“The Big Green Tent” by Ludmila Ulitskaya (translated by Polly Gannon)

This contemporary novel looks back on Communist Russia, particularly the years following Stalin’s death. The chapters generously weave back and forth in time, loosely following the friendship of three boys growing up in Moscow. “A three-way friendship, like all triangles, is a complex matter. Obstacles and temptations arise—jealousy, envy, sometimes even treachery, albeit trivial or pardonable. Can treachery be justified by unendurable, boundless love? The three of them would be granted an epoch quintessentially suited to posing this question, and a whole lifetime—shorter for one, longer for the others—in which to find out.” Ilya, Mikha, and Sanya first bonded over books, enamored by their grade school literature teacher, a one-armed veteran of the war. “A small but mighty army of young people had learned the art of reading Pushkin and Tolstoy. Victor Yulievich was certain that his students were thus inculcated against the ills and evils of existence, both petty and grand. In this he was, perhaps, mistaken.” Ilya wound up marrying Olga, whose parents were dyed in the wool party cadres. “It was here, near Vologda, that she finally came to terms with her keen disappointment in her parents’ ideals, in the whole edifice of power and authority of the country she was born in, in the country itself, with its cruel and inhuman regulations and customs.” Her mother, Antonia, even as she grew accustomed to black market luxuries, never recanted her belief in the communist system. “In Russia, all our might, all the intellect and know-how of our scientists, is for exploring the cosmos and making atomic power stations. They just invent can openers. Well, I have to admit, they do know how to make those.” Those radicals who could not consent to support the system lived far on its fringes. “Each of them was an outstanding personality with eccentric interests, rare knowledge, or expertise in every imaginable and unimaginable field, and all of it superfluous to ordinary life…. All of them, except the woman with the diamonds, worked as security guards, elevator operators, truckers, fictitious research assistants, were spongers living off their wives or mothers, creative layabouts who never lifted a finger, parasites, pariahs, and outcasts, all of them equally dangerous and fascinating. It was never completely clear whether they refused to work for the state, or the state refused to have anything to do with them.” Through the course of the novel, all three men must, again and again, choose for themselves how much they are willing to compromise on their own ideals to live within Russia. “But there was less and less time for friends. There were no more school breaks, walking excursions through Moscow with a favorite teacher on Wednesdays—the sublimely obligatory school-day camaraderie had ended. They came together from time to time out of the inertia of habit, but they dove into their little coves of friendship less and less often. Suddenly they discovered that life had forced them apart.”

“Conversations with Rene Girard” by Rene Girard (edited by Cynthia L. Haven)

This is a short collection of dialogues between Girard and various interlocutors over the years. The conversations cover much of his career as an anthropologist and historian, particularly his theory of mimetic desire. This project has sought to glean insights into the modern world as it shifts to a post-Christian age. “We live in a world where a great deal more is demanded of the communities and of each individual in terms of self-mastery. But at the same time, very often our world is one which abandons ethics, which abandons any ideal of self-mastery. We surrender to a philosophy of self-gratification that ends up in pure consumerism.” There is a distinct lack of the role of the individual in Girard’s mimetic theory. “Since the individual figures in my scheme only so far as he is involved with other individuals, the epistemology of the isolated consciousness wouldn’t make a great deal of sense for me. I feel that one of the advantages of my theory is its pragmatic effectiveness…. That’s why mimetic theory interests me so much: you can start with it at the animal level and trace it across the threshold of hominization right into human culture. That threshold is when the victim becomes the conscious object of attention by members of the community…. You have cultural specificity, a break between animal and man.” Man is a competitive animal. “The error is always in reasoning from categories of “difference.” The root of all conflicts relies rather on “competition,” in mimetic rivalry between persons, countries, and cultures. Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if necessary…. Human relations are essentially relations of imitation and competition…. What is happening today is mimetic rivalry on a global scale…. But if you ask me what mimeticism is, I will tell you: it’s pride, anger; it’s envy, jealousy—these are the cardinal sins. It’s lust as well. Human sexuality is very important, because it’s a permanent impulse, not something episodic or intermittent. There are no tranquil interludes in human life. Rivalry is what sustains desire…. Mimetic desire is when our choice is not determined by the object itself, as we normally believe, but by another person. We imitate the other person, and this is what “mimetic” means…. And of course, envy is mimetic. You cannot help imitating your model…. Envy is a denial of your own being and accepting the fact that you prefer the being of your rival.” As Girard has detailed before, the scapegoat mechanism was the route that archaic societies used to squash mimetic rivalry before violence spread out of hand within their own communities. “Before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their rituals precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That’s the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed.”

