Review of Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

Herman Hesse begins this novel with a preface in which he assures his readers that the intent of this book was not to wallow in despair at life’s dead-ends and interminable suffering, but to celebrate hope in meaning that underlies the material world, time, and the senses. It follows that this book is not a helpless surrender to a yearning for life to end, but rather an honest exploration of the limits of the torments of melancholia, boredom and modern existential angst; and I would say it applies in particular to aging intellectuals in the 20^th century. “This book, no doubt, tells of griefs and needs; still it is not a book of a man despairing, but of a man believing.” The road from doubt to hope appears circuitous at times as Hesse’s protagonist experiences it, but it arrives somewhere after all, with some progress made towards an acceptance of the multi-faceted self, a humorous approval of one’s circumstances, and an acknowledgment of one’s need for others.

The story begins with a man, Harry, who is beginning to feel old in body, mind and spirit. He increasingly grows to view himself as alien to a world of narrow scheming and simple joys, and he becomes severely depressed and burdened with his existence. Even more than bodily pain he suffers from the conviction that he has sucked life dry of anything it might offer to him, and now he wanders on the earth curiously observing the happiness and idiosyncrasies of those around him. His zest for life is long gone. He has lived his life with an aim to understand, and finds that knowledge alone does not fill one with joy. His quest for freedom from dependence on others leaves him with nothing when he has finally attained it, and having no need for others, “the world in an uncanny fashion left him in peace...for the air of lonely men surrounded him.” And being alone, breathing only his own stale breath and agonizing over the utter futility of life, he begins to seriously consider suicide, and meditates on it often.

Then, entering a bar right before his plan to discreetly exit his life, he meets a spontaneous and witty girl who seems to know his intentions and is able to disarm him. She becomes his provoker, lover, master, and…god. He feels strangely compelled to do anything she tells him, and she persuades him she knows his type and what will fix him. And fix him she does. She first teaches him to dance and to love jazz music, which opens up a new world of sensation for him. She introduces him to a friend, Pablo, who is a proficient jazz musician (apparently a fetish for Hesse, who reveres jazz as the free spirit of the modern age) and a dealer in herbs and spice and…narcotics. Yum. Pablo eventually offers him an hallucinogen, and through this Harry experiences transformative visions in which he sees his soul splintered into a thousand profound reflections in a hall of mirrors and doors. He explores his thoughts in the form of dream and phantasmagoria—what Pablo calls his ‘Magic Theatre.’ This was my second favorite part of the book, next to the “Treatise” (which I’ll describe shortly), because it was colorful and bizarre stories within the story; and frankly, each mini-story was more interesting than the work as a whole.

Harry battles the emptiness and existential hole left in modern man with the sudden invalidation of traditions and religions. He, like many moderns, has been deflated in the realization that 20^th century man is an artifact, a key which doesn’t open any doors. Humanity that no longer needs its long-evolved skills to survive is derelict on a blank sea, free to choose his direction, but unsure if there’ll ever be another place to land. As a result of, and partly a response to, the loss of classic cultural mores, the ethics of Hesse’s characters are fairly ambiguous…accept that physical violence is strongly protested in a couple scenes. The protagonists are both wastrels and erudites, prostitutes and professors; they all learn from each other, dance with each other, and knock each other up. The story themes sweat into a swirling orgy of self-discovery, belief, pleasure, music, drugs, education, dancing and sex. Hesse tries to make sense of our cravings, trying a little too hard, in my opinion, to salvage all pleasure as essentially good. However confused, Hesse’s real goal for his characters slowly manifested itself and remained consistent, which was put straightforward in his better known work, Siddhartha, “[People] no longer seemed alien to him as they once had. He did not understand or share their thoughts and views, but he shared with them life’s urges and desires…he now felt as if these ordinary people were his brothers.” That’s the moral I think: the brotherhood of all man. Happiness and harmony. Pleasure and sex. He seems wholly unconcerned about the categories of right/wrong, good/bad, keeping away from a judgmental attitude towards others which spoils one’s chances of intercourse. ‘Make love not war’, and in this way his characters find salvation by indulging in each other. I understand what he is trying to say about carnal pleasure sometimes being an appropriate response to austere anti-materialism and religious fanaticism, but his solution is too seamless. His hedonism comes across as too pure and harmless a poison, misrepresenting the dazzling allure of sexual ravishment and ignoring the addictive risks of boundless sensual pleasure.

