“Leaving The Atocha Station” by Ben Lerner

By the first page of this novel you know exactly who this narrator is. “The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate the noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited the coffee…. Next my project required dropping myself back through the skylight, shitting, taking a shower, my white pills, and getting dressed. Then I’d find my bag, which contained a bilingual edition of Lorca’s Collected Poems, my two notebooks, a pocket dictionary, John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, drugs, and leave for the Prado.” This type of self-styled creative is well worn, but still worth getting into the head of when portrayed convincingly. Soon, he is pondering art. “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change…. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf.” The narrator, Adam, is living in Madrid on a Fulbright Fellowship, supposedly researching a historical epic on the Spanish Civil War to be written in verse. He spends much of his time scoring hash from African illegal immigrants, flirting with women, and making fun of the American tourists (in his own head). He can speak rudimentary Spanish, but in his struggle to learn it better he alternates between false confidence and hopelessness. “My plan had been to teach myself Spanish by reading masterworks of Spanish literature and I had fantasized about the nature and effect of a Spanish thus learned, how its archaic flavor and formally heightened rhetoric would collide with the mundanities of daily life, giving the impression less of someone from a foreign country than someone from a foreign time.” Often, his struggle with language generates his most beautiful thoughts. “The song was Portugese, not Spanish; I experienced the slow shading of one language into another, a powerful effect only my ignorance of both enabled.” Adam is a published poet and he is always trying to measure up to other writers, both past and present. “I forced myself to listen as if the poem were unpredictable and profound, as if that were given somehow, and any failure to be compelled would be exclusively my own…. I just smiled slightly in a way intended to communicate that my own compliment had been graciousness and that I in fact believed his writing constituted a new low for his or any language, his or any art.” Adam is immensely concerned with appearances, his and others, and, so, often puts on a pose. “I didn’t know how to compose my face, if indifference tinged with vague disdain was still the right expression. If I could have smiled Teresa’s inscrutable smile, I would have.” However, through it all, his self-importance is saved by his slightly biting humor. “The prospect of being a writer in residence in a modern palace frequented by the beautiful was not without its allure, however exhausting it would be for my face.”

“The Analects” by Confucius (translated by Annping Chin)

There is arguably no work of Chinese philosophy more famous than “The Analects.” Chin’s translation includes indispensable annotations embedded within the text. She gives her own opinions on Confucius’ more enigmatic sayings, suggests alternative interpretations where possible, and gives the background of the historical period, necessary to grasp the content. Throughout “The Analects,” Confucius details the way to live the best life—a moral life of humaneness. In the text, he is referred to most often as “The Master.” Section 4.11 describes Confucius’ thoughts on living the life of a gentleman. It says, “The Master said, “The gentleman [junzi] worries about the condition of his moral character, while the common man [xiaoren] worries about [whether he can hold on to] his land. The gentleman is conscious of [not breaking] the law, while the common man is conscious of what benefits he might reap [from the state].”” In 4.15, Master Zeng, one of Confucius’ disciples, relates, “The Master’s way consists of doing one’s best to fulfill one’s humanity [zhong] and treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity [shu].” Chin helpfully expounds, “Zhong and shu, in the view of most traditional scholars, represent an accurate summary of Confucius’ teachings.” Further, she quotes Qing era scholar, Jiao Xun, “What is zhong and shu? To fulfill oneself and others.”

To be in a state of constant learning and then to be able to use that knowledge towards future problems was of utmost importance to Confucius. 7.2 states, “The Master said, “To retain knowledge quietly in my mind, to learn without ever feeling sated, not to weary of teaching [hui]—these things are not a problem for me.”” Chin comments, “Several scholars say that “quietly” (mo) is the most important word here. Mo does not refer to the absence of sound, they say, because a person can retain something in his mind quietly even when he is in a crowd. Which is what Confucius was able to do: he absorbed and internalized what he’d learned, and so he never felt sated and always wanted more.” Confucius also always pointed towards striving for the Way. In 7.6, “The Master said, “Set your aim for the Way, hold on to your integrity, rely on your humaneness, and get your share of play in the arts.””

In 7.19, Confucius gives a description of himself to one of his disciples, Zilu. “The Governor of She asked Zilu about Confucius, and Zilu gave no answer. The Master later said to Zilu, “Why didn’t you simply say that he is the sort of person who forgets to eat when pursuing a question, who forgets to worry when suffused with joy, and who does not note that old age is coming?”” Humbleness was another trait preached by Confucius. In 9.4, “The Master stayed away from four things: he did not put forth theories or conjectures; he did not think that he must be right; he was not obdurate; he was not self-centered.” Confucius also advised turning the other cheek. He was concerned with the morals of himself, not those of others. In 12.6, “The Master said, “When slanders that seep under your skin and grievances that cut through the flesh do not drive you to an immediate response, you may be said to have keen perception.””

In 13.28, Confucius describes the difference in relations between your friends and your family. “The Master said, “He must be critical, encouraging, and affable to be considered good enough to serve in government: critical and encouraging to his friends; affable to his brothers.” In Chin’s annotations, she quotes the scholar Liu Baonan, “Friends are drawn together by their sense of rightness; brothers stay together because of the love and affection they have for each other.” Chin then quotes Mencius, “Father and son would be at odds if they were to tax each other over a moral issue. It is for friends to demand goodness from each other. For father and son to do so would seriously undermine the love between them.”