“Bartleby & Co.” by Enrique Vila-Matas (translated by Jonathan Dunne)

Vila-Matas knows how to open a novel. “I never had much luck with women. I have a pitiful hump, which I am resigned to. All my closest relatives are dead. I am a poor recluse working in a ghastly office. Apart from that, I am happy.” The narrator creates a book comprised entirely of footnotes, dedicated to all the Bartlebys of the world, an appellation of Melvillian fame. Vila-Matas’ narrator states, “It is my intention, therefore, to make my way through the labyrinth of the No.” Each footnote details a famous writer who has chosen, for whatever reasons, to stop. Speaking of Pepin Bello’s choice to forgo writing, the narrator opines, “To renounce without lamentation the expression of one’s own gifts can be a spiritually aristocratic virtue and, when one yields to it without recourse to contempt for one’s peers, boredom of life or indifference towards art, then it has something of the divine.” Digressing on Hofmannsthal and the record of Bartleby syndrome, the narrator explains, “Although the syndrome already had a long history, with the “Letter of Lord Chandos” literature lay completely exposed to its insufficiency and impossibility, drawing from this exposure—as is happening in these notes without a text—its fundamental, necessarily tragic question. Denial, refusal, mutism, are gaps in the extreme forms in which the unease of culture presented itself.” Further, he recounts that “Vargas Llosa—always harboured the suspicion, which turned into a conviction, that there is a series of books which formed part of the history of the No, though they may not exist.” Most of Vila-Matas’ novel proceeds in this way, detailing instances, throughout history, when writers have refused to write. “These footnotes cannot have an essence, neither can literature, because the essence of any text consists precisely in evading any essential classification, any assertion that establishes or claims it…. So I have been working on these footnotes, searching and inventing, doing without any rules of the game that exist in literature. I have been working on these footnotes in a slightly careless and anarchic manner.”

“Phenomenology of Spirit” by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (translated by A.V. Miller)

This is one dense tome. Hegel is not an easy read. In fact, this is one of the first books of philosophy which might have made me even more confused after reading it. Hegel speaks in riddles and contradictions. Nonetheless, he does make you think. Through thesis and antithesis you reach synthesis, hopefully. Hegel begins by discussing the senses. “Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge…. Sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge…. But, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing [Sache].” Hegel next relates the idea of truth to that of consciousness. “A perpetual alternation of determining what is true, and then setting aside this determining, constitutes, strictly speaking, the steady everyday life and activity of perceptual consciousness, a consciousness which fancies itself to be moving in the realm of truth.” Consciousness interacts with the world of objects, but is separate from it. “To the extent, then, that consciousness is independent, so too is its object, but only implicitly. Self-consciousness which is simply for itself and directly characterizes its object as a negative element, or is primarily desire, will therefore, on the contrary, learn through experience that the object is independent.” Consciousness is not devoid of reason, but reason transforms the process. “Consciousness observes; i.e. Reason wants to find and to have itself as existent object, as an object that is actually and sensuously present. The consciousness that observes in this way means, and indeed says, that it wants to learn, not about itself but, on the contrary, about the essence of things qua things…. Reason, therefore, in its observational activity, approaches things in the belief that it truly apprehends them as sensuous things opposite to the ‘I’ ; but what it actually does, contradicts this belief, for it apprehends them intellectually, it transforms their sensuous being into Notions…. Hence transforms thought into the form of being, or being into the form of thought; it maintains, in fact, that it is only as Notion that things have truth.”

