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Mr Thoreau Is Agitated

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Drawing of a Slave Sale in Virginia

In his Journal, Henry David Thoreau did not choose often to intrude politics. On June 16, 1854, however, he became irate when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns was returned to his former owners by the State of Massachusetts. The state was complying with the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Thoreau not only wrote the following in his Journal, but used the same text in his essay “Slavery in Massachusetts”:

The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable—of a bad one, to make it less valuable. We can afford that railroad and all merely material stock should lose some of its value, for that only compels us to live more simply and economically; but suppose that the value of life itself should be diminished! How can we make a less demand on man and nature, how live more economically in respect to virtue and all noble qualities, than we do? I have lived for the last month- and I think that every man in Massachusetts capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar experience- with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I did not know at first what ailed me. At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country. I had never respected the government near to which I lived, but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it. For my part, my old and worthiest pursuits have lost I cannot say how much of their attraction, and I feel that my investment in life here is worth many per cent less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent back an innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery. I dwelt before, perhaps, in the illusion that my life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell, but now I cannot persuade myself that I do not dwell wholly within hell. The site of that political organization called Massachusetts is to me morally covered with volcanic scoriae and cinders, such as Milton describes in the infernal regions. If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it. Life itself being worth less, all things with it, which minister to it, are worth less. Suppose you have a small library, with pictures to adorn the walls- a garden laid out around- and contemplate scientific and literary pursuits and discover all at once that your villa, with all its contents is located in hell, and that the justice of the peace has a cloven foot and a forked tail- do not these things suddenly lose their value in your eyes?

I feel that, to some extent, the State has fatally interfered with my lawful business. It has not only interrupted me in my passage through Court Street on errands of trade, but it has interrupted me and every man on his onward and upward path, on which he had trusted soon to leave Court Street far behind. What right had it to remind me of Court Street? I have found that hollow which even I had relied on for solid.

I am surprised to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened. I say to myself, “Unfortunates! they have not heard the news.” I am surprised that the man whom I just met on horseback should be so earnest to overtake his newly bought cows running away—since all property is insecure, and if they do not run away again, they may be taken away from him when he gets them. Fool! does he not know that his seed-corn is worth less this year—that all beneficent harvests fail as you approach the empire of hell? No prudent man will build a stone house under these circumstances, or engage in any peaceful enterprise which it requires a long time to accomplish. Art is as long as ever, but life is more interrupted and less available for a man’s proper pursuits. It is not an era of repose. We have used up all our inherited freedom. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.

Impermanence

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Notre Dame Cathedral in Flames 2019

This morning at the L.A. Central Library, I was reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel of sexual obsession entitled The Bad Girl, published in 2006. In it, he discusses a visit to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris years before the 2019 fire that destroyed the cathedral’s roof. This passage made me think that it is dangerous to talk about anything that is man-made as permanent—with the possible exception of the pyramids at Giza in Egypt. Even though the damage has been repaired for now, nothing (in Vargas Llosa’s words) really is guaranteed to “escape the ususry of time.”

I tried to distract her and took her to look at the cathedral, a sight that never failed to overwhelm me even after all the years I had been in Paris. And that night more than at other times. A faint light, with a slightly pink aura. bathed the stones of Notre Dame. The large mass seemed light because of the perfect symmetry of its parts, delicately balanced and sustained so that nothing was disordered or disarranged. History and the sifted light changed the façade with allusions and resonances, images and references. There were many tourists taking pictures. Was this same cathedral the setting for so many centuries of French history, the inspiration for the novel by Victor Hugo that excited me so when I read it as a boy, in Miraflores, in my Aunt Alberta’s house? It was the same one and a different one that had accrued more recent mythologies and events. Extraordinarily beautiful, it transmitted an impression of stability and permanence, of having escaped the usury of time.

East Is East and …

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Poet Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

I like to write about Charles Bukowski, partly because he is completely honest about himself. The following is an excerpt from a 1985 New York Quarterly interview conducted by William Packard. He asked Buk the question “Over the last few decades California has been the residence of many of our most independent voice poets—like Jeffers, Rexroth, Patchen, even Henry Miller. Why is this? What is your attitude towards the East, towards New York?” His answer follows:

Well, there is a little more space out here, the long run up the coast, all that water, a feeling of Mexico and China and Canada, Hollywood, sunburn, starlets turned to prostitutes. I don’t know, really, I guess if your ass is freezing some of the time, it’s harder to be a “voice poet.” Being a voice poet is the big gamble because you’re putting your guts up for view and you’re going to get a lot more reaction than if you’re writing something like your mother’s soul being like a daisy field.

