物 の 哀 れ

mono no aware

"the pathos of things"

There are things easily said in one language that may take a page to say in another. Winter turns to spring, and there is the symbolism of hope, of renewal, of life, of fertility, of continuation.

物 の 哀 れ is Japanese, and sounds like , mono no aware and means "the pathos of things"… The Japanese talk about this at hanami, when they go to the best place to see the sakura, the cherry blossoms.

Cherry blossoms fall from their delicate cling to the center of the blossom, the part that is clinging to the branch, that is the dark and twisting lifeline to the blossoms. Then for some reason, at some time, they fall, like snowflakes, or like time, they fall at 5 cm / sec. … and Japanese go to places where there are hundreds or even thousands of cherry trees loaded with blossoms, and they have a festival all about it, hanami, going to look at the blossoms.

Why talk about mono no aware at hanami? Hanami is looking at the blossoms, but also eating some green tea ice cream and throwing back a few cups of sake, or just a normal party with chips and Coke, and it’s a party; but mono no aware is quite philosophical, even bearing a tinge of Zen sadness if you think about it. The pathos of things, meaning the suffering of things, or more for us the empathy for things, is really a rumination on the transitoriness of things, such as cherry blossoms, that last but a few days. As St James says, “For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, then vanisheth away. Like the cherry blossoms, we will live for a little time on this earth, and then drop. Or like the cherry blossoms, a lifelong friendship may just cease clinging to the branch, and fall. Or a passion held between two hearts, like the sakura, will fall, at 5 cm / sec and be gone. Gone.

The only thing that can capture the blossom forever is art.

Nobody is more sincere than a dupe.

What does it take to be a dupe? Stupidity? Maybe a little; but sometimes a dupe is quite intelligent in one arena, while being very gullible in another. I think a true dupe is really quite sincere. The true dupe is a believer, but a quickly converted believer, who doesn’t need much evidence. Or maybe they need evidence, just enough, and if the evidence is convincing because they are already predisposed towards that idea, then they go for it.

The worst dupes of all are the dupes of political factions. The dupes in the ‘between-the-wars’ period who were enamored of Hitler and his ideas on a better Germany—especially Brits and Americans who supported him and defended him, were monumentally wrong. But even worse than those dupes were the thousands or millions of people living in the free world—remember that phrase? –we don’t use it any more—too bad—it’s still true—who were the dupes of the commies. I knew them. I went to college with them. I taught college with them. Americans, well-to-do Americans with PhDs in history or sociology or political science, or botany, or English lit, living a comfy life, the life of academe, sheltered and perverted as it was, turning their hearts to murderous commie ideologues and regimes. Standing up for them and condemning us. “The USSR has never been an aggressor nation,” she told her history classes semester after semester. What a wicked woman she was. And what I mean is, she was wicked to say that. I also mean, she was committing some hidden wicked little sin, like adultery, that makes people more prone to becoming the dupes of evil empires and ideas.

In fact the worst dupes of all are those who stand up for the ideas and policies of Beelzebub. They defend abortion, and want ZPG (zero population growth) and would kill off millions by starvation to save a patch of nice green forest somewhere. Like Stalin killed his forty million in the Ukraine, the likes of Al Gore want to do the same today in the name of saving the planet. Of course, hypocrisy must have something to do with being a dupe. But that’s another issue.

You who sit in silence

Who cannot slice your words

Who wince at joy and hide

Black crumbs of hurt inside

Who moan the dingy portents

Who sing the mournful lay

Who cry white cotton tears for

Knights to turn your way

To slay the vine that holds you

To free your shrunken heart

To make the scales fall from your eyes

To take the wind out of your sighs

To prime the hope of some new start

To pick the best of morning dew

To straighten up the frame

Someone to call your name

Get up and go do something. Shake it off. At least go outside for a few minutes. But if you want to change things, go out there and help somebody else. Too many people sit and dream about things, fueled by watching movies and TV—I wish I could say by reading books, but you’re too lazy for that. Reading takes moving your eyes across the lines, down to the next line, over to the end, back and down, over, back and down; but more than that it takes a mental exercise that watching TV doesn’t. TV watching you just stare at the strike zone, and you don’t have to process words into visuals in your imagination. No o- o- . That would be effort. Don’t want to do that.

So break away. Snap the flimsy cords that bind you down to inactivity, and get up. At least go outside. But more than that, go help somebody. I mean, it just infuriates me. You know?

So what would it take to be a cultured person?

