Alexander Supertramp!

I just watched the movie "Into the Wild" last night and I found myself crying throughout most of it. I am haunted by the story of Chris McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp. I am saddened by it. I am overjoyed at what he was able to do. I am jealous and I envy him because when all is said and done, he lived life exactly the way he wanted to, no compromises made against his conscience or with society.

I do not want to lionize the man, I do not want to turn him into some kind of larger than life hero, some kind of Christ figure. I also do not agree with those who have demonized him, made fun of him, said that he was just an ignorant, naive fool whose high ideals led to his death. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I think the reason that his story touched me so deeply is because I see myself in Chris, I see Chris in me. I was touched so deeply by his story that I stayed up half the night last night reading his story on the internet and I am still crying about it today.

No, I do not think he was a prophet, but if one was inclined to see the world in such a way, he could be seen in the context of Jesus, or the Buddha or any number of prophets throughout history who have all basically said the same thing. He could be seen as a modern day Thoreau or Tolstoy.

People do not take this life seriously enough, I don't think. I think a mistake is that some people accuse others of taking life too seriously. People become complacent with all of the bad things happening in the world, all of the bloodshed, all of the inhumanity done to man. Even on a personal level, husbands and wives scream and yell at each other, totally oblivious to what they are doing to their children, they lead "lives of quiet desperation", mesmerized by their television screens and their iPods. Not too many people actually do something worthwhile with their lives and whatever one can say about Chris McCandless, at least he lived life EXACTLY the way he wanted to, on his own terms and he actually DID something with his short life and in the end, he has inspired millions.

I am assuming here that everyone pretty much knows this man's story but if not I will paraphrase. Growing up in an a fairly affluent family, in the suburbs of D.C. but emotionally scarred due to the way his parents treated each other and also the way he and sister were seen by the rest of the family as bastard children, he graduates from Emory University in Atlanta in 1990, and along with the $20,000 he has left in his college fund, his parents were willing to give him the rest of the money to go to law school. Instead he cuts all ties with his parents, gives his $20,000 to OXFAM and sets out to wander the western US, starting out in his old beat up Datsun. His ultimate plan is to go to Alaska and to just live off the land for awhile the way Thoreau did. His parents did not hear from him for over 2 years, until his emaciated body was found in an abandoned bus in the wilderness of Alaska.

Jon Krakauer, the author of the book "Into the Wild", said in his article in Outside magazine, entitled Death of an Innocent

"Alaska has long been a magnet for unbalanced souls, often outfitted with little more than innocence and desire, who hope to find their footing in the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier. The bush, however, is a harsh place and cares nothing for hope or longing. More than a few such dreamers have met predictably unpleasant ends. "

Alexander Supertramp was NOT an unbalanced soul, though, and if anything he was more balanced than most people would ever even know how to be, even if they wanted to. Yes, he was a dreamer, but he was much more than that.

"And although he wasn't burdened with a surfeit of common sense and possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not readily mesh with the realities of modern life, he was no psychopath. McCandless was in fact an honors graduate of Emory University, an accomplished athlete, and a veteran of several solo excursions into wild, inhospitable terrain."

I think he had a LOT of sense, a sense of who he was, what he wanted to do, how he wanted to live his life, and he was upset with the world he saw around him. He knew that he could not change the world, but he could change himself, so he decided to leave the world behind for awhile. He never intended his break from the world to be a permanent one.

What exactly is meant by "stubborn idealism"? Once again, he knew who he was and he was sure about his convictions. Was he stubborn because he didn't allow anyone or anything to change him? I praise him for that. If only more people in this world were "stubborn idealists", the world wouldn't be in the shape that it is. Only people who don't truly understand Chris would call him stubborn, only those who would have wished to change him would call him stubborn. Jon Krakauer understood a lot about Chris, but he got a few things wrong.