Hegel circles back to the role of the individual. “Individuality is what its world is, the world that is its own. Individuality is itself the cycle of its action in which it has exhibited itself as an actual world…. The individual exists in and for himself: he is for himself or is a free activity…. In his own self, therefore there emerges the antithesis, this duality of being the movement of consciousness, and the fixed being of an appearing actuality…. This being, the body of the specific individuality, is the latter’s original aspect.” However, the individual is not the unit of reference that Hegel deems most useful. “It is in fact in the life of a people or nation that the Notion of self-conscious Reason’s actualization—of beholding, in the independence of the ‘other’, complete unity with it, or having for my object the free thinghood of an ‘other’ which confronts me and is the negative of myself, as my own being-for-myself—that the Notion has its complete reality…. The labour of the individual for his own needs is just as much a satisfaction of the needs of others as of his own…. The whole becomes, as a whole, his own work, for which he sacrifices himself and precisely in so doing receives back from it his self…. This universal Substance, speaks its universal language in the customs and laws of its nation. But this existent unchangeable essence is the expression of the very individuality which seems opposed to it; the laws proclaim what each individual is and does; the individual knows them not only as his universal objective thinghood, but equally knows himself in them, or knows them as particularized in his own individuality, and in each of his fellow citizens. In the universal Spirit, therefore, each has only the certainty of himself, of finding in the actual world nothing but himself; he is as certain of the others as he is of himself.”

For Hegel, the role of Spirit is paramount. “As substance, Spirit is unshaken righteous self-identity; but as being-for-self it is a fragmented being, self-sacrificing and benevolent, in which each accomplishes his own work, rends asunder the universal being, and takes from it his own share…. Spirit is thus self-supporting, absolute, real being. All previous shapes of consciousness are abstract forms of it. They result from Spirit analysing itself, distinguishing its moments, and dwelling for a while with each…. Spirit, then is consciousness in general which embraces sense-certainty, perception, and the Understanding, in so far as in self-analysis Spirit holds fast to the moment of being an objectively existent actuality to itself, and ignores the fact that this actuality is its own being-for-self…. Spirit is consciousness that has Reason…. Spirit is the ethical life of a nation in so far as it is the immediate truth—the individual that is a world…. The living ethical world is Spirit in its truth.” It is only through his culture that the individual life derives any meaning. “It is therefore through culture that the individual acquires standing and actuality…. This individuality moulds itself by culture into what it intrinsically is, and only by so doing is it an intrinsic being that has an actual existence; the measure of its culture is the measure of its actuality and power…. Culture is the simple soul of the substance by means of which, what is implicit in the substance, acquires an acknowledged, real existence.”

Again, Hegel returns to the role of the individual consciousness. “Just as, in regard to its knowledge, it knows itself then as a consciousness whose knowledge and conviction are imperfect and contingent; similarly, in regard to its willing, it knows itself as a consciousness whose purposes are affected with sensuousness. On account of its unworthiness, therefore, it cannot look on happiness as necessary, but as something contingent, and can expect it only as a gift of Grace…. But though its actuality is imperfect, all the same its pure will and knowledge hold duty to be what is essential…. Consciousness starts from the idea that, for it, morality and reality do not harmonize…. Moral self-consciousness asserts that its purpose is pure, is independent of inclinations and impulses, which implies that it has eliminated within itself sensuous purposes. But this alleged elimination of the element of sense it dissembles again. It acts, brings its purpose into actual existence, and the self-conscious sense-nature which is supposed to be eliminated is precisely this middle term or mediating element between pure consciousness and actual existence…. Moral self-consciousness is not, therefore, in earnest with the elimination of inclinations and impulses, for it is just these that are the self-realizing self-consciousness. But also they ought not to be suppressed, but only to be in conformity with Reason.”