New York, I don’t know. I landed there with $7 and no job and no friends and no occupation except common laborer. I suppose if I had come in from the top instead of the bottom I might have laughed a little more. I stayed three months and the buildings scared the shit out of me and the people scared the shit out of me, and I had done a lot of bumming all over the country under the same conditions but New York City was the Inferno, all the way. The way Woody Allen’s intellectuals suffer in N.Y.C. is a lot different than what happens to my type of people. I never got laid in New York, in fact, the women wouldn’t even speak to me. The only way I ever got laid in New York was to come back three decades later and bring my own with me, a terrible wench, we stayed at the Chelsea, of course.

Ever-Spreading Chaos

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Hungarian State Railways (MÁV) 4-2-4 Steam Locomotive

In Lászlo Krasznahorkai’s great 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, a scheduled train that never shows up throws waiting passengers into a tizzy. A Hungarian novelist, Krasznahorkai is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2025), the International Booker Prize, and numerous other international literary accolades. Here is a selection from the first page of George Szirtés’s excellent translation of the novel.

To tell the truth, none of this really surprised anyone any more since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since one could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible; which is precisely what people at the village station continued to do when, in hope of taking possession of the essentially limited seating to which they were entitled*, they stormed the carriage doors, which being frozen up proved very difficult to open.

  • Earlier in the paragraph: “[T]he only two serviceable old wooden-seated coaches maintained for just such an ‘emergency’ were coupled to an obsolete and unreliable 424, used only as a last resort.”

Austerlitz at the Bibliothèque Nationale

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The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris

One of the treasures in my recent reading is W G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, in which the haunted main character, Jacques Austerlitz, attempts to track down his parents who were lost to him in the War. At one point, he visits the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Alas, he remains “oppressed by the vague sense that he did not belong in this city either, or indeed anywhere else in the world.” I was on the top floor of Los Angeles’s Central Library when, fittingly, I read this beautiful passage.

As for himself, Austerlitz continued his story after a long pause, during my first stay in Paris, and indeed later in my life as well, I tried not to let anything distract me from my studies. In the week I went daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. My neighbor was usually an elderly gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and sleeve protectors, who had been working for decades on an encyclopedia of church history, a project which had now reached the letter K, so that it was obvious he would never be able to complete it. … Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliothèque Nationale and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading room to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn.

Shades of Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “The Library of Babel”!

Yvette’s Children

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Humanitarian Yvette Pierpaoli (1938-1999)

Humanitarians tend to come off as pretty insufferable people. British author John le Carré (a.k.a. David Cornwell) tells of one who had a sense of humor. The story is told in le Carré’s The Pigeon Tunnel, an autobiographical work that traces the real-life antecedents of the characters in his books. This one tells of Yvette Pierpaoli’s efforts to save Cambodian children during the Khmer Rouge atrocities.

I made a couple more journeys to Phnom Penh before the city finally fell. By the time I left for the last time, the Indian shopkeepers and the girls in their rickshaws were shaping to be the last to get out: the traders because the greater the shortages, the higher the prices; the girls because in their innocence they believed their services would be in demand whoever won. In the event, they were recruited to the Khmer Rouge, or died of deprivation in the killing fields. From Saigon, as it still was, I had written to Graham Greene to tell him that I had reread The Quiet American, and that it stood up wonderfully. Improbably the letter reached him, and he wrote back urging me to visit the museum in Phnom Penh and admire the bowler hat with ostrich feathers with which Khmer kings had been crowned. I had to tell him that not only was there no bowler hat; there was no museum any more.

Yvette has become the subject of many wild tales, some apocryphal but many, despite their improbability, true. My favourite, which I heard from her own mouth—not always a guarantee of veracity—tells how in Phnom Penh’s final days she marched a troop of orphaned Khmer children into the French Consulate and demanded passports, one for each child.