In 14.24, Confucius again returns to familiar themes—the right way of learning and a reverence for the past. “The Master said, “People of antiquity engaged in learning to cultivate themselves. People today engage in learning with an eye towards others.”” In 14.31, Confucius advises to prepare for the worst, but never to expect it, in one’s relations with others. “The Master said, “Not to anticipate deception and not to expect bad faith and yet to be the first to be aware of such behavior—this is proof of one’s worthiness.”” 15.3 returns yet again to the theme of using knowledge fruitfully. “The Master said, “Si [Zigong] do you think I am the sort of person who learns many things and who retains knowledge in his mind?” Zigong replied, “Yes. Is it not so?” “No. I bind it together into a single thread.””

Confucius was often asked to encapsulate all of his wisdom. In 15.24, his disciple, “Zigong, asked, “Is there a single word that can serve as the guide to conduct throughout one’s life?” The Master said, “It is perhaps the word shu. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not want [others to impose on you].”” Chin comments, in 4.15, “I translate shu as “treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity,” which agrees in spirit with Confucius’ explanation of shu here.” In 15.31, Confucius yet again goes back to the necessity of holding onto knowledge and being able to apply it as the most important aspect of learning. “The Master said, “Once I spent a whole day thinking, not bothering to eat, and a whole night thinking, not bothering to sleep, but I gained nothing from it. It would have been better if I’d spent the time learning something.”” For Confucius, life was a constant state of learning new things, having an open mind, and applying his knowledge to the right conduct of humaneness. He ends 18.8 revealing, “I have no preconceptions about what one can or cannot do.” Chin explains, this is “a summing-up of what he has been saying all along about himself—in this chapter and throughout the Analects—that he does not approach life with preconceived notions and will not let his thought and action be the vehicle of an overarching principle. This meant, of course, that for each step of the way, he would have to look at the world anew and rely on his learning of a lifetime to help him see clearly what he “can or cannot do.””

“Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture” by Carl E. Schorske

In this collection of essays, Schorske evokes the changing mood of Viennese artists and intellectuals at the turn of last century. He details the rapid transformation of cultural, political, educational, and artistic trends in Habsburg Austria. In his first essay, “Politics and the Psyche: Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal,” Schorske begins, “the bourgeois turned his appropriated aesthetic culture inward to the cultivation of the self, of his personal uniqueness.” The middle class Viennese, as they gained in wealth and status, began turning away from engagement in politics and worldly affairs to mimic the aristocracy’s aesthetic tastes for refinement, particularly in opera and literature. The arts became an escape from reality. It was a substitute for the life of action. “Art became transformed from an ornament to an essence, from an expression of value to a source of value.” For the writer Arthur Schnitzler, the tension of life was between morality and instinct. He was ambivalently stuck in the middle, unable to choose a side. For many of his era, Schnitzler exemplified the apprehension between a life within society and its ethical responsibilities or retreating into the interior of the Self and personal feelings. “The social aristocrat can no longer control the reality; the aesthetic aristocrat cannot understand it.” For Hugo von Hofmannsthal the struggle was also how art and beauty could relate to the exterior world. “How shall art transcend the passive rendering of beauty to achieve a fruitful relationship to the life of the world?” Art awakened man’s instincts, but what more? Schorske states that Hofmannsthal’s “contribution was to show that beauty, which his culture had seen merely as an escape from the everyday world, pointed to another world—the ill-defined realm of the irrational…. With all its danger, the instinctual element in man, “the natural in us,” provided the power whereby one could escape from the prison of aestheticism, from the paralysis of narcissistic sensibility.” As for instinct’s relationship with civic society, “Where law ignores instinct, instinct rebels and subverts order. Politics is here psychologized, psychology politicized.”

Schorske’s second essay is on the construction of the Ringstrasse and the changing of Austrian architectural and urban planning tastes, in general. He contrasts Camillo Sitte, a defender of the old school artisans, with Otto Wagner, a modernist architect. Schorske begins, “Sitte’s deeply held assumption [was] that “artistic” and “modern” were somehow antithetical terms. The “modern” to him meant the technical and rational aspects of city building, the primacy of what he repeatedly referred to as “traffic, hygeiene, etc.”” Sitte forcefully expounded, “Modern systems! Yes! To conceive everything systematically, and never to deviate a hair’s breadth from the formula once it’s established, until all genius is tortured to death, all joyful sense of life suffocated, that is the mark of our time.” Otto Wagner disagreed about the purpose of art, stating, “The function of art is to consecrate all that emerges, in the fulfillment of [practical] aims…. Art has the task of adapting the face of the city to contemporary humanity.” Schorske relates the three principles Wagner developed for his new urban construction, “the primacy of function (Zweck) as determinant of form;…. the candid use of modern materials in terms of their inherent properties;…. a general commitment to the a-historical, quasi-symbolic language of modernity.” However, Schorske relates the single theme that did unite these two contradictory men, “Although both theorists rebelled in their divergent ways against the Ringstrasse’s uneasy synthesis of historic beauty and modern utility, both retained fidelity to one of the cardinal values of liberal bourgeois city builders: monumentality.”

