“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.”

“Either/Or (Part II)” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

The “Or” section of Kierkegaard’s commentary on the values of aesthetics versus ethics is written by the fictional B, a married judge counseling his friend A on the errors of his licentious ways. B begins, “Just consider, your life is passing; for you, too, the time will eventually come even to you when your life is at an end, when you are no longer shown any further possibilities in life, when recollection alone is left, recollection, but not in the sense in which you love it so much, this mixture of fiction and truth, but the earnest and faithful recollection of conscience.” B is trying to convince his friend that a faithful marriage is, in fact, aesthetically valid. He continues, “Romantic love manifests itself as immediate by exclusively resting in natural necessity…. Although this love is based essentially on the sensuous, it nevertheless is noble by virtue of the consciousness of the eternal that it assimilates, for it is this that distinguishes all love [Kjaerlighed] from lust [Vellyst]: that it bears a stamp of eternity. The lovers are deeply convinced that in itself their relationship is a complete whole that will never be changed.” But to B marriage brings about a kind of love even more profound than this type of love as well. “The defect in earthly love [Kjaerlighed] is the same as its merit—that it is preference [Forkjaerlighed]. Spiritual love has no preference and moves in the opposite direction, continually sheds all relativities. Earthly love, when it is true, goes the opposite way and at its highest is love only for a single human being in the whole world. This is the truth of loving only one and only once…. Thus marriage is sensuous but also spiritual, free and also necessary, absolute in itself and also within itself points beyond itself…. What I want to stress, however, is the beauty in the marriages that have as little “why” as possible. The less “why,” the more love…. A person who marries for this and that etc. is taking a step that is just as unesthetic as it is irreligious. The goodness of his objective is of no use, for the mistake is precisely that he has an objective.” 

B then compares the love within a faithful marriage to that of first love. “Thus it is not true that marriage is an exceedingly respectable but tiresomely moral role and that erotic love [Elskov] is poetry; no, marriage is really the poetic. And if the world has often witnessed with pain that a first love cannot be sustained, I shall grieve along with the world but shall also bring to mind that the defect was not so much in what happened later as in its not beginning rightly. What the first love lacks, then, is the second esthetic ideal, the historical. It does not have the law of motion in itself.” B then recites a litany of his ideals for marriage. “Honesty, frankness, openness, understanding—this is the life principle in marriage. Without this understanding, marriage is unbeautiful and actually immoral, for then the sensuous and the spiritual, which love unites, are separated. Only when the being with whom I live in the most tender union in earthly life is just as close to me in the spiritual sense, only then is my marriage moral and therefore also esthetically beautiful…. It takes courage to appear as one really is.”

B continues by relating his conception of the true nature of the aesthetic. “Most people seek esthetic satisfaction, which the soul needs, in reading, in viewing works of art, etc.; whereas there are relatively few who themselves see the esthetic as it is in existence, who themselves see existence in an esthetic light and do not enjoy only the poetic reproduction…. An esthetic representation always requires a concentration in the moment [Moment], and the richer this concentration is, the greater the esthetic effect…. Either this is a predestined moment, as it were, that sends a shudder through the consciousness by awakening the idea of the divineness of existence, or the moment presupposes a history…. How, then, can the esthetic, which is incommensurable even for portrayal in poetry be represented? Answer: by being lived…. He who in the most profound sense feels himself creating and created, who in the moment he feels himself creating has the original pathos of the lines, and in the moment he feels himself created has the erotic ear that picks up every sound—he and he alone has brought into actual existence the highest in esthetics…. We are not to read about or listen to or look at what is the highest and the most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it.”