Hegel concludes by returning to the nature of Spirit. “This Spirit is the free nation in which hallowed custom constitutes the substance of all, whose actuality and existence each and everyone knows to be his own will and deed.” Spirit is always above the Self; or, rather, envelops the Self. “Spirit is this movement of the Self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself into its substance, and also, as Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and a content at the same time as it cancels this difference between objectivity and content…. Whereas in the phenomenology of Spirit each moment is the difference of knowledge and Truth, and is the movement in which that difference is cancelled, Science on the other hand does not contain this difference and the cancelling of it…. Just as Spirit in its existence is not richer than Science, so too it is not poorer either in content…. The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit; to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. This sacrifice is the externalization in which Spirit displays the process of its becoming Spirit in the form of free contingent happening, intuiting its pure Self as Time outside of it, and equally its Being as Space…. But the other side of its Becoming, History, is a conscious, self-mediating process—Spirit emptied out into Time…. The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection the Spirits as they are in themselves as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance [phenomenology].”

“Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is a brutal novel centered around the brilliantly confused mind of a murderer. “His whole body was as if broken; his soul was dark and troubled. He leaned his elbows on his knees and rested his head in both hands. “God!” he exclaimed, “but can it be, can it be that I will really take an axe and hit her on the head and smash her skull … slip in the sticky, with blood … with the axe … Lord, can it be?” He was trembling as he said it. “But what’s wrong with me?”” Raskolnikov tries to justify his actions during brief moments of lucidity. “The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she’s not the point! The old woman was merely a sickness … I was in a hurry to step over … it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!” He is obviously not in his right mind. "“You’ve all been saying that I was mad,” Raskolnikov went on, twisting his mouth into a smile, “and just now I imagined that perhaps I really am mad and was only seeing a ghost!… And who knows! Maybe I really am mad, and everything that’s happened during these days, maybe everything is just in my imagination.”” There is more than a little of Nietzsche’s notion of the superman and the will to power in the sick mind of Raskolnikov. ““Then I realized, Sonya,” he went on ecstatically, “that power is given only to the one who dares to reach down and take it. Here there is one thing, one thing only: one has only to dare! And then a thought took shape in me, for the first time in my life, one that nobody had ever thought before me! Nobody! It suddenly came to me as bright as the sun: how is it that no man before now has dared or dares yet, while passing by all this absurdity, quite simply to take the whole thing by the tail and whisk it off to the devil! I … I wanted to dare, and I killed … I just wanted to dare, Sonya, that’s the whole reason!””

“Middlemarch” by George Eliot

Eliot’s novel depicts the small-town travails of the fictional setting, Middlemarch. It is a quintessential provincial English town of the 1830s, with nosy neighbors high on decorum and stuffy morality. The plot is set against the transformative inclinations of the age, with the Reform Bill of 1832 playing a pivotal role. The landed gentry and the ascending manufacturers vie for prestige and power in local affairs, while the poorer folk gossip about their betters and pick their personal rooting interests. “For in that part of the country, before Reform had done its notable part in developing the political consciousness, there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction of parties.” 