"An extremely intense young man, McCandless had been captivated by the writing of Leo Tolstoy. He particularly admired the fact that the great novelist had forsaken a life of wealth and privilege to wander among the destitute. For several years he had been emulating the count's asceticism and moral rigor to a degree that astonished and occasionally alarmed those who knew him well. When he took leave of James Gallien, McCandless entertained no illusions that he was trekking into Club Med; peril, adversity, and Tolstoyan renunciation were what he was seeking. And that is precisely what he found on the Stampede Trail, in spades. "

This is what people do not understand when they wonder why he didn't go into the wild more prepared. That was the point, he did not want to be prepared, he wanted to take things one day at a time, to face nature and God head on, to see if he could survive. And survive he actually did, for over 100 days. But maybe because he was lost within his own self and his ideals, he failed to take into consideration that the river he originally crossed on ice at the end of winter would be a raging river of water come summer time. He literally got stuck in the wild. There have been those who have pointed out how close he was actually to civilization, that there was a manual tram just a 1/4 mile from where he tried to cross. All of this is hindsight and for whatever reason, Chris did not know this and did not search down the river a bit to find it out.

But really, I do not want to talk so much about the particulars of his physical ordeal. Anyone can read the book, or watch the movie, or read his story online. I want instead, to talk about his spiritual ordeal, his idealism, what he knew about himself and how he was different from most people and how it relates to myself. Because, as I said, I see a lot of myself in Chris.

I have never done anything close to what Chris has done, but that is because he was a much braver man that I. I do understand him though, as if he were a brother of mine. I feel myself in his story.

I, too, came from a family where my parents fought and yelled at each other constantly, more so in the later years of their marriage. When I was only 11 and my sister 6, they split up for good. I will always remember my father, who was a Harley Davidson riding tough guy, at least in my eyes, come into the living room to tell my sister and I goodbye, and as he got down on bended knee to give us a hug goodbye he had tears streaming down his face. Up until that point I had never seen my father cry. I remember that day now like it was yesterday and I am now 35. I will remember that day for the rest of my life.

During the scenes in the movie where Chris' parents were yelling and screaming at each other and getting a little physical, I looked at my girlfriend and I said, "Oh my God, that was my childhood...exactly!" I am a 35 year old man with 2 kids of my own and I was crying. I am crying right now as I write this.

I have an Aunt on my father's side who has said that she doesn't understand why my parent's divorce affected me as much as it did. After all, her own parents were divorced (when she was almost a grown woman) and she wasn't affected so much by it. I want to strangle her by the neck!! My childhood affected me tremendously, but it wasn't just the divorce itself. It was all the fighting my sister and I witnessed prior to the divorce. My sister was only 6 and doesn't remember a lot of it, but I was 11 and remember every bit. I remember them fighting one afternoon prior to when we were supposed to be going over to my Aunt's to swim in her pool. What they were fighting about I'm not sure, but my Mom says it was because she was going to leave the house with a dirty pot in the sink. They started yelling at each other and my Mom would just not stop. She has NEVER known when to just stop. My father runs over to her and has her up against the wall with his hand over her mouth yelling at her to shut the hell up. My sister and I are screaming at him not to hurt our mother and he yells back, "Oh, I am not hurting your mother, stop it!!" She falls to the ground crying hysterically saying that he was trying to kill her, that his hand was over her mouth and nose and she could not breathe. He swears to this day that he was not trying to kill her and I believe him, but it makes no difference whether he was or not. My 11 year old eyes witnessed all of this, and I had no idea what was going on. Eventually, we made it over to my Aunt's house and as soon as we walked in the back yard and saw our Aunt, my sister and I started balling our eyes out. And she chewed them out for doing this to the "kids."

But it wasn't just them fighting before the divorce either. They got divorced and CONTINUED to fight and yell and scream at each other. The only difference now is that they both started to put my sister and I in the middle of things, between the two of them. They used us as pawns in their game of chess, in order to get back at each other, to get one over on the other. My father, in the beginning, would ask me to spy on my mother, I was only fucking 11 years old. He wanted me to listen to her phone conversations, to find out the name of the new guy she was now seeing. He wanted me to call him as soon as my mom dropped us off at our grandparents house so that he could follow her to see where she was going.

Before the divorce, I can remember my mom waking us up in the middle of a school night to go try to find my father. We went to the parking lot of night club after night club looking for his Mustang. Eventually, we found it and she sat outside for hours,waiting on him to walk out with his mistress that she just knew he had. She finally got tired of waiting and hearing the "kids" screaming to go home, so we finally went home.

