example, he wasn’t trying to fight a war, or beat the casino, or finally win a game of poker; he was aiming at nothing less than the complete mathematization of human motivation, he was trying to capture some part of mankind’s soul with mathematics.”

Sydney Brenner reveals, “I was part of the group of scientists that discovered the role that messenger RNA plays in all living cells. Essentially, it’s like a minuscule machine that copies information from DNA and then carries it to a structure that uses it to make proteins, the building blocks of life…. I always confess that it came from one of von Neumann’s lesser-known articles, a very short but powerful thought experiment about what it takes to make a self-reproducing machine…. He managed to determine the logical rules behind all modes of self-replication, whether biological, mechanical, or digital…. Von Neumann demonstrates that you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being. You need both things: to make a copy and to endow it with the instructions needed to build itself…. Right there, in that paper written in the late 1940s, he depicts the way in which DNA and RNA work…. Thanks to him, in modern biology we have this very peculiar situation: its most fundamental and precise mathematical basis was established first, and then we found out how life on Earth had actually gone about implementing it. That’s not the way things go.”

Labatut’s third section is about the Go champion, Lee Sedol, and his battle against AlphaGo, designed by Demis Hassabis’ Deep Mind. Lee, himself, enthuses, “If someone was somehow capable of fully understanding Go, and by that I mean not just the positions of the stones and the way they relate to one another but the hidden, almost imperceptible patterns that lie beneath its ever-changing formations, I believe it would be the same as peering into the mind of God.” Labatut explains, “While the total number of possible chess games is somewhere close to 10^123, which is one followed by a hundred and twenty-three zeros, the number of all possible Go games is almost unimaginably larger: over 10^700 potential games.” Labatut continues, “When future historians look back at our time and try to pin down the first glimmer of a true artificial intelligence, they may well find it in a single move during the second game between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, played on the tenth of March 2016: move 37…. It was unlike anything a computer had ever done before. It was also different from anything that a human being had ever been known to consider. It was something new, a complete break from tradition, a radical departure from thousands of years of accumulated wisdom.” Lee concludes, “I thought I was the best, or at least one of the best. But then this artificial intelligence  put the final nail in my coffin. It is simply unbeatable. In that situation, it doesn’t matter how much you try. I don’t see the point. I started playing when I was five. Back then, it was all about courtesy and manners. It was more like learning an art form than a game. As I grew up, Go started to be seen as a mind game, but what I learned was an art. Go is a work of art made by two people. Now it’s totally different. After the advent of AI, the concept of Go itself has changed.”

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

lter begins by introducing the anomalies in the Book of Job. “The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon. Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers…. The Book of Job belongs to the international movement of ancient Near Eastern Wisdom literature in its universalist perspective—there are no Israelite characters in the text, though all the speakers are monotheists…. It is equally linked with Wisdom literature in its investigation of the problem of theodicy.”

Alter describes the majestic beauty of the Job poet’s verse. “The Book of Job is, of course, a theological argument, but it is a theological argument conducted in poetry…. Biblical poetry in general works through a system of intensifications, heightening or focusing or concretizing the utterance of the first verset of a line in the approximate semantic parallelism of the second verset…. All biblical poetry, because it is formally based in part on semantic parallelism, is driven to search for synonyms. No other biblical poet, however, exhibits the virtuosity in the command of rich synonymity that is displayed by the Job poet…. The other chief resource deployed in the poetry that Job speaks is its extraordinary metaphoric inventiveness…. The fecundity of metaphor, moreover, is allied with a keenly observant interest in the processes of nature that is also rather unusual for a biblical poet…. Still another source of metaphor tapped by the Job poet, beyond quotidian reality and nature, is mythology…. The third—and, ultimately, decisive—level of poetry in the book is manifested when the Lord addresses Job out of the whirlwind. Here, too, the Job poet’s keen interest in nature is evident…. God’s thundering challenge to Job is not bullying. Rather, it rousingly introduces a comprehensive overview of the nature of reality that exposes the limits of Job’s human perspective.”