Schorske’s next essay deals with three populist politicians, who each appealed to very different bases. All three men emerged in reaction to the dominant liberal values expressed by the Austrian elites. “The liberals succeeded, in releasing the political energies of the masses, but against themselves rather than against their ancient foes. Every shot aimed at the enemy above produced a hostile salvo from below…. The new anti-liberal mass movements—Czech nationalism, Pan-Germanism, Christian Socialism, Social Democracy, and Zionism—rose from below to challenge the trusteeship of the educated middle class, to paralyze its political system, and to undermine its confidence in the rational structure of history…. Against the dry, rational politics of liberalism, the powerful leaders of these movements developed what became known as “the sharper key,” a mode of political behavior at once more abrasive, more creative, and more satisfying to the life of feeling than the deliberative style of the liberals.” Georg von Schonerer was the son of an elevated noble, whose father had partnered with the Rothschilds to develop railways across Austria. His father had bought a country manor and sent his son to an agricultural college to learn to tend to his estates as a country gentleman. Georg eventually entered politics, espousing Pan-Germanic unity, and rebelling against everything his father had stood for. “Schonerer was the strongest and most thoroughly consistent anti-Semite that Austria ever produced. He was equally and correspondingly the bitterest enemy of every principle of integration by which the multi-national empire could be held together: the enemy of liberalism, of socialism, of Catholicism, and of imperial authority. As a total nationalist, he could not rest content with the imperial state.” Karl Lueger took up Schonerer’s anti-Semitic cause in a more pragmatic vein. His Christian Socialism was imperial, but anti-capitalist and anti-nationalist. “Catholicism offered Lueger an ideology that could integrate the disparate anti-liberal elements which had been moving in contradictory directions as his career developed: democracy, social reform, anti-Semitism, and Habsburg loyalty.” As for both men, Schorske contends, “Each in his way utilized aristocratic style, gesture, or pretension to mobilize a mass of followers still hungry for a leadership that based its authority on something older and deeper than the power of rational argument and empirical evidence.” Finally, Theodor Herzl moved from a position of Jewish assimilation to mass emigration as the political realities around him shifted. As for the Zionist dream, Herzl pontificated, “Dream is not so different from deed as many believe. All activity of men begins as dream and later becomes dream once more.” Schorske relates that for Herzl, “The task of politics was to present a dream in such a form as to touch the sub-rational wellsprings of human desire and will…. Herzl rejected a positivistic conception of historical progress in favor of sheer psychic energy as the motive force of history.” Herzl declared, “No one thought of looking for the promised land where it is, and yet it lies so nearby. There it is: inside ourselves!… The promised land is wherever we carry it!… With a flag one can lead men wherever one wants, even into the promised land!”

Schorske’s essay on Gustav Klimt focuses on the shifting meaning of aesthetics in Austrian society. Klimt headed the Secessionist School, Austrian modernists aligned with the art nouveau. The Secessionists felt “art should provide for modern man asylum from the pressure of modern life.” Klimt began using myths from pagan Greece to represent the instincts within man, which he felt had been repressed in modern society. He merged Schopenhauer’s theory of World as Will with pagan symbols to create allegories of man’s true internal nature. But Klimt still felt conflicted. “In the nineties, the very nature of reality became problematical for Klimt. He did not know whether to seek it in the physical or the metaphysical, in the flesh or the spirit. These traditional categories were losing their clarity and independence. The crisis of the liberal ego came to focus on the indeterminacy of the boundaries between them. In Klimt’s constantly shifting representations of space and substance—from the naturalistically solid through the impressionistically fluid to the abstract and geometrically static—we can see the groping for orientation in a world without secure coordinates.” Finally, Klimt felt the inadequacy of physical realism. “The break he had made with history as the source of meaning, and with physical realism as the proper mode of representation, remained permanent, for him as for the class whose expectations of history and nature had played them false. He had passed irrevocably from the realm of history, time, and struggle to that of aesthetic abstraction and social resignation. In his Secessionist voyage interieur…. with Greek myth serving often his iconographic pilot, Klimt had opened up new worlds of psychological experience.”

Schorske’s final two essays, “The Transformation of the Garden” and “Explosion in the Garden,” once again deal with how artists relate to and interact with society at large. Hugo von Hofmannsthal stated, “It is hard to grapple with an existing social order, but harder still to have to posit one that does not exist.” In the rapidly changing politics of fin-de-siecle Vienna, it was hard for the artist to either conform to or to rebel against the atmosphere of the times. Adalbert Stifter tried to integrate ethics into culture. He believed the revolution of 1848 had failed because men had not developed the moral maturity to handle their own freedom. He believed primary education was the means by which the masses could be taught both Bildung and morality. Schorske explains, “Bildung, a term increasingly denoting that acquired high culture which accorded a mark of social substance if not of social grace to its possessor, still meant to Stifter a richer complex of attributes composing the well-formed and integrated personality.” Stifter believed in the power of art as the highest moralizing force. Schorske continues, “Man’s aesthetic power unites him to the creativity of God; it lets him perceive even in movement and passion that measure and order which so enchant us. Art expresses the highest stage of Bildung, for it presents the world not only to the mind, but to the soul, as religion had done…. Art took on a burden once performed by religion: the canalizing of the passions and the refinement of feelings.” For Hofmannsthal, it was, particularly, the poet who could unite the disparate and contradictory impulses of his age. He stated, “It is he [the poet] who binds up in himself the elements of the times…. [The poet] is the passionate admirer of things of eternity and the things of the present…. Everything is simultaneously present in him.” Schorske explains, “The poet must accept the multiplicity of reality, and, through the magic medium of language, bring unity and cohesion to modern man.” The artist Oskar Kokoschka and the composer Arnold Schoenberg both rebelled from, instead of trying to conform to, the dictates of fin-de-siecle society and its norms of culture and, thus, were both expelled from the garden. Kokoschka believed, “A person is not a still life.” The face and body of man contains his spirit and is the voice of his psyche. There was a rawness, based on instinct, in all of Kokoschka’s portraiture. Kokoschka continued, “Isolation compels every man, all alone like a savage, to invent his idea of society. And the knowledge that every doctrine of society must remain a utopia will also drive him into solitude. This solitude swallows us in emptiness.” Schoenberg also rebelled against traditional form to try to relay the feelings buried deep inside man in his music. He proclaimed, “Inside, where the man of instinct begins, there, fortunately, all theory breaks down.” Schoenberg felt that his age had sought comfort at the expense of truth. Schorske explains, “As a determined bourgeois individualist, he fought for the rights of the psyche against society and its confining art forms…. The truth of the wilderness—atomized, chaotic, indifferent, yet open and bracing—became Schoenberg’s substitute for the utopian beauty of the garden.” Schorske continues, “The two anti-bourgeois bourgeois, Kokoschka and Schoenberg, found the forms to express the soul of men whose culture had prevented their irrational private experience from finding public expression.” Schoenberg sums up their personal view of aesthetics, “Art is the cry for help of those who experience in themselves the destiny of men.”