Eliot’s story digs deep into the mind of her characters, dealing with their interior lives and thoughts. Her novel stresses the themes of unconsummated love, propriety, as well as the restraining binds of religion, morality, chastity, and proper gender roles. At the heart of the plot is young Miss Dorothea Brooke, a woman strict in her religious belief, with genteel deportment and a pure heart. “Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.” Proper marriage is a recurring theme in the novel and the story begins with Dorothea’s to a much older clergyman, Casaubon, stodgy and didactic, but from impeccable stock. “‘I should not wish to have a husband very near my own age,’ said Dorothea with grave decision. ‘I should wish to have a husband who was above me in judgment and all knowledge…. I cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but I should wish to have good reasons for them, and a wise man could help me to see which opinions had the best foundations, and would help me to live according to them.’” Her honeymoon in Rome was not even out, however, before the first pangs of regret seep into her mind. “Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as any ruminant animal, and had not actively assisted in creating any illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead to nowhither?” Dorothea soon becomes reacquainted with her husband’s younger cousin and ward, studying painting in Rome, Will Ladislaw, who, in turn, becomes enraptured by her charms. “He only wanted her to take more emphatic notice of him; he only wanted to be something more special in her remembrance than he could yet believe himself likely to be. He was rather impatient under that open ardent goodwill, which he saw was her usual state of feeling. The remote worship of a woman throned out of their reach plays a great part in men’s lives, but in most cases the worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by which his soul’s sovereign may cheer him without descending from her high place.” Will and Dorothea are much too mindful of what each owe to Casaubon to act on any of the impulses of their hearts. “Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.” However, this unconsummated bond of affection would weigh heavily, though always unspoken, on both as they travelled their own paths through life. “All their vision, all their thought of each other, had been as in a world apart, where the sunshine fell on tall white lilies, where no evil lurked, and no other soul entered.” Eliot seeks to show, through her novel, that even the plainest of lives, lived in pure honesty, morality, and propriety, though unknown to the world at large, can still greatly touch all those acquainted with them. “The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

“On Political Philosophy” by Leo Strauss

This book is taken from a series of lectures Strauss gave for a class at the University of Chicago in the winter of 1965. Each chapter transcribes Strauss pontificating for about an hour on the ideas of history’s great philosophers, judiciously interjecting his own opinions, and then being grilled by a small group of students for clarifications and insights into his esoteric ways. Strauss begins with the positivism espoused by Auguste Comte. He points out that Comte brings a religious righteousness to his idea of scientism. “Comte doesn’t hesitate to draw the conclusion… that there cannot be toleration. Universal toleration for every opinion is defensible as a transitional thing, for the pulling down of the untenable old views and institutions so that room is created for the emergence of the new and final…. [In Comte’s program] systematic tolerance cannot exist, and never really has existed, except regarding opinions regarded as indifferent or questionable.” Comte’s science explicitly leaves no room for the opinions of the masses. “Comte overestimates the power of reason or of ideas…. Comte is clearly antidemocratic…. His antidemocratic stand is based on his belief in the incompetence of the masses, and he puts his trust in the men at the top, the captains of banks and industry, controlled in a way by the men of science.”

Strauss explains the difference in the accumulation of knowledge in the fields of philosophy and the natural sciences. He begins by stating that Rousseau was not so special. “Rousseau implies that his political philosophy differs more or less from the teaching of all his predecessors…. In fact, every great political philosopher did this—that is, he said: Here I present the political truth…. Many great political philosophers teach very different things about the just order. One can say we have no political philosophy, but only political philosophies. There is not one edifice impressing us by its unanimity, so to say, or quasi-unanimity, as modern science in a way does…. Here we have anarchy…. In Hegel’s words, the individual—and he meant by that not only thoughtless individuals, but the most thoughtful men, the philosophers—is the son of his time, and not in the way in which he shaves or wears clothes, but in his highest and most sublime and abstruse thoughts.” According to the historicists, man is trapped by history more than by nature. “We modern men are by virtue of this “progress” in need of historical studies in order to see again the hidden foundations of our thought.” 