B’s second essay, in the form of a long letter to A, is on “The Balance Between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality.” He begins, “Wherever in the stricter sense there is a question of an Either/Or, one can always be sure that the ethical has something to do with it. The only absolute Either/Or is the choice between good and evil, but this is also absolutely ethical…. The person who wants to decide his life task ethically does not ordinarily have such a wide range; the act of choosing, however, is much more meaningful to him…. The is an Either/Or that makes a human being greater than the angels…. What takes precedence in my Either/Or is, then, the ethical. Therefore, the point is still not that of choosing something; the point is not the reality of that which is chosen but the reality of choosing…. The esthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes.”

B now and then specifically addresses A and tries to rebut his particular aesthetic stance of resigned despair to exterior worldly life. “It is manifest that every esthetic view of life is despair, and that everyone who lives esthetically is in despair, whether he knows it or not. But when one knows this, and you certainly know it, then a higher form of existence is an imperative requirement…. It is not despair involving something actual but despair in thought. Your thought has rushed ahead; you have seen through the vanity of everything, but you have not gone further. Occasionally you dive into it, and when for a single moment you abandon yourself to enjoyment, you are also aware that it is vanity. Thus you are continually beyond yourself—that is, in despair. Therefore, your life lies between two enormous contradictions: at times you have colossal energy, at times an equally great indolence.” B continues lecturing A on his particular aesthetic personality, which finds contentment in despair. “As far as enjoyment goes, you have an absolutely aristocratic pride. This is entirely appropriate, for, after all, you are finished with the finite altogether. And yet you cannot give it up. Compared with those who are chasing after satisfaction, you are satisfied, but that in which you find your satisfaction is absolute dissatisfaction…. In a certain sense you are right, for nothing that is finite, not even the whole world, can satisfy the soul of a person who feels the need for the eternal.”

B goes on by describing ethics as intwined with the universal. “The person who views life ethically sees the universal, and the person who lives ethically expresses the universal in his life. He makes himself the universal human being, not by taking off [affore] his concretion, for then he becomes a complete non-entity, but by putting it on [ifore] and interpenetrating it with the universal. The universal human being is not a phantom, but every human being is the universal human being…. The person who lives esthetically is an accidental human being; he believes he is the perfect human being by being the one and only human being. The person who lives ethically works toward becoming the universal human being.” The ethical also has a unique way of viewing the nature of the Self. “The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself…. That is why the ethical life has this duplexity, in which the individual has himself outside himself within himself…. If he does not hold firmly to the truth that the individual has the ideal self within himself, all of his aspiring and striving becomes abstract.”

B concludes by again confronting the rare aesthetic life-view held by A, directly. He explains to A what happens to the person who cannot accept the universal, but must stand apart, as the exception. “If it so happens that the universal he is unable to actualize is the very thing he desired, then in one sense he will, if he is high-minded, rejoice in this circumstance…. He will then be convinced that there is something of the universal that he cannot actualize. But he is not finished with this conviction, for it will generate a profound sorrow in his soul…. He himself will grieve, not cravenly and dejectedly, but deeply and openly, for he will say: Nevertheless, I do love the universal. If it is the happy fate of others to testify to the universally human by actualizing it, well, then I testify to it by my grief…. I have placed myself outside the universal; I have deprived myself of all the guidance, the security, and the reassurance that the universal gives; I stand alone, without fellow-feeling, for I am an exception. But he will not become craven and disconsolate; he will confidently go his solitary way; indeed, he has demonstrated the correctness of what he did—he has his pain.”

“Celestial Bodies (Ladies of the Moon)” by Jokha Alharthi (translated by Marilyn Booth)

This novel, originally written in Arabic, recounts the lives of three generations of a wealthy Omani family, living in the village of al-Awafi. The narration switches between an omniscient third person and Abdallah, the husband of the eldest of three sisters, who together form the narrative backbone of the story. The tale unwinds slowly, with flashbacks often breaking the chronological flow of the drama. Bits and pieces of local history and gossip are revealed, which fill in the blanks of previous events. Azzan and Salima, the parents of the three daughters, also feature prominently in the narrative, but the novel is as much about all the relationships and intrigues that build across the whole village over generations, more than just one family’s travails. Al-Awafi abuts a Bedouin encampment and takes a three day donkey ride to travel to Muscat. But, by the end of the novel, its kids are playing on Playstations and the Shaykh’s Landrover, the town’s lone car, has been joined by pickup trucks and Mercedes sedans.