I can remember her chasing my father down with the "kids" in the car, him on his Harley. She was chasing him, and her front bumper at times would be right up to the rear fender of his bike. My sister and I were screaming, we thought she was going to run him over and kill him, either on purpose or accidentally.

So when my Aunt wonders why all this affected me so much, yea, I'm sorry but I get angry. WTF do you mean it shouldn't have affected me so much? It has. I have been through two marriages now myself and my own 6 year old son is now living without the benefit of his mom and dad living together. Granted, we did not fight as much and do to him what my parents did to me, but I know that he is traumatized as well. And it just tears me apart. When I was growing up, I said that I would NEVER get divorced. I guess I was a little naive and a "stubborn idealist".

Some may ask why I'm turning Chris' story into my own. It's because his story IS my own. Everyone's story is our own, we are all in this together. And the reason why movies and books affect a person so much, is because we see ourselves in the characters.

I too became introspective and withdrawn from society as I grew older. I never took it the extreme that Chris did, but as I said earlier, that was only because I lacked his courage, his bravery. When I became a teenager I began to read books voraciously. I had not yet come across Thoreau or Tolstoy though. Or Jack London. But it was at this time that I began to doubt my Christian upbringing. I too wondered why and how people could be so cruel to one another. I became so that I just did not understand other people at all. I felt as if I was from another planet. I did not understand the unsatiable desire of most people for "success", however "success" was defined by society. I shunned church and refused to go. My mother and I had many loud arguments because of this. She told me one time, several times actually, starting when I was around 16 or so that I reminded her so much of my father that it sickened her. I thanked her for the compliment but it tore me up inside for my mother to say such a hurtful thing. I knew how much she hated my father, and I now knew, or felt, how much she hated me too. She didn't really hate me, but she sure made me feel as if she did.

Like Chris, I also graduated at the top of my class. I graduated from high school in 1990, the same year Chris graduated from Emory University, in the top 1/3 of my class. I was a Florida academic scholar and was able to go to any state University that I chose. My father, who I was now living with, gave me no other choice but to go to the local University, the University of South Florida. During my first year of college, my mother moved to Knoxville, TN with my step father, to get him away from the drugs and his alcoholic friends. He was a terrible alcoholic at this time. My sister was only in 8th grade, and in her eyes, our mother chose her husband over her own daughter. My sister stayed in Florida. I ended up moving up there after visiting one time mostly because I fell in love with the area and with the University of Tennessee. I attended school there and continued to do well throughout my first semester of my second year. By the second semester I was becoming disillusioned with everything, did not see the point in anything that I was doing any longer. I was pre-med at the time but I felt trapped. I had always wanted to be a doctor since I was 5 years old and that is the direction my parents always led me in. I was always told growing up that I was going to be a doctor. At the age of 19, I no longer wanted to be a doctor.

Instead of going to class, I would drive my car down by the river and park by the scenic overlook of the Tennessee River as it goes over the Ft Loudon Dam. I would just sit there for hours, no music, no nothing. I would turn the car off and roll the windows down and I would just listen to the sounds of the river, the birds singing, the children running down the slope of the embankment to the river front. This was peace for me, tranquility. And I knew that I was done with college. I just had no idea what I was going to do. I was living at home at the time, making minimum wage a nursing assistant at the local nursing home. I was so confused. I was disturbed. I sat there and thought about God, wondered why life had to be so difficult. Why God allowed the Church to continue to spread lies about him.

So I finally decided to go to my own wilderness, to go into my own wild. I joined the United States Navy, for many of the same reasons that Chris wandered the country. I wanted to make a clean break, to get away from my parents, to live on my own terms. Joining the military, it turned out, wasn't the best of ways to live life on your own terms.

I could go on and on with this, I guess, I could ruminate on the many ways that Chris and I are kindred souls but there also many ways in which we are different. For one, I wouldn't have the balls to do what he did and if I did, I probably wouldn't have survived half as long as he did.

But I also want to get across how wrong I believe some people are about Chris. How do I know they are wrong? Because I understand Chris, I understand what he did and why. Some of the things people have said about Chris just frustrates me and some of it makes me angry. I feel like not too many understood Chris, just as not too many understand me.