“The Tale of Genji” by Murasaki Shikibu (translated by Dennis Washburn)

This epic, from Heian period Japan, is arguably the world’s first extant novel. Shikibu was born in the late tenth century to a family of the middling aristocracy, descended from the Fujiwara regent. In many ways, this novel is a story about nothing more than daily court life for the nobles in the orbit of the emperor. Most of the novel follows the life of Genji, an exceptional man, born to the the favorite consort of the emperor, but, himself, ranked as a commoner. “He cut such an attractive figure that the other men felt a desire to see him as a woman. He was so beautiful that pairing him with the very finest of the ladies at the court would fail to do him justice.” Genji, nonetheless, rises to the most envied positions at court— in politics, in romantic dalliances, and in prestige. By the end of his long life, he is even bestowed the honorary rank equal to a retired emperor, with all the pomp and deference that entails. Frankly, a great deal of the book describes, in graphic detail, Genji’s attempted sexual conquests and liaisons—some more willing than others. “During all those years when Genji ought to have followed the dictates of his heart and bestowed visits on her—a period during which the lady also thought longingly of him—his complacency, born of self-conceit, prevented him from feeling any sense of guilt or urgency about their relationship. Then after he had been convinced in his heart that she was frighteningly flawed, his passion for her cooled to the point that now they were estranged. Yet as memories of their affair came back to him on the occasion of this extraordinary meeting, his heart was roiled by powerful emotions of sorrow and pity. Thinking of all that had happened and of all that was to come, he wept, brokenhearted.” These pursuits are mostly drawn out courtships, with the women hidden behind blinds and screens until the final moment of conquest. The mere sweet sound of a lady’s voice wafting through the corridors will send a vivacious young nobleman into fits of pique and lust. “If a woman who is flirtatious and flighty and fond of faddish things gets in some untoward affair… well, the man is not entirely to blame now, is he?”

Many of the interactions between noblemen and women are conducted through the writing of poems, heavy with literary allusions. Classical poetry and older traditions are hinted at to say what might be too bold to be formally expressed. “Having passed so many dew-drenched springs/ At last I have entered the season/ When wisteria blossoms for me.” In general, courtly etiquette, tradition, and form play major roles in the novel. Proper attire, dialect, and cultural references mark the high nobility from the petty aristocracy and, worse, the rural bumpkins, such as mere provincial governors. “He kept the blinds up and, as he sat near the veranda in dishabille with a bound volume open on top of an armrest, holding his brush with the tip of its handle between his teeth, thinking about what he was to write, he looked so magnificent that no one could have ever tired of gazing at him. As he hunched over the pages of red and white paper that he had chosen specifically to set off his calligraphy, the manner in which he adjusted the grip on his brush and his expression of concentration made for a scene that discerning, sensitive people would have found truly breathtaking.” Playing musical instruments, such as the koto and lute, also served to stratify class—both through skill and even in style and tone. “When the instruments were tuned at last and the concert began, all of the ladies showed exceptional talent—though it must be said the Akashi lady was especially skillful on her biwa lute. Her venerable style of playing produced a lovely clarity of tone that stood out. The Major Counselor listened with rapt attention as Murasaki played the six-string koto, combining an unusual, modern plucking technique in her right hand with more traditional fingering in her left to produce a warm, gently alluring effect. He was startled to hear the Japanese koto played in this manner, for it was a style every bit equal to those displayed by affected masters of the art whose performances of songs and modes strove to dazzle.”

Aesthetic beauty is prized above all else—in nature, with cherry blossoms, maiden flowers, mountain peaks, and flowing streams, but also, particularly, in the looks of the noble young men and women. “If cherry blossoms held to their branches and did not scatter when we told them to tarry, why would we treasure them over other flowers?” When a nobleman acts less than honorably they are most often seduced by their primal urges lusting after incomparable beauty. “As he gazed at Tamakazura, he was suddenly put in mind of mountain roses at their peak, blooming in wild profusion, covered in dew and glowing in the twilight. He was comparing her to a flower out of season, but that was the image that came to him. A flower’s beauty has limits, of course; it must fade eventually, and it has ragged and frayed parts such as pistils and stamens that make it a less than ideal metaphor for a woman’s lovely face.” Falling into disrepute fawning over a woman almost seems the inevitable course of events within the context of this narrative. “Having tasted the sorrows of love for the first time this evening, I am ashamed and feel I can no longer remain in this world.”

“Escape from Rome- The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity” by Walter Scheidel

Scheidel’s book seeks to explain the growth in prosperity of Latin Europe, as compared to the rest of the world, which peaked in the twentieth century. He suggests that what allowed Latin Europe to develop was the collapse of the Roman empire. The reason for this success was the competitive fragmentation of power that the collapse generated. “By laying the foundations for persistent polycentrism and the transformative developmental dynamics it generated over the long run, this rupture was the single most important precondition for modern economic growth.” In fact, Scheidel argues that polycentrism was the single necessary factor that led the world into modernity.