One of the most striking transformations in Omani society, over the course of the 20th century, was the liberating of the slaves. Abdallah remembers of his father, “He went on shouting, in one of those bouts of raving that took his mind for most of two years before his death. Boy! Boy! Tie Sanjar up, tie him to the column on the east side of the courtyard, out there, out in front of the house. Anyone who gives that slave water or shade has to answer to me. I knelt down beside him. Father, the government freed the slaves a long time ago, and then Sanjar went to Kuwait.” Later, Abdallah recounts what another of his father’s own slaves, a runaway, had told his wife (and Abdallah’s nanny), “Before he fled, Habib told Zarifa that songs were the only thing left in his memory to keep his language alive for him. That’s why he sang. If he didn’t have songs in there, the hollow spaces would be filled with rage.”

Class roles and traditional societal structure are paramount in all the relationships in this novel. Gender norms are particularly acute. Alharthi writes of Mayya, the eldest daughter, “her father left the matter in her mother’s hands. After all, these were her girls and marriage was women’s business.” Mayya’s own daughter, London, also found out how little customs had changed despite the years. “By then, this grandmother of hers was swearing out loud that she would slit her granddaughter's throat if the rebellious girl really did marry the peasant’s son. How could she possibly marry the issue of the man who had threshed the family’s grain?” Asma, the middle daughter, realized on the eve of her wedding, “She’d be one of the women now, and finally she would have the right to come and go, to mix freely with the older women and listen to their talk, to attend weddings, all of them, near and far, and funerals too. Now she would be one of the women who sat around their coffee in the late mornings and then again at the end of the day. She would be invited to lunch and dinner, and she would issue her own invitations, since she was no longer merely a girl. Marriage was her identity document, her passport to a world wider than home.” Salima, the family matriarch, herself concludes, “We raise them so that strangers can take them away.”

Another theme that recurs in the novel is the concept of home. At one point Abdallah says, “when we are away from home, in new and strange places, we get to know ourselves better.” At another point, having moved with his family to Muscat, he says of his old family village, “Al-Awafi’s people were firm believers in the past; they did not look to the future.” Finally, a man known as Issa the Emigrant, because he had had to flee Oman for fighting alongside the Imam in the Civil War against the Sultan and the British, cautioned his son while spending years of exile in Cairo, “We may live here but we’re not from here. We won’t leave anything of ourselves here. When we die our coffins will be carried to Oman. That’s where we’ll be buried.”

“Attention Seeking” by Adam Phillips

This short collection of essays by Phillips plays around with the theme of attention and examines what exactly it means to be seeking it (or not). He begins by describing how attention relates to the notion of Self. “This assembling of our selves through what we notice, through what, as we say, attracts our attention—both consciously and unconsciously—and just how surely we limit the repertoire of what we do notice, smacks of addiction (‘we get hooked’); and of a fundamental unknowingness about how we make ourselves up.” What we attend to becomes our own subjective world and, therefore, forms our own notion of our Self. Especially when young, we play with what we attend to. We challenge our conception of our Self and often even strive to transform it. “Attention and interest are always themselves experimental, even when—or perhaps particularly when—we are unaware of the risks being taken; curiosity never comes with a guarantee…. It is always worth wondering what our interests are a way of not being interested in…. The kinds of interest we take, the forms of attention we prefer, seem to be the best ways we have so far of trying to get the lives we think we want.”