Perhaps the single most important part of the book, an excerpt of which I read in an anthology of existentialist literature, and reading which inspired me to read this book, is the chapter titled, “Treatise On the Steppenwolf.” This short essay, which in the story was a document handed to Harry by a mysterious character, describes the divided soul of man as a carnal-spiritual struggle that is only held together by the utmost struggle and effort to subdue the wolf, and wake the man—a tension alluded to by Hesse as often erroneously resolved by feeding chocolate to the wolf, and blood to the man.

This tension between the animal-god poles, or natures, warring within the human breast, is often confused to be a tension between two selves. Hesse writes that “it appears to be an innate need of every person to regard the self as a unit”, but this complicates the problem of the ego more than resolves it, and “however often and however grievously this illusion [of ontic duality] is shattered, it always mends again.” Our self is a “manifold world, a constellated heaven” with thousands of facets, a “chaos of forms, stages and states; of inheritances and potentialities.” Later in the book, Harry, the protagonist, is taught how to organize these facets, these selves, into different combinations that might better meet the demands of his daily experiences which are as diverse and convoluted as his own inner world. The image of a chessboard with a myriad possible pieces to play a myriad possibly ways is given to him in a vision of how to better utilize the endless options inherent in being. This ‘schitzophrenic’ multiplication of one’s personas to create a fuller repertoire of faces to handle different situations that may arise is considered by Hesse to be ‘genius’, and not sociopathic. The difference between a healthy throng of standby-selves, and an unhealthy battering of personas trying to push to the front, may be the conscious choice and control over the manifest actors—a leading director of the many actors.

Some of this book was dull, and bohemian, and way overcooked. The parts I liked, I really liked; while the other 90% devolved into tale-chasing and an attempt to value all opposites of being. It is true, as Hesse infers that we too often prefer to treat our infinitely complex world and our view of it with a black-and-white objectivism, and we need to acknowledge the overlap between contrasts (grays) and the interrelatedness of all things. He isn’t interested in dismissing paradoxes by translating them into a plain contrast of right and wrong, as this kills the real subtle and finely nuanced nature of being.

But spend too much time in vagueness and even the concept of vagueness grows vague. Huh? It is true that man is not so easily categorized, pinned, and labeled as we sometimes like to think; but neither is man an amorphous ‘becoming’ with no definable progress or outline to differentiate him from his world and the unconscious chaos from which he has risen. Man is infinitely complex in his constitution and evolution, but he is also a phenomenon, an appearance, a form.  His challenge is fitting and proper: “[To live] you will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will at last take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may, before you are through and come to rest.” But his story illustrates a man whose concept of self was fractured to hell with no discernible center for concrete thoughts or directed action. Jung was right when he said that consciousness implies direction, and therefore exclusion. We are complex beings whose goal is to harmonize and simplify that complexity into discrete actions, and centered and continuous consciousness. Swinging too far to either extreme risks on one hand the loss of identity, and on the other hand the loss of expansion. Hesse may have expanded so far he popped.  

The ending in which Harry wakes up from the drug-induced hallucination in which he kills his lover and discovers that he has a lot to learn, is a bit too sudden a stop with no follow-through, but I was just glad to get out of Hesse’s fun house. A little longer and I would have started contemplating suicide myselves [sic]. 

A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking

This work is lauded as theoretical physics for the layman, but it is no Dummies version. Hawking quickly exhausted any common language and ideas that he and I might have shared, strapped me to the back of his wheelchair, and warped to light speed.  And yet, it really was an enlightening read, and I feel better informed regarding the frontiers of science, at least as it stood 20 years ago. It was especially nice to learn from Stephen Hawking, the late 20^th century’s Einstein, and the fact that Hawking overcame so much in his lifetime (a quadriplegic suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease) gives his ideas a courageous flavor. It also helps that the cover art of the 1990 edition totally looks like Hawking is the Emperor in his throne at the last duel between Luke and Darth Vader in The Return Of the Jedi. “Take your weapon. Strike me down! Your journey towards the dark side will be complete!” And I trust this man to escort me “From the Big Bang To Black Holes”? Enough.