There was an article in Men's Magazine, what a joke, entitled The Cult of Chris McCandless I know that I can't expect a magazine such as this to understand Chris, their idea of what it is to be a man is based so much on gender stereotypes, but one thing the article said struck me.

'Carlson, a barrel-chested Athabascan who worked as a tribal liaison on the shoot, shows me around the bus. He chuckles through a handlebar mustache and offers an unburnished appraisal of McCandless: Another fool bit the dust. "We grew up here. You learn how to make a campfire when you're a kid. This, I didn't think much of it at the time. That kid's mistakes started a long time before he got here."

What got me is not that Chris was called a fool, but that Chris' philosophy of life was trivialized as a mistake, that Chris was the one who was wrong in his assessment of society. And I am here to say that no, it is society that is largely wrong in it's assessment of Chris.

The guy goes on to say:

"And what will happen to this bus?

"Not sure what we'll do with it. Make it some kind of attraction. Maybe a cappuccino stand. I know that sounds like we're profiting off someone else's story, but you do what you have to do to survive here."

This is exactly the kind of thing Chris was talking about. This makes a mockery of survival. It turns the idea of survival into market capitalism. It is grotesque! That is not survival, it is profiting off Chris' bravery. They didn't have the balls to do what he did, yet they want to capitalize on it.

"The majority of Alaskans share some version of the opinion that McCandless was deeply out of his element. Medred, the outdoors columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, believes that he was suffering from schizophrenia and compares him to Timothy Treadwell, the unstable filmmaker and bear enthusiast who (along with his girlfriend) was killed and eaten by a grizzly in Katmai National Park in 2003. "McCandless didn't need the wilderness," he says. "He needed help."

No, society needs help. Chris was spot on!! There was nothing wrong with Chris, he had a clarity of vision that most people will never have.

Chris said, "Rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth." I full understand where he is coming from, I have said nearly the same thing myself in some of my articles here on Newsvine. But what Chris found out too late and what I know now, is that one of those words did not belong with the others. I shun money, faith, and fame but love IS the truth.

""So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greather joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."

This is one of the biggest reasons that led me to drive a truck for a living for a year and a half. It was my way of leaving society behind, so I thought, of just being on my own, just me, the truck and my music, and when the weather was right, the wind. It wasn't exactly like that though in truth.

"Surely all Americans have the right to give their money only to those causes which they support. But what kind of society has this created? A society where the ignorant reign. A society where enlightened must hold their tongues. A nation whose politicians must profess half-hearted devotion to an ancient fable or face the disastrous consequences of speaking their true mind."
Chris McCandless writing on religious fanaticism in The Emory Wheel student newspaper, October 1987

"Two years he walks the earth.
No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. — Alexander Supertramp May 1992

I have never been as brave as Chris, I am still working on killing the false being within. It is a task that we each must do alone, in our own way.

Near Death!

In closing, I want to leave you with a snippet relating to a John Bunyan work, called, "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners", written in 1666. I do not agree with the truth that Bunyan ultimately came to but I can very much relate to his journey. When I read this, I felt like John's journey, like Chris' was just like my own. You could almost insert my name in here and it wouldn't make much difference, except for the final destination, which obviously has been different for me, John basically sticking with Christianity because, he was a product of his times after all.

"As a nonconformist, Bunyan rejects the Church of England -- it's rites, it's doctrines, it's authority, and it's congregations. And this makes him very much alone. He longs to join other believers: when he hears "three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, and talking about the things of God," he longs to enter into a brand new life. But the women, he writes, seem to be "on the sunny side of some high mountain... while I was shivering and shrinking in the cold." Between the women and himself,Bunyan sees a wall; he can't find a way through, until he discovers "a narrow gap... At last, with great striving, methought I at first did get in my head, and after that by a sideling striving, my shoulders, and my whole body; then I was exceeding glad, and went and sat down in the midst of them, and so was comforted with the light and heat of their sun." Finally in the company of others who also believe, Bunyan should be secure and full of grace. But the temporary comfort and hope that he feels is followed by an obsessive desire to blaspheme, and the cycle continues; Bunyan fights off temptation, is "put into my right mind again," is assaulted by temptation again, understand grace, struggles against guilt again. Finally he grasps that his righteousness is not his own, but that of Jesus Christ. "Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed." Is this the final act? Not quite; darkness descends again on his soul, until God assures him with a final scripture: You are come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God.. to the general assembly of the first-born..to the spirits of just men made perfect. At last Bunyan has found his company, where others stand with him in the presence of God. He is no longer alone. Has he reached Salvation at last? Perhaps, but for Bunyan, conversion is is not a single shining moment, but a long path down which he walks, with an eye always cautiously behind: Like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan was threatened by the "door to hell, even at the gates of heaven."