Attention is also a social phenomenon. Our culture seeks to direct our attention in prescribed ways. “If rules, like teachers, are by definition attention-seekers, they also try to define the attention they seek.” Tradition and culture are guides to what is worth attending to, passed down through the generations. “Acculturation means getting your attention-seeking right.” Attention is also intimately related to love and, particularly, reciprocal love. “Attention-seeking, whatever else it is, is always a love test, and should be treated as such…. In our attention-seeking it could be assumed that we know neither what we want nor what we expect; and so we are in our starkest dependence on others.” In fact, attention-seeking is often the act of grasping in the dark. “We might assume that we don’t always know beforehand what the attention is that we seek.”

The notion of shame is also bound up with attention. “A shameful relation to anything is, by definition, a determined narrowing of attention…. In an uncanny narrowing of the mind, shame forecloses one’s attention…. It is only possible to have a shameful relation to the things that matter most…. By being ashamed of ourselves, we reveal what we value about ourselves…. When we are ashamed of ourselves there is something we have failed to be, or to do, that is deemed essential; and this failure to be or do something or other has been exposed.” Shame is also related to our conception of our Self. “Shame measures the distance between who we experience ourselves being, and who we would like to be—the distance between our ego and ego-ideal that is the source of our suffering…. A lot of work goes into the attempt to conform to a preferred model of oneself.”

Phillips ends by directly relating attention-seeking to psychoanalysis. He writes that Freud discovered “a new kind of attention, psychoanalytic attention; an interpretive attention that is in the service of telling and useful descriptions of unconscious motivation.” Phillips suggests an insight of psychoanalysis is to pay attention to what you are not paying attention to. He continues, “Freud is suggesting that attention is primarily, if not essentially, already thoroughly censored (or selective, as we more blandly say). That looking is a way of stopping us seeing; that talking is a way of stopping us speaking; that listening is a way of stopping ourselves hearing. That what we call attending is a process of motivated exclusion…. Attention evaluates, prohibits, and pre-empts.” In the realm of attention, the most important things are most often, actually, the unattended.

“Either/Or (Part I)” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

This is a collection of essays and miscellanea devoted to the aesthetic values of life. Kierkegaard wraps the work in multiple layers of obfuscation. He assumes the persona of Victor Eremita, the editor of a correspondence of papers between two individuals, A and B. The papers have been supposedly found in a secret drawer of a wooden desk bought in secondhand shop. These layers of remove give Kierkegaard the comfort of deniability for his more outrageous assertions. Part 1 of “Either/Or” contains the supposed papers of the person dubbed A, a pure aesthete.

The first section is a collection of aphorisms in which A writes lines such as, “desire in our age is simultaneously sinful and boring, because it desires what belongs to the neighbor.” Much of A’s writing revolves around the mimetic impulses of human nature. Another central theme of of his writings is a brutal self-examination of his own inner life. “One ought to a be a riddle not only to others but also to oneself. I examine myself; when I am tired of that, I smoke a cigar for diversion and think: God knows what our Lord actually intended with me or what he wants to make of me.” The subject matter never deviates far from the pure aesthetic, but also contains the portrayal of the power dynamic in all human relationships. “Real enjoyment consists not in what one enjoys but in the idea…. Enjoyment consists not in what I enjoy but in getting my own way.”

The second section of A’s papers is an essay devoted to the supreme beauty of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” A exclaims, “Immortal Mozart! You to whom I owe everything—to whom I owe that I lost my mind, that my soul was astounded, that I was terrified at the core of my being—you to whom I owe that I did not go through life without encountering something that could shake me, you whom I thank because I did not die without having loved, even though my love was unhappy.” He reflects on the difference in the enjoyment of music and language. “Music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. This is also the reason that in relation to language music appears first and last, but this also shows that it is a mistake to say that music is closer to perfection as a medium. Reflection is implicit in language, and therefore language cannot express the immediate…. Sensuous immediacy has its absolute medium in music.” A goes on to relate the process of desire in detail. “As soon as desire awakens or, more correctly, in and with its awakening, desire and the object of desire are separated; now desire breathes freely and soundly, whereas before it could not draw its breath because of that which was desired. When desire has not awakened, that which is desired fascinates and captivates—indeed, almost causes anxiety. The desire must have air, must find escape; this occurs through their being separated.”