I really did appreciate the leap to being able to understand, partially at least, the beginning and end of the horizons of the empirically known universe in 182 pages. To be sure, some parts of the book were…shall we say…a black hole sucking all light of the understanding into the fathomless abyss where Hawking sits alone with the key to the origins and ends of it all. Or maybe he doesn’t. It was intriguing to learn that some of Hawking’s “Eureka!” moments weren’t always the byproduct of complex mathematical procedures, but some occurred spontaneously in rather mundane places and times, such as a conversation with one of his students, or during a bedtime routine. In other words, he fortuitously stumbled upon some of his best ideas like any normal bloke, not always painstakingly exhuming them from the deep, ponderous vaults of trigo-calcu-bra. Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge, and I definitely see good ole’ fashioned creativity and wonder at work in Hawking as he discovered new worlds (and anti-worlds) for his brain to roll around in. I find it hilarious that at one point he found himself so immersed in ‘imaginative physics’ that when he finally reached irreconcilable contrarities, he had to be reminded by one of his students that he was using imaginary time in some of his formulas, which didn’t always work in real time scenarios. And I feel smart again for a couple seconds.

Let it be known, I love having my mind blown. Hawking takes us on the journey of basic physics, but then reaches to the furthest applications of those fundamentals without all the mind-cramping math. He includes only one equation in the book: E = mc (squared), and this is simple enough to understand as he explains the implications of Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity on energy (E), mass (m), and the speed of light (c). The beauty of the whole thing is this: it is beyond me. I had to try to picture the ‘color’ beyond the white pages full of static black symbols. The words had to become events. My mind often transposed the convoluted processes into cartoons; after all, much of it only makes sense as story. How else is anyone supposed to understand what is going on inside a star or an atom? Reality transcends mere words. We transpose the unseen, untouched world into pictures, into analogy, into math, into poetry. In the end, science is fiction, language is myth, math is… music!  I believe Hawking reconciles himself to the metaphysics of physics, even if it is unconsciously, when he states, “It is meaningless to ask: Which is real, “real” or “imaginary” time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.”

It is so interesting that so much of this book is now common knowledge at least in outline: The Big Bang, black holes, the variable nature of time and space. It was new depth in decades-old ideas for me as I relearned Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Uncertainty Principle, and quantum mechanics. I also finally understand a little better the nature of light, color, radio/x-ray/gamma rays…and the whole electromagnetic field that these waves wave on; and I can finally grasp the essentials of Super String Theory, which I’ve come to think is just a way to apply the mystery that particles cannot be differentiated from waves. Holistic cosmological evolution is now outlined in my mind more lucidly than it ever has been before. And I certainly know more now than I EVER wanted to know about black holes!

I was a little confused about Hawking attributing a sweeping loss of order to the universe in his elucidation of entropy with barely a nod to increasing order. He concedes the remarkable nature of human consciousness and man’s understanding of the universe, and refers to it as “a small corner of order”, but isn’t that small corner a greater improbability than all of the rest of the universe’s order/disorder put together? In other words, the concentration of evolution in terms of improbably and highly complex structure is weightier than all the entropy of all time. Doesn’t this warrant more attention and awe than quickly dismissing it as ‘a small corner of order’? Is he so eager to prove his point about the ultimate Big Crunch at the end of time, or the absence of cosmic intelligence, that he totally disregards the significance of his own sphere of existence and its rarity?

Science, for all it claims of emotional detachment and pure mechanics, so quickly capitulates to egoism. Maybe this betrays my ignorance, but I am always stunned by the amount of angst wrapped up in the competition among the intelligentsia. Maybe this shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but still it is upsetting for me to learn—the scientific community is cutthroat! Reading Hawking’s short bio on John Newton at the back of the book floored me as regards the Machiavellian nature of Newton’s politics that polluted any hope of unbiased research he might have undertook.  Who would believe a word he said if they couldn’t reproduce the results themselves? And apparently times haven’t changed: Hawking couldn’t even get through this book on super-physics for the layman, a daunting enough task to warrant cutting out all extraneous drama, without alluding to recent skirmishes between himself and his colleagues, and years later he’s still defending himself, or ostensibly trying not to defend himself.  To the credit of Hawking’s scientific integrity, he has admitted at least some of his errors in the past. Immediately following a paragraph in the book in which he asserts “one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem [referencing his own handiwork of course]”, he humbly acknowledges, “It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe.” It seems that though one can’t ‘argue with the math’, one can change its meaning, even years later. Two plus two may equal four, but two apples and two refrigerators equal four…what? The idea that science is pure and math is not arguable is nonsense. Simone de Beauvoir rightly said that “every objective description, so-called, implies an ethical background.” We’re all trying to get at something.