Strauss devotes much time in separating the difference of meaning between the ancients and the moderns, even when, superficially, their ideas seem similar, based on the inadequacy of definition and translation. “Political philosophy as the quest for the just or the good society has become incredible in our age owing to positivism and historicism…. Positivism leads to the contempt or neglect of the political philosophies of the past. Historicism, on the other hand, must cultivate the history of political philosophy, although it can no longer recognize the possibility of political philosophy proper.” (That is, the idea that there is one greatest-good polis, for all times and for all peoples.) The fact that there is only one greatest-good does not mean, however, that philosophy does not stand on the shoulders of giants. “Every attempt at rational knowledge, philosophic or scientific, consists in replacing opinions by knowledge. This cannot be contentiously done if one does not first know the opinions from which one starts. But these opinions are only partly our opinions. Their most important part, or their largest part at least, is inherited. What we regard as our opinions consists to a considerable extent of the sediments of past discussions, discussions which were conscious, which were the focus of attention in earlier centuries, and now we live on their results.”

For Strauss, the moderns originate in Hobbes and, even earlier, if less overtly, in Machiavelli. “Here we have a decisive opposition of the two considerations: a political teaching which takes its bearings by how men ought to live [the ancient position], and a teaching which takes its bearings by how men do live [the modern position].” But are these two positions really that different? “What is characteristic of men like Machiavelli and Hobbes is that they claim to oppose a realistic teaching to the idealistic teaching of the past…. But we must not forget for one moment that what they tried to do was to erect on this so-called realistic basis an ideal order…. The perfection is much lower than that aspired to by Plato, but perfection it is.”

One difference of the ancients and moderns was their distinction between natural duties and natural rights. “In the traditional doctrine, especially as presented by Thomas Aquinas, these natural inclinations of man give rise primarily to duties…. [For Hobbes,] the fundamental phenomenon is not any duty but the right to preserve myself, and any duties which come are derivative from the foundational right…. That people should do their duties, one can only hope. But that they should be concerned with their rights, and fight for them: this is a much safer, more realistic, assumption.” Man generalizes his rights into universals through the means of reason. “In the moment I conceive my desire in terms of a law, I become already more reasonable, to say the least, than I was before…. By nature, men are unequal according to Rousseau, but the social contract replaces the natural inequality by conventional equality, and that is justice…. As long as the classical tradition lasted, a distinction was made between the natural law and positive law…. The political philosophy founded by Socrates, constituted itself by establishing the view that the just and the noble are fundamentally natural and not merely conventional.”

Strauss does not believe in the prevailing modern strain of historical relativism. He believes that the purpose of philosophy is to search for the truth. Political philosophy helps man, through its conception of the just society, to build ideal social institutions and traditions. “We have no higher duty and no more pressing duty than to remind ourselves and our students of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their baseness, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.”

“The Museum of Innocence” by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Maureen Freely)

This is a novel about love and patience. It is also a story about class, propriety, gender relations, religious norms, and traditional values. It is also one weird book. The story, above all, is one about an all consuming obsession. Set in Istanbul in the second half of the twentieth century, the novel details the milieu of the city’s nouveau riche and fading aristocracy. Kemal, the narrator, set to marry the daughter of a prestigious civil servant, Sibel, becomes enraptured by a poor distant relative, Fusan, whom he happens upon at a boutique. “Even all these years later I remember that Sibel spoke to me sweetly. Sibel was fun, and clever, and sympathetic, and I knew that with her at my side I would be fine, not just then but for the rest of my life. Late that night, after I had taken her home, I walked for a long time through the dark and empty streets, thinking about Fusan. What I couldn’t stop thinking about, what perturbed me was not just that Fusan had given me her virginity; it was that she had shown such resolve in doing so. There had been no coyness, no indecision, not even when she was taking off her clothes.” From the start of the affair, the mood of the book reveals that things will not end well for anyone. “It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure.” When Kemal and Fusan become estranged, he sinks to the nadir of his despair, comforting himself with any relic from his apartment that she had happened to touch. “As the pain I felt wondering whether Fusan might come grew less intense each day, I sometimes convinced myself that I was slowly growing accustomed to her absence, but there was no truth to this, none at all. It was simply that I was growing more adept at distracting myself with the happiness I found in objects.” For a time still engaged to Sibel, Kemal obsessively ruminates on the nature of love. “I would entertain the hopeful thought that all serious and honorable men who happened to fall passionately in love went through the same things I did.” The objects of his obsession consume Kemal’s existence. “The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory—of this there is no doubt.” What could be a thoroughly pitiful and depressing tale is interspersed with just a shimmer of light as Kemal struggles on with life. “I had already had intimations that my passion for Fusan would ultimately turn into such a story of stubborn introversion. My love for her, my obsession, or whatever one could call it—it had rendered me incapable of diverting myself onto a path that would lead me to sharing this world freely with another. Even in the early days I’d known deep in my heart that mutuality could never happen in the world I’ve been describing, and so I’d turned inward, to seek Fusan there. I think Fusan knew, too, that one day I would find her inside me. In the end everything would be fine.”