Narrow it down: what reading would turn somebody into a cultured person?

Even further: What should you have read by the time you are 25 to be a cultured 25-year-old? And then 30? And then 40? And maybe by 50 you really are cultured, because you’ve read the list for the 25, the 30, the 40, and you’re still going.

But this all excludes music, and painting, and history, and language, and all the arts and sciences, that make somebody a cultured person.

A cultured person knows how to say junta.

A cultured person knows how to use the word zeitgeist, and ennui, and Weltschmerz, and Schadenfreude, and hubris.

A cultured person knows something about Mao’s little red book.

A cultured person has listened to Bach’s St Matthew Passion, if only on CD.

But those are only examples, minutiae in a vast wash of culture.

Back to reading. Reading is fundamental. Too bad it is not fundamental to get out of high school. Too bad it is not fundamental to get into college. Too bad it’s not fundamental to even graduate college.

College is to accelerate becoming a cultured person. Unfortunately, there is so much emphasis on skill, on specialization, that culture is not something that is transmitted, or acquired, in college anymore, in general. Even the college professors are culturally illiterate, specialized, like insects.

So the problem with making a list of books that a cultured person should have read, is reading itself. Reading is going to be a lost art for the masses before long. They will communicate with signology, with txtmsgging and I/M-ing language. b4 u no it thy wll nt b rding n e mor.

Reading will be the Sibboleth of the future. It has been a sifter in the past, and will be in the future. Look at those peoples who either had no written record that was sacred and kept as a core, as an anchor to their language, as opposed to those who did. One great example is the Mulekites. They had no scriptures, and in fact, nothing of significance in writing, when they left the Old Country and came to the New World. After generations, they were illiterate; and their oral language suffered from not having a written language. And their culture was only the culture of the rising and the immediate past generation; they could not claim any classics, any scripture, any great writing as a foundation to their language or their culture.

Saul Bellow asked, “Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” The Zulus, in fact, had no written language, and therefore no rich heritage of literature. Their culture was their immediate survival, accompanied by the traditions that were passed along from generation to generation. But who’s to say that three generations back, the traditions weren’t slightly different? There’s no written, no reliable, account. And where is the art of literature for the Zulus? Where is the psychology, the theology, the sociology, the history, the allegory, the morality, the humanity that literature is? To read Tolstoy’s War and Peace is to see a vision, to be transported into the hearts and minds of humans, of people, of a nation, of a civilization; it is to live another life in a capsule—and another, and another. Where is that for the Zulus? They have no literature.

And then there were the followers of Alma, and Mosiah, who had a cherished tradition of the written word—they had scriptures. They had the mind and will of the Lord, the voice of the Lord, unchanging, available, immutable, to guide them not only in theology, in spirituality, in congregations of faith, but also to serve as the touchstone for all writing, and all language.

Look at the English speaking world, with its King James Bible. It has been the guiding voice for language since 1611. All of Western civilization revolves around the Bible, and the English world comes out of the KJV in its literature.

The time will come when only the elite, the intelligentsia, will be able to read actual English, and only the faithful will be able to read scriptures. Look at the difficulty people have with the KJV right now, and its Elizabethan English. We are changing now as much in our language, away from Bible language, in one year, as it took a hundred years to change before the Great War.

Soon only certain people will want to read, or be able to read. It will be a separator.

10 Best Books

The ten best books—the impossible list. First of all, the ten best books about what? The ten best books of faith? The ten best books of fiction? Of nonfiction? Politics? History? But what if it’s just the ten best books period. That would include all genres. That would include the best books about dog breeding, or string theory; so there are parameters, and most people who would even care about a list of the ten best books know the parameters.

So here is my list. Except for 1, there is no order.

The top 10 books an American who is uncultured, somewhat uncivilized, and ignorant (not stupid, but just denied a certain degree of discovery and learning so far) that is to say, a high school grad, should read soon:

1. The Bible – Every cultured person should read the Bible. It is the most accessed piece of literature by writers in forming their own literature or literary contributions. Read it as literature, as philosophy, as myth, as the true word of God, or however; but read it because if you don’t you will miss out on all the richness that it has contributed to other literature. You will miss the fact that some writer you hold in high regard has gained his inspiration for an entire book, or only a character, or a situation, or a viewpoint, from the Bible. Unless you are reading the Bible for theological reasons (in which case you would read the best modern translations with study aids), the Bible you should read is the King James Version. In this category I could have added books of faith, or in other words scripture, since there are other books of scripture besides the Bible, unless you are an inerrantist, or in other words a certain brand of Protestant.