The third essay is a reflection on tragedy in ancient Greek and modern dramas. A reflects, “In ancient tragedy, the action itself has an epic element; it is just as much an event as action. This, of course, is because the ancient world did not have subjectivity reflected in itself. Even if the individual moved freely, he nevertheless rested in substantial determinants, in the state, the family, in fate…. The hero’s downfall, therefore, is not a result solely of his action but is also a suffering, whereas in modern tragedy the hero’s downfall is not really suffering but is a deed…. The hero stands and falls entirely on his own deeds…. But just as the action in Greek tragedy is something intermediate between action and the suffering, so also is guilt, and therein lies the tragic collision…. The Greek hero rests in his fate; his fate is unalterable; of that there can be no further discussion.”

The fourth essay is titled “Silhouettes Psychological Diversion.” A contrasts the forms of visual art with language. “Art is in the category of space, poetry in the category of time…. art depicts repose, poetry motion.” He goes on to contemplate inner sorrow and the possibility of its depiction in art. “Unhappy love is in itself the deepest sorrow for a woman, but it does not follow from this that even unhappy love engenders reflective sorrow…. Reflective sorrow, then, cannot become a subject for artistic portrayal. For one thing, it is never really present but is continually in the process of becoming; for another, the exterior, the visible, is a matter of unimportance and indifference.” It is buried so deep within the soul that reflective sorrow can never actually be seen and, therefore, portrayed in art. “The point in reflective sorrow is that the sorrow is continually seeking its object; this seeking is the sorrow’s restlessness and its life.” A concludes with the supposition, “for only the person who has been bitten by snakes knows what one who has been bitten by snakes must suffer.”

The fifth essay is a short piece titled “The Unhappiest One,” addressed to a fake secret society, “The Fellowship of the Dead” or “The Society of Buried Lives.” A states, “we, like the Roman soldiers, do not fear death, we know a worse calamity, and first and last, above all—it is to live…. Happy is the one who died in old age; happier is the one who died in youth; happiest is the one who died at birth; happiest of all the one who was never born.” A reoccurring theme in many of Kierkegaard’s works is the concept of recollection. “Recollection is above all the distinctive element of the unhappy ones, which is natural, because past time has the notable characteristic that it is past.” A ends in paradox, “See, language breaks down, and thought is confused, for who indeed is the happiest but the unhappiest and who the unhappiest but the happiest, and what is life but madness, and faith but foolishness, and hope but staving off of the evil day, and love but vinegar in the wound.”

In his sixth essay, A says of poets, “The reason poets are called priests is that they interpret life, but they do not want to be understood by the masses but only by those natures with sensitive hearts.” Poetry is esoteric writing. He continues, “So it is in life, where one always needs explanatory notes, but it ought not to be so in poetry. Then the spectator, free from care, can enjoy, can absorb undisturbed, the dramatic life.”

The penultimate piece returns to the theme of recollection. A writes, “every particular change still falls under the universal rule of the relation between recollecting and forgetting. It is in these two currents that all life moves, and therefore it is a matter of having them properly under one’s control. Not until hope has been thrown overboard does one begin to live artistically; as long as a person hopes, he cannot limit himself…. To be able to forget always depends upon how one remembers, but how one remembers depends on how one experiences reality…. Thus nil admirari [marvel at nothing] is the proper wisdom of life. No part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any moment he wants to…. The more poetically one remembers, the more easily one forgets, for to remember poetically is actually only an expression of forgetting. When I remember poetically, my experience has already undergone the change of having lost everything painful. In order to be able to recollect in this way, one must be very much aware of how one lives, especially of how one enjoys.” A concludes with a plea for the arbitrary. “Arbitrariness is the whole secret. It is popularly believed that there is no art to being arbitrary, and yet it takes profound study to be arbitrary in such a way that a person does not himself run wild in it but himself has pleasure from it. One does not enjoy the immediate object but something else that one arbitrarily introduces. One sees the middle of a play; one reads the third section of a book. One thereby has enjoyment quite different from what the author so kindly intended. One enjoys something totally accidental; one considers the whole of existence [Tilvaerelse] from this standpoint…. It is very advantageous to let the realities of life be undifferentiated in an arbitrary interest like that…. The eye with which one sees actuality must be changed continually…. The accidental outside a person corresponds to the arbitrariness within him…. The most insignificant thing can accidentally become a rich material for amusement.”

