Category: Books

Dr. Henry Marsh’s And Finally: Matters of Life and Death


Am reading Henry Marsh’s And Finally: Matters of Life and Death. Marsh is a retired brain surgeon, who recently was diagnosed (2021) with advanced prostate cancer, presently in remission, but with a 75% chance of reoccurrence.

His previous books include Do No Harm and Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon, both well received. Professionally, he has published 179 papers in peer reviewed journals and performed 50,000 surgeries over a 40-year span.

In his fulsome writing, Marsh reminds me of the late neurosurgeon Oliver Sacks, gifted in eloquence, humble, and unfailingly compassionate.

Perhaps I’m stereotyping, but he’s unlike many in the medical sciences, consumed by professional interests and profit motive, insensitive or ignorant of the arts and, professionally, objectifying their patients rather than seeing them as individuals, each with gradients of need and longing.

One of his cherished accomplishments is the creation of two balcony gardens for neurological patients at St. George’s hospital

Impressively, he’s been working pro bonum with colleagues in Ukraine since 1992. Neither cancer nor the Russian 2022 invasion of Ukraine has deterred the good doctor visiting the country regularly to consult and advise colleagues.

At home, Marsh is an assisted dying activist.

Of his previous Do No Harm, now translated into 37 languages, The Economist wrote that it’s “so elegantly written it is little wonder some say that in Mr Marsh neurosurgery has found its Boswell.”

Marsh reads widely, owns several thousand books, keeps a garden, raises bees, and enjoys woodcrafting.

I’m early in my reading of And Finally, so I’ll delay full commentary for another post when fully read. But let me share a passage I read this morning that amplifies Marsh’s writing talent infused with observation and an affinity for nature, under assault by climate change:

The {COVID} lockdown coincided with perfect spring weather – so fine, prolonged and warm that it spoke of climate change. The bushes in the little paradise of my back garden almost all burst into flower all at once, and the trees went from being bare winter skeletons to towers of spreading green leaves in a matter of days. The bees came rushing out of their hive in front of my workshop and shot up into the sunlight, rejoicing in vertical zigzags. And the lockdown brought complete peace and quiet. The air felt as fresh as if you were in the countryside and the sky was a clear and deep blue. The only sounds were of birds singing, children playing and the wind in the trees. And at night, at first there was a full moon, looking down kindly on the suddenly silent city, and you could see the stars. It was a vision of heaven, here in London, SW19. Time had stopped. Eternity is not the infinite prolongation of time but instead its abolition.

The silence and clear air, and the return of birdsong, reminded us of what we have already lost with cars, pollution and the changing climate, and the unnaturally fine weather told us that Nature is out of joint, and that there is much, much worse to come.

I feel it in my bones. This is going to be a great read.

—rj

 

David Copperfield: An Enduring Nexus

Those of us who read fiction do so for many reasons, the majority perhaps to relieve the tedium of a long flight or empty minutes in the lobby of a doctor’s office, or as a verbal nightcap absolving the tensions of a frenetic day of undulating joy and sorrow, nuanced by disappointment or regret.

As a child, I read to escape into a fantasy world remote from the quotidian squalor of waterfront Philly and the domestic insecurity of a single parent home suffused with alcoholic addiction. In these maturer years, I read fiction mostly for connection and inspiration that my strivings have mattered, despite my myriad blunderings, providing solace and meaning—and best, that I am not alone.

Of the books I’ve read, David Copperfield resonates most by way of nexus: a childhood annulled by environment, a sensitive child seeking emancipation, a failed marriage and, at last, a soulmate found. It was Dicken’s “favorite child” among his fourteen completed novels over a brief twenty years.

In many ways, David Copperfield navigates the journey of its protagonist for sovereignty over life’s intemperate intrusions, impeding one’s happiness; the fissuring of expectation and event; in Tom Wolfian parlance, the looming challenge of having the “right stuff” to break through.

Observing the mythic triad of separation, trial, and restoration, David’s journey becomes our own.

I first came upon David Copperfield when in the eighth grade in Massachusetts at age thirteen. How wonderful the schools were then. Instantly, the book became a first love, an affection that has endured.

This novel differs from Dickens’ earlier ones, its early chapters autobiographical and penned in first person. A novel of memories and reflections, it plays down his usual melodrama.