The last chapter, ‘Conclusion’, was truly startling to read. Hawking all but admits a thirst for some kind of ultimate meaning at the end of the book. “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?...Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” I thought it was a brave move, especially after working so hard to debunk God. Then, as if he was the first to ask these questions in an intelligent way, Hawking commits an embarrassing faux pas by accusing philosophers of neglecting their task of asking ‘why’. “Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories.” He cites Wittgenstein as a “comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant”, and obviously laments Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy as drifting away from the real purpose of philosophy. Let us suppose Hawking’s elitist view—that only certain people have the right to ask certain questions—is valid, and suppose it really is solely the philosophers business to ask the ‘why’ as Hawking suggests; then who is he, a mere empiricist, a mathematician, to question another sacred authority? Though I disagree with his accusation of modern philosophy, and though I think he has contradicted himself by questioning a fellow authority that he self-allegedly should be trusting implicitly to work unassailably in their specialized field, I still think he’s right in asking the questions himself. Maybe we all ought to be asking the big questions and making some discovery for ourselves, not implicitly trusting Hawking and Wittgenstein to do it all for us. In the end, the ‘specialists’ can’t save us. They can barely save themselves.

That all being said, I really did enjoy the book and I learned a lot. Mystery is necessary for the expanding soul, and we can take comfort in the fact that there isn’t an end in sight.  This ‘small corner of order’ is boundless—as deep as it is wide—and the longer the universe expands, the more infinite the scope and intricate the scale. The universe we know will always be a door to a larger universe as long as something keeps urging us to ask ‘what’ and ‘why’. And the question itself signals more; and if nothing else, we can always squeeze back through the small hole the question itself slipped in at. There’s always more for those who want more.

SeinLanguage by Jerry Seinfeld

For me, this book was an ‘inbetweener’. It helped lighten the load between Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time and an anthology of existentialist thought titled Existentialism. And lighten the load it did. I read just a couple pages each time I came to it, and put it down with a more cheerful and ‘breathable’ outlook.

Everyone knows Seinfeld’s humor (if you don’t, I don’t want to know you anymore…simple as that…just leave). He cracks jokes about everyday things that we take for granted, and helps us see the absurdity of what we accept as normality and common sense. A running joke on his sitcom Seinfeld is that it is a show about ‘nothing’, the irony being that it is about everything little that happens in our lives, and not any one big happening. His plots never go anywhere in the strict sense of narrative progress, but they explore the everywhere and find in it the irony and wonder of being.  

I truly believe we all need this sense of the hilarious mundane. Reading his jokes helps me, even if for a moment, not to be so consumed with restlessly prodding along the cosmic epic of my life, and to embrace the moment-by-moment joy and laughter that I can experience if I just open up my eyes. Not that Seinfeld’s humor always celebrates beauty and love, it also rejoices in the madness and destruction of the idiot, and that is funny too, no? Who doesn’t, at least inwardly, jump at a chance to call someone stupid, especially when that someone is us, and I think this urge helps us better define the boundaries of what we consider practical/impractical, or wise/unwise. The margins of our sanity can be a frightening zone to explore, but cognitively scoping out these borders can keep us from wondering too close in deed. Thus, comedy is a safety valve of sorts, allowing us to test the waters of danger in theory, not reality. That’s why I like to say, humor is soft danger, or soft fear. Humor is fear on weed. And that statement is weed on weed.

And now for a few examples from the book that had me rolling:

“I couldn’t be a maid. I wouldn’t have a good attitude. If I was a maid at someone’s house, I’d find them, wherever they were in the house. ‘Oh, I suppose you couldn’t do this…No, no, don’t get up, let me clean up your filth…No, you couldn’t dust, that’s just too tough, isn’t it? Don’t even try to help me. You rest. Save your energy so you can turn this place back into a filthy, stinking hole when I leave.’”

“Of course we all try and save time. Cutting corners, little short cuts. But no matter how much time you save, at the end of your life, there’s no extra time saved up. You’ll be going, ‘What do you mean there’s no time?  I had a microwave oven, Velcro sneakers, a clip-on tie. Where is that time?’ But there isn’t any.”