The final section takes the form of “The Seducer’s Diary,” which is a selection of letters and notes that A has supposedly written to and about his latest conquest, Cordelia. Kierkegaard, as Victor Eremita, editor of A’s works, begins forebodingly, “a bad conscience can indeed make life interesting.” The editor continues, “For him [A], individuals were merely for stimulation; he discarded them as trees shake off their leaves—he was rejuvenated, the foliage withered.” A, then, writes, “It is not a particular beauty who captivates me, but a totality; a visionary picture floats past me in which all these feminine beings blend with one another and all these movements are seeking something, seeking repose in a picture that is not seen.” He continues on with his conception of love and of Platonic forms. “The image I have of her [Cordelia] hovers indefinitely somewhere between her actual and her ideal form…. It is not art to seduce a girl but it is a stroke of good fortune to find one who is worth seducing. —Love is full of mysteries…. If at first sight a girl does not make such a deep impression on a person that she awakens the ideal, then ordinarily the actuality is not especially desirable; but if she does, then no matter how experienced a person is he usually is rather overwhelmed.” For a woman the Platonic form excites slightly differently. “I do believe a young girl would prefer to be all alone with her ideal, that is, at certain moments, and precisely at those moments when it has the strongest effect on her mind. Even if her ideal has found an ever so perfect expression in a particular beloved object, there nevertheless are moments when she feels that in the ideal there is a vastness that the actuality does not have.”

A contrasts, explicitly, for the first time, the aesthetic from the ethical. “Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient; when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular, infinitely langweiligt [boring].” Quickly, he returns to the aesthetic. “If a person does not know how to make erotic love the absolute, in comparison with which all other events vanish, then he should never let himself become involved in loving.” He also explicitly spells out his ideas on the proper course of love and its natural poetry. “I am an esthete, an eroticist, who has grasped the nature and the point of love, who believes in love and knows it from the ground up, and I reserve for myself only the private opinion that no love affair should last more than a half year at most and that any relationship is over as soon as one has enjoyed the ultimate. All this I know; I also know that the highest enjoyment imaginable is to be loved, loved more than anything else in the world. To poetize oneself into a girl is an art; to poetize oneself out of her is a masterstroke. But the latter depends essentially on the former.” Finally, A concludes by summarizing his general opinion on aesthetics. “Woman still is and will continue to be an inexhaustible subject for contemplation for me, an everlasting overabundance for observations. The person who feels no need for this study can be whatever he wants to be in the world as far as I am concerned, but one thing he is not, he is no esthetician. What is glorious and divine about esthetics is that it is associated only with the beautiful; essentially it deals only with belles lettres and the fair sex.”

“The Story of the Stone Vol. V- The Dreamer Wakes” by Cao Xueqin (translated by John Minford)

This is the final volume in Cao Xueqin’s epic novel. The houses of Ning-Guo and Rong-Guo have fallen on hard times and out of imperial favor. Events come to a head when the masters of the two houses, Jia She and Jia Zhen, are stripped of their hereditary titles, their mansions, land holdings, bonded servants, and gold are all confiscated, and the two are banished to the frontier by Imperial Decree. If not bad enough, the younger master of the Ron-Guo branch, Jia Zheng, is impeached from his position as an official grain collector. Although personally upstanding, he had been negligent in his command and allowed his underlings and servants to extort the peasantry for private gain.