Scheidel begins his massive book by detailing the key features in the initial rise of the Roman empire. He states, “The least invasive way of scaling up was to leave local structures intact and thereby reduce friction. Emphasis on taxing military labor maximized the honor of co-opted groups…. It was bound to be more honorable for young men to fight…. than for everyone to be asked to hand over a tithe or poll tax to Roman tax collectors…. Instead of disarming former enemies, Rome not only actively encouraged them to maintain their previous warlike disposition but institutionalized this quality even more solidly by routinizing it as a key obligation to a larger network of communities…. War-making was by far the most potent force of integration in a very parsimoniously structured system…. Only 19 of the 310 years between 410 and 101 BCE were free from recorded wars…. From an institutional perspective, the Roman state was so poorly integrated beyond its urban center that in the absence of war, citizenship would not have meant much for most Romans.” Rome was a fragile empire held together by constant combat, which brought booty from its periphery to its core in central Italy. Rome was also a complete outlier in its  complete hegemony over the Mediterranean, both before and after its rule. “No other state would ever again rule four out of every five inhabitants of Europe. No other state would ever again control all of the Mediterranean basin as well as the entire population of its coastal regions…. Military mass mobilization—and political republicanism—on the scale practiced by the ascendent Roman state and its principal allies did not return to Europe until the early modern age…. No later state in the temperate zone of Europe would ever again enjoy the privilege of being able to scale up its resources and military capabilities without having to worry about outside interference. Never again were geopolitical conditions so favorable for the creation of naval hegemony, of the Roman mare nostrum.”

In its uniqueness and fragility, the Roman empire’s collapse was almost inevitable. “Local elites, on whose cooperation the central government critically relied, obstructed attempts to increase state revenue. Military capabilities as proxied by mobilization intensity declined. Geographical divisions deepened and became more formalized. Secondary state formation at the frontiers commenced wherever the Roman advance had finally run out of steam (or rather incentives): what had once been a highly fragmented tribal periphery steadily accumulated organizational and technological knowledge. Scaling-up progressed far enough to challenge Rome’s military supremacy but not enough to create suitable targets for counterattack, let alone sustainable conquest. The spatial, social, and ethnic peripherization of military service—a feature common to many maturing empires—not only raised the profile of frontier forces but also drew in manpower from beyond. The resultant hybridization prolonged the life of the empire but became harder to manage once key revenue flows dried up. The system was highly vulnerable to the loss of regions that functioned as net exporters of the tax revenue required to secure poorer but more exposed areas.” The split of the empire into its eastern and western halves and then further fragmentation into Byzantine, Vandal, Visigoth, Ostrogoth, and Frankish rule was drawn out, but absolute. The difference in state capacity between the Frankish kingdom and Rome is instructive. “The formation of an entrenched military class, the allocation of quasi-hereditary land to its members, and the decline of centralized revenue collection and disbursement greatly narrowed the scope for the exercise of coercive power by the ruler…. It fell to local estate owners to mobilize soldiers and present them to royal campaigns…. Growing emphasis on horses and armor reduced and devalued the contribution of the less affluent, thereby narrowing the social base for warfare—the exact opposite of what happened in the Roman Republic, when a voracious conscription system ensnared an ever-larger share of the citizenry.”

For much of the rest of his book Scheidel compares the post-Roman legacy of Europe to China’s enduring empire. He states that the Chinese empire, for most of its rule, controlled about eighty percent of the population of East Asia, about the same as Rome at its peak. However, despite brief intervals, such as the Warring States period, Chinese hegemony ebbed and flowed, but never disappeared entirely. “The central state managed to hold its own in its struggle against local interests. Its administrative capacity was sufficient to maintain adequate registration and taxation systems, which in turn enabled it to field enough forces to curb local autonomy. Instead of accommodating a hybrid elite of tax-exempt landowner-soldiers, the state retained control over revenues and military compensation. As a result, the tributary state as a means of managing people and resources did not dwindle nearly as much as it did in post-Roman Europe…. Whereas in Western Europe tax immunity and its replacement by localized rent and service obligations spread across the general population, in China everybody became subjected to homogenized claims by the central state…. State capacity differed accordingly, with noble levies, small armies, and rudimentary administrative structures on the one hand and extensive censuses, huge militaries, and ministries full of literate bureaucrats on the other. The former sustained polycentrism, the latter hegemonic empire.”

For Scheidel, geography was the prime reason for Europe’s and China’s unique development paths. “Europe consisted of multiple smaller core regions whereas China initially had just one—the Central Plain—and then two, with the Yangzi basin added into the mix. Increasingly interconnected, the northern basin consistently remained politically and militarily dominant…. No such “natural” core existed anywhere in Europe.” The prime reason for northern dominance in China was its relationship to the steppe. “The conspicuous scarcity of large empires in regions that were ecologically well equipped to support them but were sheltered from major grassland zones highlights the causal dimension of this association.” This unique ecological divide between “civilized” northern China and the “barbarian” steppe culture led to “the pooling of military assets for the purpose of predation, preemption, and defense; the dissemination of steppe-sourced military techniques; the infiltration and repeated takeover of exposed agricultural regions by steppe warriors, as well as responses to these intrusions. The agrarian empires that were forged in these complex interactions were often large because they were close to the steppe, rather than close to the steppe because they were large…. In East Asia, the concentration of challengers to the north favored hegemonic empire among the agriculturalists, as well as the decentering of the capital cities toward the threat zone, a feature well documented for most Chinese dynasties. In Europe, the absence of a severe one-sided threat facilitated decentralization.” For Scheidel, proximity to the steppe (and the institutional, military, and cultural adaptations that it fostered) was the definitive difference in development pathways for Latin Europe and China.