“So I was on this plane where it was this flight attendant’s first day on the job, but they didn’t have a uniform for her yet. And that really makes a big difference. I mean, now it’s just some regular person coming over to you going, ‘Would you mind bringing your seatback all the way up?’ I turned around, ‘Who the hell are you?’ And then she goes, ‘Well, I’m the flight attendant.’ ‘Oh yeah? Then I’m the pilot. Why don’t you sit down, I’m about to bring her in.’”

Future Of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud

I’ve always been interested in how some of the brightest minds of different eras attempted to solve the dilemma of existence, those people who have cast a large shadow in history for one reason or another; people whom others have looked to for answers for their time, in whom the spirit of the age was represented but partially transcended; figures like Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, Luther, Lincoln, Einstein, and, to cut to the chase, Sigmund Freud. The simple idea that many of our adult ‘parapraxes’ and neuroses may actually be unconscious fixations and frustrations carried over from coping mechanisms in early childhood was revolutionary, and kicked open the door to a surge of research into depth-psychology and eventually neuroplasticity. Freud was no joke, even though many of his theories were left far behind, as all theoretical tailings are, in the exhaust of later developments in psychology and psychoanalysis. The man was a courageous visionary in his time, and did much for science…and for religion. Some see his attitude towards religion as completely hostile, but I don’t think it was. His attitude towards some forms of religion and some religious attitudes was aggressive, but his posture towards religion in general was one of understanding of the time and culture in which they arose, and of the psychological prerequisites that occasion religious devotion. He happened to think that most every religion was indeed wishful thinking, or ‘wish-fulfillment’, but he didn’t think it was all bad, and actually thought it might be, in many cases, good for what ails a society and a soul.

Freud had written more extensive treatises on the evolution of religious belief in culture and individual psychology, but this short work is not to be ignored. If a work like Moses And Monotheism or Totem And Taboo was his assiduous proof, then Future Of an Illusion was his concise posit. It is direct and honest, yet offers a glimpse into what might be called Freud’s ‘humility’ in the matter of people’s cherished beliefs and traditions (though some may say it feels the opposite). I was actually impressed, and somewhat persuaded, by some of his points. There was a good bit of prefabbing and contextualization for his argument in the first few chapters, establishing that the mass of society needs either coercion or persuasion to abandon a lazy-impulsive lifestyle. He opts for the latter, persuasion, and loses no time in working to convince the reader of the dire need to displace religion with reason.

Freud is actually pretty fair in his acceptance of the idea that religion was developed as a necessary, instinctual response to the need of mankind to survive in a hostile environment. He asserts that man personified nature, creating a father-image to protect and rule over him, and slowly grew out of an infantile animism to value his personality as it grew powerful in intelligence to order his own way through chaos. He assigned this growing consciousness the value of an anthropomorphized Power—God—but now humanity is having a hard time salvaging truth from those ancient analogies (“important historical recollections”). Thus, the idea of ‘God’ is an ongoing cultural neurosis, an illusion that at one time was subscribed to by the masses and is still propagated by the collective pressure to repress the growing disconnect been our religion and our reason, and conform to the dogma of this shared myth. All is not lost, however, and even this communal fixation has some value in that “devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain [individual] neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the [cultural] neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.”

Who can blame Freud for catching onto, and pulling back the curtain for others to see, the conspiracy with which religious leaders dupe simple people into believing something for which no reason or proof has been provided, except the mandate not to question or one would lose their privileged status as God’s ‘darlings.’. He specifically zeros in on three bogus claims of religious teachings that are used to manipulate the flocks of possibly well-meaning followers: 1) The teachings ought to be believed because they were believed by primal ancestors, 2) We possess ‘proofs’ from these same ancestors, 3) It is forbidden to raise a question of their authenticity on penalty of excommunication, death and/or hellfire. Who can disagree that these are indeed harmful traits and can bring any ideology into question? The real danger of trying to cement ancient paradigms lies in the attempt to transplant ideas into a new ethos, away from its native soil and environment. All the old ideas have to be put into theological zoos, cramped, withered, and anemic away from home; and the new theology all but kills the original thought which was wild, often contradictory, and rather uncivilized. The new form is hardly recognizable: “The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth.”