Jia Zheng, recalled to the capital and temporarily without official position, finally looks at the household books and sees what a sorry state his family’s fortune has dwindled to with years of luxury, gambling, and waste. “And now I find that we have been mortgaging ourselves up to the hilt in order to keep up an empty show! We have been living far beyond our means…. What is it to you [servants] if we live or die? You say we are lucky not to have had everything confiscated—but what do you know? Do you realize that with our reputation as it stands at present, we’ll be hard put to it to avoid bankruptcy. And with you putting on airs, acting as if you were rich, talking as if you were important, swindling people left right and centre, we don’t stand a chance.”

Alone, Grandmother Jia, at her wits end, struggles to preserve what dignity and standing remains for the Jia households. “Almighty Lord Buddha! I your humble servant, born into the family of Shi, and married into the house of Jia, earnestly beseech you to show your compassion. For many generations we have done no wrong, we have not trodden in the ways of violence or arrogance. I have done my humble and inadequate best to stay in the paths of righteousness, to support my husband and to assist my sons. But the younger generation have acted with wanton recklessness, they have incurred the wrath of providence, and now our home has been raided and our property taken from us. My son and two of the younger men are held in prison and must expect the worst. The blame for all of these misfortunes must rest on my shoulders, for having failed to teach the younger generation the true principles of conduct. Now I kowtow and beg Almighty Heaven to protect us. May those in prison see their sorrow turned to joy, may the ailing swiftly recover health. May I alone be permitted to carry the whole family’s burden of guilt! And may the sons and grandsons be forgiven! Have pity on me, Almighty Heaven, and heed my devout supplication; send me an early death that I may atone for the sins of my children and grandchildren!”

By the time Grandmother Jia does pass away, the Imperial Throne has once again shown favor to the Jias.  One hereditary title has been restored to her younger son, Jia Zheng, who has also been reinstated to an official position at the Commission of Public Works. Eventually, Jia She and Jia Zhen are also given amnesty and allowed to return to their restored properties. However, it is in the conduct of Grandmother Jia’s servant, Faithful, that filial piety is most staunchly displayed. Upon her mistress’ death, she chooses to hang herself, rather than serve any other master. Bao-yu comments, “What a rare girl Faithful was to choose such a death! The purest essence of the universe is truly concentrated in her sex! She has found a fitting and noble death. We, Grandmother’s own grandchildren, are despicable by comparison. We have shown ourselves less devoted than her maid.”

This final volume, again, shifts in tone back towards the mystical and philosophical. Bao-yu reflects, “People always say that dreams are false, but it seems that this one was real! How often I’ve wished I could dream that dream of mine again! And now here I am, and my wish is coming true.” In fact, throughout this volume, Bao-yu transforms from a carefree youth into a spiritual enigma. “In addition to his inveterate contempt for worldly success and advancement, he had of late begun to adopt an attitude of indifference towards the whole gamut of romantic attachment—in a word, towards love itself. But this radically new departure was hardly noticed by those around him, and he himself said nothing to enlighten them.” His new wife, Bao-Chai, is the first to notice this change in mood and admonishes him, “Since we are husband and wife I should be able to look to you for lifelong support. Our life together should be built on something more than the passion of a moment. Glory and wealth are as insubstantial as a cloud—that I can understand. But since ancient times, what the sages have prized most has always been virtue…. It’s ridiculous to compare yourself with Bo Yi. Both he and Shu Qi lived in the declining years of the Shang dynasty, and their lives were beset with difficulties of one kind or another. So they had a good pretext for escaping their responsibilities. But your case is totally different. Ours is a golden age, and we ourselves have received numerous favours from the throne, while our ancestors enjoyed lives of luxury. And you yourself have been treasured all your life, both by our late grandmother, and by Mother and Father.” However, a mysterious visiting monk observes, “Predestined attachments of the human heart are all of them mere illusion, they are obstacles blocking our spiritual path.”  Bao-yu, himself, ponders, “The True Sage does not reveal himself, and he who reveals himself is no True Sage.” Cao’s novel ends by abstracting out upon its own very narration, “When grief for fiction’s idle words/More real than human life appears,/Reflect that life itself’s a dream/And do not mock the reader’s tears.”

“Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith- A Dialogue” by Rene Girard and Gianni Vattimo

This book contains a series of three public debates between Girard and Vattimo, from the late 1990s, followed by concluding essays by both men, summarizing their differing positions. Girard is a French anthropologist and Vattimo an Italian philosopher, but both are practicing Catholics, though neither doctrinaire by any means. Girard should be regarded as the more traditionalist of the pair, whereas Vattimo considers himself a left Heideggerian nihilist, who has found his way back to Catholicism. The two find plenty in common, however. The debates’ moderator, Pierpaolo Antonello, suggests, “if we seek a unifying philosophical theme encompassing both authors, a common cornerstone of their outlook, that would be “the death of God” in both the philosophical and the anthropological senses.”

Vattimo states that, after reading Girard, a key term he began implementing was secularization. He defines it thus, “secularization, which I take to mean the effective realization of Christianity as a nonsacrificial religion…. Secularization is not the relinquishment of the sacred but the complete application of the sacred tradition to given human phenomena…. Christianity is the religion that opens the way to an existence not strictly religious, if we take “religious” to mean binding restraints, imposition, authority…. Charity takes the place of discipline.” Girard offers a word of caution. “If our cultural evolution has led us to substitute ourselves for God, then we had better realize that we have taken on an enormous responsibility…. Judaism and Christianity are aware that if we try to do away with all the prohibitions, the limits that the archaic religions imposed, we are putting at risk not only ourselves but the existence of the whole world…. Secularization also entails the end of the sacrificial…. When, thanks to Christianity, we get rid of the sacred, there is a salvific opening up to agape, to charity, but there is also an opening up to perhaps greater violence.” Girard goes on by describing the facts common to all archaic myth, as he sees them. “Every myth is a failed Passion. Not in the sense that the victim was not killed, but that the anthropological truth of this death, of this innocent death, was not unveiled. The question the Passion poses is: which side are we on? Are we with the crowd that accuses Jesus of being guilty, or are we on the other side?… Myth is always dominated by the viewpoint of the crowd, which designates the victim and proclaims his guilt, whereas in the Passion story we see the other side too, the position of the innocent victim.”

In the next debate between Girard and Vattimo, the two discuss cultural, ethical, and moral relativism. Vattimo begins, “I think of God as relativist because he is the only entity who really could be, given that he gazes down on the various cultures of humanity from on high.” Girard brings in his ideas on mimetism. “The mimetic theory is an effort to demonstrate that cultural differences, no matter how significant they may be at one level, are insignificant at another…. Man is essentially competitive and inclined to rivalry. He wants to outdo his neighbor, and so he competes with him. Human intelligence, the spirit of initiative, is basically competitive.”

In the final debate, where the men discuss their readings of Heidegger and Nietzsche, Girard brings up what he sees as the crucial point. “The most important thing Nietzsche ever said about religion (and, I would hazard, the most important thing said in theology since the time of Saint Paul) is that in myth the victim is always expelled and justly killed (and in this sense, I, too, could claim to be a bit of a Nietzschean), whereas the community bears no blame. Sacrifice is something necessary and therefore positive because a community, a society, that cannot kill, that cannot victimize, no matter if the victims are innocent, is condemned to extinction; it is condemned to exactly the kind of weakness we have today, a weakness inherited from Christianity…. [Nietzsche] chooses to take the part of violence!” In the end, Girard asks of Vattimo, in a world stripped of the safety valve of the scapegoat mechanism, “How do we control the ever-present tendency of the crowd to veer off into some excess?”