In Europe, decentralization led to repeated warfare between small states. In the early modern period, “the major powers were involved in warfare in more than 90 percent of the years of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in 80 percent of the years in the eighteenth century…. [There were] 443 wars in Europe between 1500 and 1800, or one and a half per year, compared to an annual mean of 0.2 in China from 1350 to 1800.” Therefore, war had to pay in Europe. “It had to be common and desirable (by promising glory, territorial gain, and commercial advantage); fixed costs had to be low (military infrastructure was already in place, beginning with medieval castles and knights, which represented a huge sunk cost); variable costs had to be similar (allowing efficient smaller parties to balance larger ones that found it harder to raise revenue); conditions had to be conducive to investment in modern technologies such as firearms and in navies (which was ensured by sufficient distance from the steppe and the coastal articulation of much of Europe); and obstacles to innovation had to be low (which was all but guaranteed by the relative openness of European polities and ease of transnational diffusion).”

Instructively, Scheidel details Britain’s development beyond its Roman legacy. “England had escaped most thoroughly from Roman imperial traditions help[ing] it establish durable local units of government and political representation. Later, the break with papal Rome under Henry VIII made England a pioneer in creating a national church…. In addition, England largely escaped from a renewal of the Roman legal tradition…. The monarch was the head of the church, and the standing of common law, as a collection of wisdom derived from earlier arbitration, was strengthened.”

In general, Scheidel makes the case it was small European polities, acting as individual labs and incubators, interacting and fighting with one another, that generated winning capacities, which then could be copied and repeated by the others. “The state was the ultimate bundle of institutions. The more developmental its nature, the more innovative were the outcomes that followed…. Societies were made modern by institutions that rendered continuous change possible…. Diversity was conducive to the discovery of potentialities because it created natural experiments: thus, discrete but interconnected polities addressed shared challenges in different ways and learned from outcomes.” Overseas colonial expansion further projected this power struggle and the diversification of these states. “By 1914, between four-fifths and five-sixths of the earth’s land surface were under European control.”

In China, on the other hand, hegemonic empire led to stale state bureaucracy. “Confucianism was revived under the Northern Song, which greatly expanded the civil service examination system by setting up more than 400 schools for candidates, helping to establish a gentry class based on canonical education rather than inherited wealth. Firmly attached to the state, this elite supported it whether from within or outside the civil service and remained loyal regardless of which regime was in power…. Merchants were strongly motivated to join the official class via kinsmen, to ally themselves to gentry families, and to participate in government at the local level: whatever formal standing they could hope to gain would accrue from public service and proximity to traditional power brokers…. Dependence on informal or de facto property rights meant that legal processes were primarily determined by social hierarchy and status. Commercial and civil law codes were absent…. Institutional arrangements were stable, resilient, and path-dependent. The repeated success of imperial restoration after intermittent shocks shows how much the interests of rulers and various elite groups from bureaucrats and scholars to commercial and landed property owners overlapped and coalesced into “a tight web of vested interests, that, once established, proved extremely difficult to dislodge.”” This system of kin-based customary law stifled commerce, credit, and impersonal exchange. Politics trumped rule of law. Regime uncertainty hindered capital accumulation and planning for the future. “Inasmuch as state support was contingent on centralized preferences and sensitive to turnover at the very top, it could be supplied or withdrawn at will…. The potential for centralized intervention and regulation across a large territory…. contains within it, however latently, the option of discouraging innovation.” Stasis became the norm and even the goal of Chinese bureaucrats and elites.

Europe, while politically fragmented, was united by a culture of knowledge. “A fortuitous blend of pervasive political splintering and overarching cultural integration created a viable marketplace of ideas…. The European state system facilitated ideational change by preventing conservative forces from consistently coordinating resistance to and suppression of innovation…. Although political pluralism was essential in ensuring free discourse, so was the relative ease of transnational intellectual communications. In the absence of some degree of underlying cultural unity, the costs of catering to a larger market of ideas would have been higher, limiting entry and competition and protecting incumbents from disruptive innovation. This cultural unity—manifest above all in the use of Latin and Christian norms—was a legacy of the Roman empire.”

“The English Elegy- Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats” by Peter M. Sacks

Sacks’ lone book of literary criticism is a collection of poetic case studies, in which he performs close readings on a number of English elegies. Chronologically spanning Spencer’s “Astrophel” to Yeats’ “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” Sacks picks apart his chosen poems line by line to give the reader insight into the common themes and divergences amongst the genre of English elegy. Sacks clearly states his mission in the preface, “I am trying neither to remystify language nor to sentimentalize subjectivity, but I do hope to use this study of the elegy as a perspective from which to reexamine the connections between language and the pathos of human consciousness.” For Sacks, much of the tension within the elegy is in language’s lack of ability to fully express the range and power of human emotions adequately. “Much of the elegist’s task lies in his reluctant resubmission to the constraints of language…. [Elegy gives a view of] man in tension with, rather than inertly constituted by, the language that so conditions him.” The form of elegy is replete with this tension. It shows “accommodation between the mourning self on the one hand and the very words of grief and fictions of consolation on the other.”

The definition of the form of elegy combines a poem of mortal loss and of consolation. “What Apollo or the poet pursues turns into a sign not only of his lost love but also of his very pursuit—a consoling sign that carries in itself the reminder of the loss on which it has been founded…. It is this substitutive turn or act of troping that any mourner must perform.” Mourning properly “requires a withdrawal of affection from the lost object and a subsequent reattachment of affection to some substitute for that object.” Throughout his book, Sacks sneaks in quite a lot of psychoanalysis along with his poetic criticism. He quotes Freud to reinforce this point, “No matter what fills the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.” Sacks continues, “The movement from loss to consolation thus requires a deflection of desire.” Sacks reveals the successful elegy most often will skirt at themes of damaged narcissism and ritual castration. It might even address the super-ego as a collection of the “illustrious dead.” Common motifs in the poems are a cast of mourners, images of weaving, vegetation, fertility, natural cycles of time, and the seasonal renewal of nature. “Few elegies or acts of mourning succeed without seeming to place the dead, and death itself, at some cleared distance from the living.” For the poet-mourner, the elegy is an act of freeing: from grief and rage, but also from any guilt. “It is as though some of the violence of death’s power enters man’s anger against that power. But this anger is as much a rage against man’s own susceptibility to death, hence a rage against the self.” When the task of elegy fails, the griever is stuck in his own melancholy, unable to properly perform the necessary task of mourning. Sacks summarizes, “no work of mourning can be successfully completed without positive recourse to various forms of mediation.” Within the poetic form of elegy, “repetition creates a sense of continuity, of an unbroken pattern such as one may oppose to the extreme discontinuity of death…. Repetition may itself be used to create the sense of ceremony.”