Beautiful and arresting metaphors abound in the Book of Job. In Job 3:9, Alter relates, “the eyelids of dawn. This exquisite and surprising image—another hallmark of this poet’s originality—simultaneously indicates the first crack of light on the eastern horizon and the movement of the awakening person’s eyes taking in the first light of day.”

In Job 9:22-24, Alter details Job’s main argument against the Lord, “the blameless and the wicked he destroys. This single verset compactly summarizes Job’s argument against the mainline biblical notion of God’s justice. Observing the reality of human events, including, of course, the disasters that have beset him, he sees no neat system of reward for the virtuous and punishment for the transgressor: the purported system of divine justice is essentially arbitrary…. He mocks the innocent’s plight…. God’s mockery of the innocent makes him not just arbitrary but sadistic…. The earth is given in the wicked man’s hand. Job now steps up his argument. God is not merely arbitrary; he actually tilts the conduct of the world to favor the wicked.”

Alter points out the aspects of Wisdom literature that appear in the book. In Job 37:24, he relates, “He does not regard all the wise of heart. As the Hymn to Wisdom concluded in Job 28:28, “fear of the Master, that is wisdom,” and God has no special regard for those who imagine they have attained understanding independently through the exercise of intellect. This final line would be a last rebuke to Job, who has had the presumption to think he knows how the system of divine justice should work and hence dared to challenge God.”

In Job 39:30, Alter describes the brutal honest reality that the Job poet versifies, “His chicks lap up blood. One of the remarkable aspects of the Job poet’s vision of nature is that it is so completely unsentimental…. The concluding image, then, of God’s first speech is of the fledgling eagles in the nest, their little beaks open to gulp down the bloody scraps of flesh that their parent has brought them. The moral calculus of nature clearly does not jibe with the simple set of equations and consequences laid out in Proverbs and Psalms.”

“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is the first book in a long time that I have given a reread. On a second read, it did not disappoint. I was tempted to give another translation a whirl, but who are we kidding? Pevear and Volokhonsky might not be as unanimously praised for their Tolstoy as their Dostoyevsky, but they are still the gold standard. At heart, this is a story of a society bound by conservatism, tradition, and honor. The plot also relates how the Russian aristocracy acts and reacts to those who do not know their place and push the bounds of polite company’s limits. “Vronsky’s life was especially fortunate in that he had a code of rules which unquestionably defined everything that ought and ought not to be done. The code embraced a very small circle of conditions, but the rules were unquestionable and, never going outside that circle, Vronsky never hesitated a moment in doing what ought to be done…. These rules might not all be very reasonable or very nice, but they were unquestionable.”

Tolstoy is also telling a love story, or, in fact, two love stories, two very different stories, though intimately intertwined. “As a bachelor, seeing the married life of others, their trifling cares, quarrels, jealousy, he used only to smile scornfully to himself. In his own future married life, he was convinced, there not only could be nothing like that, but even all its external forms, it seemed to him, were bound to be in every way completely unlike other people’s lives. And suddenly, instead of that, his life with his wife did not form itself in any special way, but was, on the contrary, formed entirely of those insignificant trifles he had scorned so much before, but which now, against his will, acquired an extraordinary and irrefutable significance. And Levin saw that to arrange all those trifles was by no means as easy as it had seemed to him before.”

Living up to society’s moral codes and hypocrisies was even harder for a noblewoman. “Abstractly, theoretically, she not only justified but even approved of what Anna had done. Weary of the monotony of a moral life, as irreproachably moral women in general often are, she not only excused criminal love from a distance but even envied it. Besides, she loved Anna from the heart. But in reality, seeing her among these people she found so alien, with their good tone that was so new to her, she felt awkward…. In general, abstractly, Dolly approved of what Anna had done, but to see the man for whose sake she had done it was unpleasant for her. Besides, she had never liked Vronsky.” Anna, speaking to Levin, shall get the last word herself, “Tell your wife that I love her as before, and if she cannot forgive me my situation, I wish her never to forgive me. In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.”