“Barley Patch” by Gerald Murnane

The stories nested within stories within stories sometimes makes for a challenging read. The layers peel back and forth so that sometimes the reader struggles to figure out which level of the story he is on. Murnane references previous details in the story by making the reader count the paragraphs he has just read backwards as markers. “I reported at the end of the fifth paragraph before the previous paragraph that I was often afraid of the character known as Aunt Bee.” Murnane also blends nonfiction and fiction, all the while claiming that everything is fiction. “I should remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction.” Maybe it is and the reader should take him at his word. The narrator of this novel is never Murnane, the author, but just a fictional character in this novel. Perhaps.

This novel is a meditation on the monkish practice of reading and writing fiction well. “Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it.” Murnane’s thoughts, at first, seem like they might be a little bit off. “Several times while I was writing the previous pages, I recalled the statement: fiction is the art of suggestion. This statement allows me to suppose that a person without imagination might still succeed in writing fiction so long as his or her reader is able to imagine.” He sometimes less than subtly interjects his opinions on what constitutes good fiction. “I have long forgotten whether or not the narrator of The Glass Spear was one of those unconvincing personages commonly occurring in fiction of the twentieth century: those narrators who claim to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in the work of fiction.” Murnane’s novel also tries to get at the heart of what fiction is all about. “During all the years while I had been a reader of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction—during all those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest places mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or to her; what places such a character thought of during the hours or the days that were never reported in the text; what places such a character dreamed about…. Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about…. Now, I was justified in believing in the existence of places beyond the places that I had read about or had written about: of a country on the far side of fiction…. I understood for the first time that a personage mentioned in a work of fiction is capable of devising a seeming territory more extensive and more detailed by far than the work itself.” It sometimes all blurs together and gets very meta. “I find myself now in a strange situation. Nearly sixteen years ago, I stopped writing fiction. A few years later, I wrote a piece of fiction intended to explain why I had so stopped. Now, more than ten years later again, I am trying to compose a passage of fiction that might explain my explanatory piece.” This novel is that fiction.

“Private Truths, Public Lies” by Timur Kuran

Kuran is currently a Professor of Economics at Duke University. He proposes a theory of “preference falsification, the act of misrepresenting one’s genuine wants under perceived social pressures…. Preference falsification aims specifically at manipulating the perceptions others hold about one’s motivations or dispositions…. A phrase that captures the meaning of preference falsification exactly is “living a lie.”… If one distinguishing characteristic of preference falsification is that it brings discomfort to the falsifier, another is that it is a response to real or imagined social pressures to convey a particular preference.” Kuran proposes that preference falsification is ubiquitous, both in totalitarian regimes and in democracies. He suggests that “to acknowledge the universality of preference falsification would call into serious question some of the alleged virtues of democracy.” However, “the proclivity to engage in preference falsification depends crucially on the institutional context.” Preference falsification occurs when an individual wants to appear to be in step with public opinion. However, “insofar as we overrate the genuineness of public opinion, we will overestimate its permanence and adapt more readily to its apparent shifts. Therefore public opinion may be very sensitive to signs that it is in flux.” Public opinion also exerts pressures well beyond what might be legally permissible in a society. “The pressure of public opinion may make minorities refrain from exercising their constitutional rights to dissent. As a practical matter, institutional checks and balances do not even guarantee that majorities will exercise their expressive rights. Even without government coercion, majorities might submit to the wishes of vociferous minorities. Protections against government tyranny do not prevent societies from tyrannizing themselves through the force of public opinion.”