And that, my friends, is the story of Phaedrus. Told in the year 1666. The only difference being that I have found the truth in the opposite direction, away from the Church, but the journey is the same.

The following is my review of the movie Into the Wild.

LOVED IT!!!

Don Quixote (Signet Classics)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

The second book I have started in my quest for reading 50 books in 365 days is:

Title : Don Quixote

Author: Miguel de Cervantes

Translator: Walter Starkie

Signet Classic edition

pages: 1050

complete and unabridged

The version I have is different from the picture, but I can't find the exact version I have on Amazon.com

I have had this book for awhile and actually started reading it awhile ago, getting about 1/3 of the way through it, before getting lazy and just putting it down. I remember it being very good, humorous and entertaining though, so I'm looking forward to reading the whole thing.

The length of the book got me to thinking though about the 50 in 365 challenge. Obviously one could read 50 books that are only 150 pages in length, but reading books of this length, I'm not so sure one could complete the challenge. Maybe the challenge should be amended to take book length in consideration, counting this one as two books. Maybe?! I don't know the solution but this does seem to be a problem. If one reads 50 short little novellas have they really accomplished as much as someone who has read Don Quixote, Ayn Rand and Dostoyevsky? I dare say there is no comparison!

After I finish this tome, I guess I'm going to have read a few shorter novels in order to get my numbers up.

Skinny Legs and All

Tom Robbins

The Dance of the Seven Veils

"The dead are all laughing at us"

I finished my first book in the 50 in 365 challenge.

Title: Skinny Legs and All

Author: Tom Robbins

# of pages: 432

Loved it!!! Loved every minute of it!!! This is one of those books that when you finally finish the last page, you just sit back in amazement and say, "Wow!!" Over and over again!!

I guess it helps that the subplot revolves around religion and the fanatics who so populate it. As I keep saying, I am not much of a review writer, but I will try to sum the book up in as few words as possible.

I am actually reminded of an old Red Hot Chili Peppers song, "Blood, Sugar Sex Magic!! She's tragic!! Sex Magic!!" That pretty much sums up the book but to be more precise it is the story of a tortured artist named Ellen Cherry and her new husband Boomer Petway, both of Colonial Pines, VA (which in real life is Colonial Heights, I used to live there), who set out from Seattle Washington for New York in their RV, which has been made up to look like a giant Turkey. Once in New York, things don't work out too well for them, and they become estranged. Ellen Cherry has a very religious family, of the Southern Baptist variety, back in VA, all except for her mama. Her uncle is even a Baptist preacher, of the hell fire and brimstone sort. In short, he is a religious fanatic, preaching about the New Jerusalem and bent on hastening Armageddon.

Along the way, we get the philisophical and religious musings of a can o' beans, a spoon, a dirty sock, a conch shell and a painted stick. Yep, you heard that correct. May sound silly but it's actually nothing short of brilliant. You learn a lot about the real Jezebel of the Old Testament and how the paternalistic religious authorities have maligned her name. You learn about the real Solomon and how he was not really as wise as everyone has been led to believe. You learn about Solome and how she danced the dance of the seven veils for her stepfather, King Herod, before he produced the head of John the Baptist.

All of this is interspersed within the main plot of Ellen Cherry and her purposefully leaving the art world to work as a waitress at the Isaac and Ishmael's, a joint venture between a Jew and an Arab. You learn all about the real historical reasons for all the turmoil in the middle east, why Jews and Arabs hate each other so much. Hint, it has to do with the name of said restaurant.