Now, some of it did feel outdated. Freud lauds scientific progress ad nauseum. Does he not realize that for all his dissection of totemism in his other works, science is becoming the new totem of our age, the fetish of modernism? Here Science becomes the one god, and Freud is his prophet. Freud is a believer in logical positivism to an embarrassing extent, and subordinates the subjective thinker far below objective phenomenon, putting all his eggs in the one basket of external reality. Freud thinks reason will save the world, and I don’t blame him for pleading for more balance between faith and reason, but his answers come across as naïve. He gives a downright obnoxious illustration of one of his children that was “distinguished at an early age” for calling out during a children’s story time in which a fairytale was being shared, “Is that a true story?” When he was answered in the negative he turned away in disgust. Freud’s point? “We may expect that people will soon behave in the same way towards the fairy tales of religion.” What a downer. Did he really have no appreciation for imagination, beauty, and the power of symbols? What can I say—he wasn’t so far ahead of his times that he wasn’t influenced by the utopian dream that intellectual prowess alone can bring peace and love.

I applaud Freud for wanting change to come the non-violent way. He saw two ways that change could come about: “Either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision.” Glad he elected to pursue the latter. What a peach. But his ending is pathetic, and, as all endings become what we are most remembered for, it is a terribly disgraceful way to go out. The paragraph to the last is a defense of science, and the last sentence is almost funny…except it’s not. “No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.” Geez.

So, ironically, we’re stuck having to cull some semblance of ‘systematically disguised and distorted’ truth from Freud’s illusion of science’s majesty. What’s new?

Existentialism edited by Robert Solomon

I really enjoyed this collection of excerpts from existentialist writings. I liked that it opened my eyes to the different kind of thinkers within this tradition: liked some, loathed some. It gathered from about 26 writers from Kierkegaard to Arthur Miller, and concentrated more heavily on the more well-known contributors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre. I came to this book having read some from this philosophical emphasis, but I wasn’t disappointed in the selections which helped me to broaden my understanding of different expressions of the ideas as well as lesser known authors which have contributed to its progress (or lack there-of).

Some broadly assume that existentialism is an expression of egoism or solipsism that offers no value system, or ultimately leads down the path to a philosophical ‘catatonic immobility’. Not so. That is mostly a misunderstanding of the uninformed. It, in fact, has been developed as a system, or as ideological tools rather, to help one redefine and reform one’s values, and conceptualize truth and meaning in the face of the increasing dereliction and obsolescence of old meanings and ideas in each new age. It is not wholesale ‘relativism’, as some would like to think, but a grounded sense of conviction and purpose within a growing awareness, individually and globally, of the relative nature of people’s perception of reality. Subjectivity is the dominant focus of existentialism because it brings me first, then others, into the center of my concern; and freedom and responsibility of the individual become the core values.

I definitely come away from this wanting to read more of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Jaspers, Hesse, Marcel, …and DEFINITELY Sartre above all the rest. Sartre has so many profound things to say, and I love his emphasis on human responsibility. Not sure I can stomach his Nausea, but we shall see, because it’s going on my reading list along with some of his others. I can’t get away from some of his words:

“What happens to me happens through me…Moreover everything which happens to me is mine.”

“To live [in any given situation] is to choose myself through it and to choose it through my choice of myself.”

“Everything which happens to us can be considered as a chance.”

Rubies.

I will say, however, that reading this expanded selection from different types of existentialist authors makes me a bit more cautious in labeling myself broadly and unreservedly as an ‘existentialist’. That label might be in need of some qualification depending on who is talking and who they are talking to.

The point of this book, and one of the reasons I’ll never read it again but benefited from it regardless, is that it was as good as it was bad. I was introduced to authors that I grew to love, but some that I was glad to be finished with once-and-for-all. The contrast was enlightening.

Huckleberry Finn

Finally, I finished my first Mark Twain book. Verdict: it was fun and often engrossing, but I guess that’s it. I didn’t find it to be an especially meaningful story, although Twain made it clear in a unequivocal notice at the beginning of the book that this was his intention, “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” No kidding. Someone must have moralized the hell out of Tom Sawyer.

There were a couple laugh out-loud parts, and some mystery/suspense that might appeal to biblio-sleuths. Mostly I think it is just a well-paced adventure, with unique and bizarre twists, and a cast of loveable characters. The fact that some consider this to be a piece of civil rights literature I suppose is true enough, although I would like to remind readers that Twain denied having his book say anything about anything; but if it did something for the wellbeing of blacks, it certainly helped readers to sympathize with and grow comfortable imagining a relationship with a black person who may have had little exposure to their culture. Granted, the black person typified in Huckleberry is ignorant, nearsighted, a dupe for a prank, and overly-sentimental; but the average black person in those days was most likely uneducated, segregated and unaffected by so-called ‘refined’ intellectual society, and I’m sure their emotionally dominant way of thinking was a bit more serviceable to their survival needs. But it still seems to me they were less to be pitied than their prejudiced, gluttonous, and hostile white brothers and sisters; and Twain does much to endear Jim to the reader despite his stereotyped manner.