Even when private opinions do change, there is a tendency not to reveal those altered preferences publicly because of status quo bias. “”Individuals would rather not be the first to challenge the status quo. Under the prevailing reputational incentives, people will not switch for fear that others will not…. Public opinion may thus outlive the circumstances that created it…. Individuals preserve an established public opinion in trying to be prudent—in endeavoring, that is, to select their public preferences at least partly on the basis of reputational incentives inferred from the history of public opinion…. When large numbers of people conceal their misgivings about the status quo, individuals may consider their own disenchantments exceptional…. Through preference falsification, they may thus hold in place structures that they could, if only they acted together, easily change.” Kuran observes that this also can lead to inefficient outcomes. “Preference falsification is itself a form of free riding, for it is undertaken to avoid the personal cost of achieving a desirable social outcome. As such, it is another basic source of inefficiency…. Where preference falsification differs from Olsonian free riding is that both its practice and its consequences may remain hidden.”

Public opinion also can, over time, shift actual private beliefs. “By transferring beliefs from the realm of the thinkable to that of the unthinkable, social pressures induce the withdrawal of those beliefs from public discourse. The consequent reconstruction of public discourse distorts private knowledge. In particular, it makes people progressively less conscious of the disadvantages of what is publicly favored and increasingly more conscious of the advantages. As a result, private opinion moves against the publicly unfavored alternatives. Having lessened their public popularity, preference falsification thus ends up also lessening their private popularity…. The status quo, once sustained because people were afraid to challenge it, will thus come to persist because no one understands its flaws or can imagine a better alternative. Preference falsification will have brought intellectual narrowness and ossification.”

Public preferences can shift rapidly once information reaches certain breaking points and perceptions snowball. “Neither private preferences nor the corresponding thresholds are common knowledge. A society can therefore come to the brink of a revolution without anyone realizing this, not even those with the power to unleash it…. [However,] widespread antipathy toward the government is not sufficient to mobilize large numbers for revolutionary action…. If the opposition is minuscule, the expected cost of revolting is immense…. By the same token, a revolution may break out in a society where private preferences, and therefore individual thresholds, tend to be relatively favorable to the government. It is necessary only for additions to the opposition to trigger further defections from the government’s ranks. In other words, the threshold sequence must form a bandwagon that is mobile at the prevailing public opposition…. In reality, a revolutionary bandwagon may help create the discontent that keeps it in motion…. Not only is mass discontent inessential to start a revolution, but the early movers need not be among society’s most disaffected members…. A nineteenth-century socialist is reputed to have exclaimed to a friend handing coins to a beggar: “Don’t delay the revolution!””

However much events have catalysts, social outcomes cannot be mass managed, planned, or preordained. “First, insofar as social outcomes result from interaction among individual actions, collective responses, and preexisting social structures, no person or group will deserve full credit for an unfolding outcome. Observed social outcomes are bound to be unconstructed. Second, no one can reliably imagine all long-term consequences of any given choice. There will be social outcomes that were unintended…. The spread of new ideas is determined partly, if not substantially, by the diverse communications that form ordinary public discourse. Neither these communications nor the consequent development of public discourse can be controlled with precision…. Social evolution is influenced by chance and contingency, in addition, of course, to genuine desires.”

It is important to note that Kuran’s theory of preference falsification is normatively neutral. “One can recognize the role of preference falsification in an ideology’s dissemination without having to pass judgment on the ideology. Conversely, one can praise or criticize an ideology without losing sight of its dependence on preference falsification.”