2. Don Quixote, Cervantes masterpiece, and only book, really. This is a book that will charm, but teach, and reveal. And it is a foundational novel for all other novelists.

3. Proust. Actually that’s not the book. Proust is the author, and he wrote In Search of Lost Time, also called Remembrance of Things Past. The title in French is A la recherche du temps perdu; and if you can read it in French, you will actually have read it. But if not, and you have to have a translation, you can see the better translation of the title is “in search of lost time.” And so to get the copy with that title would mean you are getting an updated version of the original translation, which was Remembrance of Things Past. The first translator, Moncrieff, took his title from a line of a Shakespeare sonnet, so it’s actually quite clever, though not a direct translation of the title. But the title is what the book is about. The novel is seven volumes long, and takes up ten inches of shelf space, even with 10 point type. So if that’s too much, just read one of the volumes, Du Côté de chez Swann, or Swann’s Way.

4. Shakespeare. All. Or if not, then first of all Hamlet. And if only one of Shakespeare’s, then Hamlet it is. Then if something else, just pick any of his plays, but before you do that, think of reading all The Sonnets. There are 154. With Shakespeare, you have to get an edition that has footnotes, since Elizabethan English is beyond most people’s vocabulary today. But when you read Hamlet you’ll see where so many of our common English expressions came from.

5. Machiavelli, The Prince. This is the quintessential book on politics, but really it’s a book on power, whether in national or international politics, or the politics of personal interactions. You have to read this short treatise to understand what the adjective Machiavellian means. As you read it, look for the phrase, “The end justifies the means.”

6. Dante. That’s not the title—he’s the author. So you could read The Divine Comedy, or just the first book, Inferno. I’m not sure if Dante gave the best expression of the Church’s doctrines on the afterlife, and other subjects as well, or if the Church took Dante’s ideas and made them doctrine. The Inferno goes into the degrees of sin and the degrees of punishment that are agreeable to the sin (maybe agreeable is not the best word here). Everybody who was anybody in literature for a millennium had read Inferno, so it’s another foundational piece. And you will be amused with some of the punishments, but you will want to write down all kinds of quotes to use daily in conversations, beginning with the words at the beginning, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.”

7. Faust. By Goethe. It’s the German book, and for some, the German soul. What Shakespeare is to English, Faust is to German and Germans. It has shaped their culture, or perhaps it has exposed, or defined, or explained, their mind and heart. And it is a study of life, and humans, and hearts, and mistakes, and so full of quotable quotes that you want to write down and memorize, and pull out in conversation sometime, and say, “Well, Goethe said, ….” It’s almost overwhelming by length and breadth and height and depth.

8. Anna Karenina, by Count Leo Tolstoy. This is another evidence of Denis de Rougemont’s contention in his Love in the Western World that the two major, and nearly only, themes in literature are adultery and Liebestod. This novel is a dissection of the case against the first. It will take you into a world of people that you will know because they are people like people you already know, only more interesting because they are a distillation of people.

9. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. This is one that if at all possible, you should read in French. Flaubert would spend a week on one page, written with pen and ink, then go out into the apple orchard and read the page at the top of his voice, almost shouting, to get le mot juste—just the right word, the exact word, and then the exact words, that conveyed by their length, and shape, and sound, as well as by their meaning, what he was expressing on that page. This is the book that says what real life is, but in such a way that is so opposite the mundane and quotidian reality of real life. Like a Vermeer, it is the poetic exposé of the everyday.

10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Not “The” but just “Adventures.” The American story that used to be America, and should be remembered, and should be a part of our heritage. We’ve come a long way from that era, that culture, that mentality; but it should always be remembered as our past, our culture as in a yoghurt culture. There is an edge to this book that can cut.

You must get out of the mindset of TV with its 24-minute time frame for sitcoms and 51 minute time frame for hour-long shows, where everything is presented, examined, and wrapped up quick and tidy. Books are meant to take the reader away for as long as possible; and sometimes TV readers can get impatient, wanting the action, to get to the point, to get things moving along, when the author, especially of days gone by, wants to show you everything around, about, before and after, the people and the actions of the book. So don’t be impatient. Slow down and read. And slow down in reading. Read at the pace of someone—preferably yourself, but with good diction and interpretation—reading it to you.

Translation. It’s the only way we’re going to read a book that was written in a language we don’t know; but it’s never going to be the same as reading the original. Just hope for a good translator, and a good translation.