I thought the tapestry of lies that Huck wove every time he was in a tight spot was brilliant. And hilarious. I’ve never had so much fun witnessing someone lie. It was Huck’s high art. Each meticulously crafted deception was studded with creative and ludicrous details, dovetailed together so seamlessly so as to evoke the reader’s admiration. It was so reflexive without any accompanying guilt to clothesline his momentum. It was his way of life, and it was survival. Huck’s young age and small stature made it the most useful defense against the dark arts of adulthood and brute force. Every falsehood worked to grease his escape and afford him another day to move freely on the river in the hot potential of the sun. It was especially entertaining to watch him out-con the cons. I cheered him on the entire time, and it helped that he seemed to know when to turn his mendacity ‘off’ when he felt that honesty would be more conducive to a healthy relationship.

The ending of the book was the most disappointing. It truly seemed as if Twain had totally lost track of the plot. The last fourth of the book was completely taken up with Tom Sawyer entering the scene and playing an imaginative game of rescue of Jim from his captors. SO boring. I totally wanted to put the book down and call it a day. What an absolute waste of time. Dumb. Not bad writing necessarily, but just arbitrary and uninteresting. Was Twain trying to stretch the story, and stick it to his publishers? It’s not unheard of, and I have no better explanation.

I probably won’t read Tom Sawyer anytime soon, though I probably will one day. More interested in his other short stories like Mysterious Stranger and others. Too bad this wasn’t more rewarding. It had my vote before I started, but lost most of it by the end. I’m sure Twain wouldn’t have cared.

Fatherhood by Bill Cosby

This was a very enjoyable read! It was another one of those books that I’ve know about for a long time, but never had the interest in reading. I came across it again recently, and, since now I am a father of two, thought it might be interesting. It was. I laughed on almost every page. What I loved most is that Cosby is so sarcastic about his appreciation for his children, speaking often of a concealed desire to set them on fire or getting rid of them and making new ones. He refers many times to his hope that his children will be out of the house by the time he dies. He calls his children beggars, and says that he often sits in the stillness of the night watching his daughter sleep, relishing the air of innocence about her when she’s not asking for anything. He is wry, and he says it like he means it. But he’s not always serious, except when he is. You have to trust him to understand him, and I do.

He’s creative with his comedy, and actually very intelligent about it. I was surprised to find out that he has his doctorate in education, and his value on education certainly comes through in the book. These are no low-brow jokes, although the appeal probably still spans across all educational levels. He expertly and often eloquently boils down the ‘sweet insanity’ of parenting, not only fatherhood, to its quintessence, and helps us come to terms with those most frustrating realities like a child’s lack of logic, a girl’s journey through dating, a boy’s devil-may-care attitude, and a grown children’s tendency to return home after college.

I am definitely going to re-introduce this book into circulation among my friends and family who are parents, although a parent will mostly appreciate it only after having been a parent for at least several years. Besides being a classic—much of it has already woven itself into the parenting humor of our culture (“I brought you into this world, and I can take you out…”)—it is a safety valve of sorts, releasing in laughter the building pressure from all the things you think you can’t complain about in parenting. Cosby blows his top for you, and does it brilliantly. You can hear his punctuated, consonant-popping, measured emphasis of every syllable, stressing his utter bewilderment of why kids do the things they do, and why people choose to have them in the first place.

For all the satire, it really is good-natured humor. He makes complaining about children’s behavior feel right, for at its heart it is deeply reverent of the miracle of life and love. You sense that Cosby is a paragon of a good father, and his steady love and understanding of children’s sometimes slow intellectual development becomes the model of patience for his readers. I come away from this with a better understanding that parents are in the unique position of being the wisdom and law for relatively unreasonable creatures, while still trying to learn the rules of the life ourselves. We walk the tightrope of trying not to take human logic—and the lack of— too seriously, while taking love very seriously.

I don’t spend a lot of time with humor books, but this one was rich and well worth the short read!