At any rate, this was a terrific book, all the way up to the end. I just loved how all the 7 veils dropped one by one, both literally and figuratively,but I must say that there were no huge epiphanies here for me. The secrets that were revealed, I have either already thought of myself or read elsewhere, but it was very entertaining and thought provoking none the less.

The book is very humorous, but it does have it's serious side, it is talking about religion and metaphysical truths, after all.

I will just leave you with one little quote from the book that I particularly liked and think is very true, "The dead are all laughing at us."

This article has a multiple purpose, the first of which is to tell about my finding of a veritable treasure trove, more valuable than all the world's gold, in my humble opinion. My girlfriend and I went to a local antique store that I had known about because of my ex-wife who buys and sells antiques there. A couple years ago I had noticed that there is quite a large book section, both antique books dating from the 1800's and also just a general assortment of books of all sorts. There is a large 3 section book case labeled literature and I was flabbergasted at what I saw there. It is literally a find of massive proportions. Everything from Thucydides' "History of the Pellopenisian War", to just about half of Shakespeare's entire library, to a whole row of Mark Twain, to an entire 7 volume set of Marcel Proust's "A Remembrance of Things Past", or what it is referred to as today, "In Search of Lost Time", to volumes I and III of Edward Gibbon's, "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." I literally could not believe my eyes that all this treasure was almost literally hidden away, most people not knowing about it. I felt like I had discovered an ancient treasure, X marks the spot. The most amazing thing about all this was the prices.

Proust

If you look up "A Remembrance of Things Past" on Amazon.com and most especially the entire set published in 3 volumes by Vintage Press, Remembrance of Things Past you will see that the price starts used and new at $125. It is available in it's entirety at this little almost unknown antique shop for $8.50. Unbelievable!!!! In my mind that's like finding $125 worth of gold being sold for $8.50

I saw book upon book upon book like this, deeply discounted well below what they are actually worth, both in real dollars and in the education one can receive by reading them. I wanted to hide half the library away, so that no one else would find my treasure and buy the books before I could get to them.

Another treasure which I found, which I did purchase today, was Volume I of Edward Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Guess what? $5.00. Un-frickin-believable!!! I was like a kid at a candy or toy store in this place.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was a little about two of the books that I mentioned, the one by Edward Gibbon that I bought and am reading now and the one by Proust, which is really one long continuous novel in 7 volumes. I won't say too much here about either, except by way of introduction, as I intend to explore these books and many others in later articles. First of all, one can read the wikipedia page for Remembrance of Things Past. But I will quote a couple paragraphs here to wet your appetites.

"In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) is a semi-autobiographical novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its extended length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine". The title In Search of Lost Time has gained in popularity since the publication of a new translation by that name in 1992, but it is also widely referred to by its original English title Remembrance of Things Past."

"In Search of Lost Time is considered the definitive Modern novel by many scholars, and it had a profound effect on subsequent writers such as the Bloomsbury Group.[2] "Oh if I could write like that!" marveled Virginia Woolf in 1922 (2:525). More recently, literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that In Search of Lost Time is now "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century."[3]"

According to ibiblio, in an account of the following book, Botton, Alain de. How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, a few short paragraphs should suffice to show what an effect Proust had on Virginia Wolf.

"In a chapter of this literary parody of the self-help genre called "How to Put Books Down," Woolf exemplifies "Symptom no. 2: That we are unable to write after reading a good book." "Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf," writes Botton. "She loved his novel . . . rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it." Botton continues with "Marcel and Virginia: A short story," an historical narrative of Woolf's engagement with Proust beginning in autumn 1919, when she wrote Roger Fry in France asking him to bring her back a copy of Swann's Way. Woolf then procrastinated for several years: "Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience. . . . I'm shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again."

This fear proved for a horrible moment to be true: "Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures--there's something sexual in it--that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can't write like that. . . . How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped--and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp." Woolf, Botton continues, was able to gather her forces to write Mrs. Dalloway, though she remained diffident: "I wonder if this time I have achieved something? . . . Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own."