Finally, in his epilogue, Sacks lists many of the conventional elements of English elegy, “the use of the pastoral, of cropped flowers, of stellar and solar imagery, of covering the coffin or grave, of procession, of reality testing, of repetition and antiphony, of eclogue and self-surpassal.” Sacks concludes, “Since the occasion for elegy will not disappear, and since the elegist’s work of mourning itself requires repetitions and acceptances of codes and traditions, and, finally, since consolation itself comes usually in the form of acquired legacy or sense of continuity, it seems as though the elegy, of all genres, would have the strongest prospect of a continuing life…. Elegies are indeed condemned to repeat themselves and their predecessors.”

“Kitchen Curse: Stories” by Eka Kurniawan (translated by Annie Tucker)

This is a collection of short stories from the Indonesian writer, Eka Kurniawan. Some stories are propelled by the magical realism found in his novels, “Beauty is a Wound” and “Man Tiger.” There is a dog-like creature, who learns to walk on two legs and shoot a gun. There is a stone, who ponders morality and is consumed by thoughts of revenge. There is a talking elephant, who possibly ends up regretting what he wished for. Some of Kurniawan’s stories are personal, others have a political bent. Some have a moral tale that makes you think after it’s done. He often gives voice to the downtrodden—a prostitute, a slave-cook, and a kid who gets beat up in school. One reoccurring feature of his stories is at least a couple of lines that will make the reader chuckle. His first story, “Graffiti in the Toilet,” contains the basic truth, “But in this world everyone is condemned to pee.” In another, “Pigpen,” he states, “He was just like us: he liked to eat and then take a good crap.” Kurniawan’s politics show sympathy for communists. He usually does it with a wink and a grin. “There was only one person in the entire village who had voted for the People’s Democratic Party and everyone knew it was my younger brother, the chicken farmer, because he was the only person in the whole village who had put their campaign sign up in his front yard. “Another one of your sons is a cummunist!” Once again, father just laughed. I knew he would be more upset to see one of his children steal a fish from a neighbor’s pond than to see one of us wear a Lenin T-shirt and the other vote PDP.”

“The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner

Lerner’s novel is auto-fiction, written from the perspectives of multiple narrative voices, but also trying to comment on the larger societal forces that have shaped America today. It uses the microscopic lens of one boy’s coming of age to comment on macro political trends. Lerner’s “Self” is fictionalized as Adam Gordon, a senior at Topeka High, class of 1997. The novel shifts between being told in the third person from high school Adam’s vantage point to contemporary first person narratives by his father, Jonathan, and his mother, Jane. The novel also sometimes gets meta, with contemporary Adam, speaking as a novelist in 2019, interjecting with commentary. “Who is this unsmiling seventeen-year-old boy whose hair is drawn into a ponytail while the sides of his head are shaved, a disastrous tonsorial compromise between the lefty household of his parents and the red state in which he was raised?” The chapters flow seamlessly between these voices. The multiple perspectives allow the family history to gradually unfold through flashbacks, as the reader sees how the family unit has been shaped by each individual’s subjective processing of past events. Both of Adam’s parents are psychoanalysts, adding to the layers of disguised meaning. During the course of the narrative, sexual boundaries are explored, gender roles are questioned, alcohol and drugs are abused, race and socioeconomic hierarchy is churned over, multiple infidelities are exposed, repressed incest is recollected, and a thrown cueball breaks a young girl’s jaw. It is also a hilarious book. “Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy.”

The novel deals with the tensions of being the Gordons, an intellectual family stuck living in Kansas. “The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy—even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagined East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony.” Lerner suggests that the process of growing up for an adolescent boy was all one big pose. It involved navigating the subtle images that one wanted to project to multiple audiences at once—your parents, your peers, your teachers. “The thin beige braided belt he wore to secure his sagging pants for instance somehow constituted less a single bad decision than a deep incomprehension of the language game in which he was attempting to feign fluency.” Even adult role models teach that your image of Self is a role one puts on. “You need to be winning hearts as much as minds. What you have in your favor is Kansas. You have Midland American English. I want quick swerves into the folksy. “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” That kind of thing. I want you saying, right after some hyper-eloquent riff about Yeltsin breaking a promise, “Now, in Kansas, we call that a lie.” After you go off about a treaty regulating drilling in the Arctic: “Now, in Kansas, we wouldn’t shake on that.” I don’t care if they’re tried-and-true. Say “tried-and-true.” Say “ain’t” if you want. You can go agrammatical so long as they know it’s a choice, that it’s in quotes. Interrupt your highbrow fluency with bland sound bites of regional decency. Why do you think they elect Texans who went to Yale, Arkansan Rhodes Scholars?” Lerner implies that there was a fine line, made up of tiny individual life decisions, that separated him, now a professor of English at Brooklyn College, from the boys who would grow up to be stuck in Topeka, now wearing red MAGA hats in 2019. “Instead of focusing on the fight, zoom in on the fascinating and absurd spectacle of the gang signs that precede it: Reynolds, the son of Realtors, working his fingers into the word “blood,” throwing up his set, miming the manual language of a Los Angeles street gang to which he could bear no coherent relation; see Nowak, who has a real if unloaded pistol tucked into the waist of his sagging jeans, respond with a rapid array of finger movements based on the signs of “Folks,” which originated in the projects of Chicago, which may or may not have been a presence in Topeka, but certainly not among these white kids mainly bound for college who had no volk beyond their common privilege.” Throughout Adam’s life, everything, in the end, comes down to power dynamics. “We were a couple of privileged crackers with divergent parenting strategies; we were two sovereignless men in a Hobbesian state of nature on the verge of primal confrontation.” Lerner’s novel questions how much of one’s Self is really up to the individual; how many of one’s actions are shaped by a past we might have no control over. “I was having my own experience of depersonalization, no drugs involved—an overwhelming sense of frames of reference giving way, of the past and present colliding in on one another.”