“But whose children are they?” the besieged consular official protested.

“They are mine. I am their mother.”

“But they’re all the same age!”

“And I had many quadruplets, you idiot!”

Defeated, perhaps complicit, the Consul demanded to know their names. Yvette reeled them off: “Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi …” [The names of the days of the week in French]

Do It Again!

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British Writer G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

As a voracious reader of books, I have always had my strange little reading traditions. For example, in most years, I have usually read a couple of G. K. Chesterton’s books every February. This year was no different: Since February 1, I have read The Club of Queer Trades (1911) — a re-read, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911), and All I Survey (1933). Below is a quote from his book Orthodoxy (1908) in which he demonstrates, by the following quote, that he knows children as well as he knows God:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Vantage Point

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The Parthenon in Athens

I was unusually restless today. I started three books and gave up on two of them. The one I continued on was a re-read from fifty years ago, G. K. Chesterton’s All I Survey, first published in 1933. There was a time in the 1970s when I read everything I could find by Chesterton. Today, my shelves hold over a hundred titles of his work, including duplicates. There are few authors whom I enjoy reading so much, probably because he always makes me feel so good. The following is the first paragraph of his essay entitled “On St. George Revivified.”

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living. Without some such contrast or comparison, without some such shifting of the point of view, we should see nothing whatever of our own social surroundings. We should take them for granted, as the only possible social surroundings. We should be as unconscious of them as we are, for the most part, of the hair growing on our heads or the air passing through our lungs. It is the variety of the human story that brings out sharply the last turn that the road has taken, and it is the view under the arch of the gateway which tells us that we are entering a town.

The City of Losses

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Moscow in the Rain

I am currently reading Yuri Andrukhovych’s The Moscoviad, about a Ukrainian writer living in a Moscow where it’s almost always raining during the late days of the Soviet Union. In his book, Andrukhovych has some very pointed things to say about the city:

This is the city of losses. It would be nice to level it. To plant again thick Finnish forests, introduce bears, elk, deer: let them graze around the moss-covered Kremlin ruins, let perches swim in its rivers and lakes returned to life, let wild bees focus on storing honey in the deepest fragrant tree cavities. This land needs a rest from its criminal capital. Perhaps then it will be capable of something good. Since it cannot go on forever poisoning the world with the bacilli of evil, suppression, and aggressive dumb destruction!

A Legacy of Losers

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Hungarian Writer Miklós Vámos (b, 1950)

I am currently reading Miklós Vámos’s The Book of Fathers (2000), in Hungarian: Apák Könve. In the notes at the end of the novel, I found this anecdote, which I couldn’t help but share with you. It summarizes more than half a millennium of Hungarian history.

One well-known fact is that Hungary and the Hungarians have lost every important war and revolution since the time of the Renaissance king Matthias Corvinus. He occupied Vienna and became Prince of Austria. He died in 1490. Since then, the nation and its heroes can be found only on the losing side.

A famous, if hoary, joke is instructive.

A Hungarian enters a small shop in New York and wants to buy a hat. But he doesn’t have enough dollars on him, so he asks if he could pay in forints, the Hungarian currency.

“I’ve never seen any forints,” the owner of the shop says. “Show me some.”

“Who’s this guy here?” asks the owner.

“This is Sándor Petöfi, the brightest star of Hungarian poetry. He lived in the nineteenth century. He was one of the March Youth who launched the 1848-49 War of Independence. He was killed in the Battle of Segesvár when the war was crushed by the Austrians and the Russians.”

“Oh my God, what an awful story … And who is this guy on the twenty forint bill?”

“This is György Dózsa, who led in peasant uprising in the sixteenth century. It was crushed and he was executed—actually, he was burned on a throne of fire—”

“OK, OK. And who is that on the fifty?”

“That’s Ferenc Rákóczi II, leader of another war of independence, crushed by the Habsburgs. He was forced to spend his life in exile in Turkey.”

“I should have guessed. And on the one hundred?”

“That’s Lajos Kossuth, leader of the 1848-49 War of Independence, you know. After it was crushed, he had to flee—”

The owner stops him again. “OK, you poor man, just go—you can have the hat for free.”

(Note: these banknotes are no longer in circulation, owing to the ravages of inflation.)