Later, Botton notes, when she was in the doldrums after Orlando, she asked herself, "Why always be spouting words? . . . Take up Proust after dinner and put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid and worthless." At this point, Botton writes, she wisely gave up reading Proust so as to write more books of her own, returning to him only in 1934: A la Recherche "is of course to magnificent that I can't write myself within its arc. For years I've put off finishing it; but now, thinking I may die one of these years, I've returned, and let my own scribble do what it likes. Lord what a hopeless bad book mine [The Years] will be!" Botton sums up the peace Woolf has made with Proust thus: "The path from depression and self-loathing to cheerful defiance suggests a gradual recognition that one person's achievements did not have to invalidate another's. . . . Proust might have expressed many things well, but independent thought and the history of the novel had not come to a halt with him. His book did not have to be followed by silence; there was still space for the scribbling of others, for Mrs. Dalloway, The Common Reader, A Room of One's Own, and in particular, there was space for what these books symbolized in this context--perceptions of one's own."

I don't anything else needs to be said about Proust after that little anecdote from Virginia Woolf. All I can say is Wow!! I can't wait to dive into this treasure trove of a novel, a novel which "literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that In Search of Lost Time is now "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century."

I will just say one more thing about this "novel" and then leave it up to the reader to check out the Proust wikipedia page and that is this:

"In J. Peder Zane's book The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, which collates 125 "top 10 greatest books of all time" lists made by prominent living writers, In Search of Lost Time places eighth.

You can click here to see the entire list of books.

Gibbon

Since, I've written so long already I'll leave the other one, "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to another time, except to quote this little anecdote from the wikipedia page about Gibbon, which I think ties in really well with one of my most recent articles Jesus was alright...

"The last quarto in Volume I, especially Chapters XV and XVI, were highly controversial, and Gibbon was attacked as a "paganist".

Gibbon attacked Christian martyrdom as a myth by deconstructing official Church history that had been perpetuated for centuries. Because the Roman Catholic Church had a virtual monopoly on its own history, its own Latin interpretations were considered sacrosanct, and as a result the Church's writings had rarely been questioned before. For Gibbon, however, the Church writings were secondary sources, and he shunned them in favour of primary sources contemporary to the period he was chronicling. This is why Gibbon is referred to as the "first modern historian".

According to Gibbon, Romans were far more tolerant of Christians than Christians were of one another, especially once Christianity gained the upper hand. Christians inflicted far greater casualties on other Christians than were ever inflicted by the Roman Empire. Gibbon extrapolated that the number of Christians executed by other Christian factions far exceeded all the Christian martyrs who died during the three centuries of Christianity under Roman rule. This was in stark contrast to orthodox Church history, which insisted that Christianity won the hearts and minds of people largely because of the inspirational example set by its martyrs. Gibbon demonstrated that the early Church's custom of bestowing the title of martyr on all confessors of faith grossly inflated the actual numbers.

Gibbon compares how insubstantial that number was, by comparing it to more modern terms. He compared both the reigns of Diocletian (284-305), and Charles V (1519-1556) and the electorate of the Holy Roman Empire, making the argument that both were remarkably similar. Both emperors were plagued by continuous war and compelled to excessive taxation; both chose to abdicate as Emperors at roughly the same age; and both chose to lead a quiet life upon their retirement.

Gibbon's critics were scathing in their attack on this particular line of argument. Numerous tracts were published criticizing his work, and Gibbon was forced to defend his work in reply. He left London to finish the following volumes in Lausanne, where he could work in solitude."

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates--1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.

My forearm tattoo. The Angry Thinker.

2 comments

Quick!! Who said that?! Mark Twain, that venerable bede of thought and humour. This article was inspired by Jay Leno's, Jaywalking skit that he does, whereby he supposedly goes out to the common man on the street and asks them simple questions, that any high school educated person should know. Now I realize that he is only going to show the ones that don't know anything, because it wouldn't be funny to show the ones that actually know something, but I think it is no small point to make that he has never found it difficult to find ignorant people. And every time I watch this, when everyone else is laughing and I know that I should be laughing as well, I'm cringing inside and it angers me. It angers me that education is valued for so little in this country today. It angers me that our youth has taken the Pink Floyd song, "We don't need no education" to heart and have found it somehow uncool to be educated. No need to point out that "We don't need no education" is grammatically incorrect to begin with. I just don't understand people today and that is one thing at least that I do love about Vox. At least here, most of us value education and most of us are at least marginally educated, whether or not we have a college degree or not.