“Normal People” by Sally Rooney

Rooney’s second novel details the enduring relationship of a young man and woman, Connell and Marianne, as they age through their last year of high school and into their college years at Trinity in Dublin. Connell’s mother, Lorraine, also happens to be employed cleaning Marianne’s mother’s mansion. Lorraine had Connell when she was seventeen. Connell doesn’t care to know who his father is. An uncle or two has spent time in jail. Stark relationship imbalances are a recurring theme in Rooney’s work. 

In school, the two are the smartest kids. But, Connell is the popular star soccer player and Marianne is the weird loner with no friends. Even her mother and brother seem to think she is odd and resent her. “Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it. She had that feeling in school often, but it wasn’t accompanied by any specific images of what the real life might look like or feel like. All she knew was that when it started, she wouldn’t need to imagine it anymore.”

Connell keeps his relationship with Marianne a secret from everyone at school, even though they start having sex regularly. “He has a life in Carricklea, he has friends. If he went to college in Galway he could stay with the same social group, really, and live the life he has always planned on, getting a good degree, having a nice girlfriend. People would say he had done well for himself. On the other hand, he could go to Trinity like Marianne. Life would be different then. He would start going to dinner parties and having conversations about the Greek bailout. He would fuck some weird-looking girls who turn out to be bisexual. I’ve read The Golden Notebook, he could tell them. It’s true, he has read it. After that he would never come back to Carricklea, he would go somewhere else, London, or Barcelona. People would not necessarily think he had done well; some people might think he had gone very bad, while others would forget him entirely.” By year’s end, the two have a dramatic falling out and Marianne stops attending school.

At Trinity, Connell is the fish out of water and Marianne blossoms into the sexy, popular girl on campus. She moves with a rich crowd, whose parents are all investment bankers and doctors, she begins to dress posh, and tries to hide her Sligo accent. Connell and Marianne meet at her boyfriend’s party and resume some sort of relationship, as they feel a strange bond no one else seems to understand. They sleep with each other on and off through college, but never identify as a couple. “Rich people look out for each other, and being Marianne’s best friend and suspected sexual partner has elevated Connell to the status of rich-adjacent: someone for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere.” Every time they seem on the verge of a conventional relationship, however, life keeps getting in the way. “I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”

“Conversations with Friends” by Sally Rooney

Rooney has written a novel for the age. Set in contemporary Dublin, it is narrated by a twenty-one year old lesbian communist poet, just finishing up at university. Her direct narration is sparingly interspersed with chunks of email, texts, and instant message chains. Tinder plays a cameo-role. The plot revolves around the narrator, Francis, her ex-girlfriend/still best-friend, Bobbi, and their new friends, Melissa and Nick, a married couple in their thirties, one a photographer/writer, the other a B-movie/theatre actor. The casual flirting, biting sarcasm, hidden jealousies, intellectual one up-man-ship, and sexual tensions quickly flow between and across the couples. “Bobbi wanted me to know that she had been in touch with Melissa when I hadn’t. It did impress me, which she wanted it to, but I also felt bad. I knew Melissa like Bobbi more than she liked me, and I didn’t know how to join in their new friendship without debasing myself for their attention…. Bobbi did come over that night, though she didn’t mention Melissa at all. I knew that she was being strategic, and that she wanted me to ask, so I didn’t. This sounds more passive-aggressive than it really was.” Much of the interplay in all these relationships revolve around the idea of status and power, often unspoken. “I noticed that Nick had dropped my name into conversation, as if to show that he remembered me from last time we talked. Of course, I remembered his name too, but he was older and somewhat famous, so I found his attention very flattering.” Much of the action also seems much like a giant pose. Everyone is trying so hard, while playing that their lives are lived so effortlessly. “I wrote a sample message, and then deleted the draft in case I might accidentally hit send. Then I wrote the same thing over again.” Every detail of technological protocol could be misinterpreted and, therefore, was fraught with unsaid meaning. “I read his e-mail again several times. I was relieved he had put the whole thing in lower case like he always did. It would have been dramatic to introduce capitalization at such a moment of tension.” Rooney is at her best when getting into the mind of the post-modern student, playing at being a communist, feminist intellectual. “Bobbi and I walked along underused paths kicking leaves and talking about things like the idea of landscape painting. Bobbi thought the fetishization of “untouched nature” was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic.” Relationships with friends are always hard. They are even harder when trying to wear a mask of a constantly put-together adult. “It made me want to step on her foot very hard and then look in her face and deny that I had done it. No, I would say. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And she would look at me and know that I was evil and insane.” The plot of the novel is almost besides the point. It is the interaction between the characters which is so powerful. Each person wants to be smart, witty, and sexy. But more importantly, they want to be though of as smart, witty, and sexy to all the others in their social circle. “I felt sorry for all of us, like we were just little children pretending to be adults.”