And that's what I want to talk about. The value of learning and an education, even if it's self taught. It seems to me that college today exists solely to prepare people for the work force, to go out and get a 9 to 5 job, and work for some faceless corporation. A true education one does not get in college hardly any more. I mean, people make fun of people all the time with degrees in history or literature or philosophy who now graduated from college can't seem to find a job. Just look at most of the degree programs colleges offer today. Yes, they offer history, philosophy and literature, the liberal arts, but for the most part a college education today is dominated by such world of work worthy majors as Business Administration, Accounting, para-legal, computer science, criminal justice, nursing, allied health, etc etc etc. Now I understand that the world needs all these types of people, but to call them educated would be a misnomer, even with the general education requirements most colleges have. How else to explain that when Jay Leno asks people who admit to being college educated when the Declaration of Independence was signed they fumble around and answer, the 1890's? Or when he asks who was the President during WWI, that they can't even come close at all and say, "Hinckley?" Who the hell is Hinckley? And the sad part is that they laugh and chuckle and act as if it is hilarious that they are so ignorant. I don't find it funny, I find it absolutely disgusting.

Aristotle said, "All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth." We are seeing this today, in that the world is passing us by, everyone the world over now seems to value an education much more than we do and I think it is disgusting.

I'm not suggesting that an encyclopedic knowledge is to be sought, that we should all strive to be on Jeopardy, but when someone asks you when the Declaration of Independence was signed, you should not laugh, but should be ashamed of yourself if you don't know that it was 1776.

Epictetus in his Discourses said, "We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free." I personally truly believe this. To me, to be uneducated about even the basics, is like wandering about life lost in a fog. How can a person have any idea of his place in the world if he thinks this country was founded in the 1890's? If when asked who we fought in WWI they say Vietnam? It's like being a true Stranger in a Stranger Land. How can a person have any idea of how to live their lives if they don't even know how others in the past lived their lives. No wonder we seem to be so lost today, everyone is constantly trying to re-invent the wheel, not realizing that there is nothing new under the sun, that for every experience of man, someone at some other time or another has gone through the same exact thing. Instead of watching American Idol, and knowing every detail of the life of Paris Hilton would it hurt to pick up a book every now and again? Even when people do pick up a book, they pick up the wrong ones, thinking that to read a Dean Koontz book makes them a good reader.

Einstein said, ""Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." And I think it takes a true liberally educated person to move in the opposite direction. Our current education system is only teaching people how to make things bigger, more complex and more violent. That's not an education, that's on the job training.

Einstein also said, ""Imagination is more important than knowledge." Any old fool can obtain knowledge. It takes a real education to become wise, and we can't become wise unless we are taught how to use our imagination. This can only be learned by reading the worlds classic literature, plato, socrates, Homer, Shakespeare. Shakespeare said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There are more things in this world than just learning how to balance a balance sheet.

Einstein also said, ""The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." That is what people do not understand, they think that once their "education" in how to be a good cubicle dweller is over, they no longer have any need of learning and for most people their education ends. Oh how sad this truly is. I haven't set foot in a college class room in over 15 years and I never even obtained a degree yet, but I'm willing to bet that I'm more educated than most college graduates.This is not to brag, I am by no means the smartest guy around, it's an indictment of the youth of today that no one values an education anymore, and that they have been fooled into thinking that a college degree makes them educated.

Henry David Thoreau said that the great masses of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Not I. I may not have a whole lot of money but I have all the riches in the world right at my fingertips. I love to read and learn and crave it as some people crave for gold. Wouldn't the world be a much better place if more people felt this way?

Hi, I'm Phaedrus (brownie points to anyone who can tell me the inspiration for my moniker) and I love to read but definitely do not do enough of it. Sometimes life gets in the way and soul nourishment falls by the wayside. I hope to use this group to find some good book recommendations (already have), to get involved in the discussions going on and to post some books that I have read and am currently reading and my take on them. Maybe this will help me to read on a regular basis.