As for its teeming, colorful characters—a Dickensian constant—latent behind their public personae lies a good deal of dissonance, the incongruity loved by Shakespeare between appearance and reality:

Micawber, outwardly jovial, masking an inner angst and volatile moods as debtor prison looms ever closer.

The narcissist Steerforth, whose duplicity manipulates David, but
achieves a lesson learned.

Mr. Dick, whose labored utterances suggest mental illness, sympathetically drawn.

I know David Copperfield ends in fairytale recompension, resilence rewarded, injustice vanquished—if only life were like that. Still, we need to dream that life may sometimes prove compensatory, a lotus land dulling life’s transgressions.

There’s so much in David Copperfield that revives dormant memory of my own childhood and early adulthood, its idealism and reality’s harshness; not least, growth paradoxically through failure.

It works the same way for many others as well. I think of a couple that nightly reads five pages of the novel to each other before turning in.

I understand that. As said, I also read to connect.

–rj

Jack Kerouac: Soulful Wanderer

Jack Kerouac turned 102 a week ago. The fierceness of his writing overwhelms, lyrical, sensory, harnessing human moods, a fiery warmth beneath a canopy of gazing stars on cold stellar nights:

“Fury flashing on rocks that rise like gloomy sea shroud towers out of the cove, the bingbang cove with its seas booming inside caves and slapping out, the cities of seaweed floating up and down you can even see their dark leer in the phosphorescent seabeach nightlight.”

—Big Sur

“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhoo 0d, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”

—The Portable Jack Kerouac

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.

—The Portable Kerouac

I miss you, Jack. You left us all too soon.

—rj

RJ´s 2024 Draw-bag Reading List


Welcome to the New Year and my sixth annual Draw-bag Booklist I’ve curated from the very best sources. Perhaps you’ll find pleasure among several of those books listed. I personally use my list to prevent my straying from the reading trail, taking time out only for the best reads, ample in their pleasure, abundant in their wisdom and solace:

FICTION:

Boyd, William. The New Confessions. (Boyd specializes in whole life narrative, delivered in conversational prose, and unfailingly riveting. Famous for Any Human Heart, this cerebral novel also has its many fans.)

Cain, James. The Postman Always Rings Twice. (Modern Library lists Cain’s novel among the best 100. A mystery classic, it’s been turned into a movie seven times.)

Chekhov, Anton. Peasants and Other Stories. (Famed critic Edmund Wilson collected and wrote the introduction to these late short stories of Chekhov that scrutinize Russian society, each a genre masterpiece.)

Colette. The Pure and the Impure. (Colette thought this novel the best she’d written and nearly autobiographical. Published in 1934, it explores love’s
labyrinths, especially among women. Get the recent New York Review of Books edition. Insightful critic Judith Thurman wrote the introduction.)

Duffy, Bruce. The World As I Found It. (Joyce Carol Oates deemed it “one of the five best books,” a blend of fact and fiction, centering on philosophers Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; on display, their disputes, contradictions, and follies.)

Gilbert, Elizabeth. The Signature of All Things. (The author of Eat, Love, Pray pens a page turner, reviving the milieu of the late 18th and 19th centuries and the courage and achievements of its remarkable female protagonist. Meticulous in its underlying research and compelling in its superlative prose, you’ll grow fond of this book.)

Laestadius, Ann-Helén. Stolen. (An indigenous Sámi author’s novel reveals a repressed culture struggling for survival in Scandinavia. A best seller in Sweden.)

Santayana, George. The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a NoveI. (Words fail to adequately express my devotion to Santayana, an eclectic essayist, scintillating in observation, endowed with sagacity, verbally in command, cultural connoisseur, ever eloquent, and unflinchingly honest. The Last Puritan, his only novel among his many publications, tells the story of Puritan descendant Oliver Alden, embedded in its strictures, seeking escape, yet unable to break their hold. Published in 1936, it finished second to Gone with the Wind in popularity.)

Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (A favorite American classic, it tells the story of a young girl at the turn of the 20th Century and her family’s struggle with poverty. Replete with wisdom, poignant and beautifully told, it deserves its wide esteem.)

Spark, Muriel. A Far Cry From Kensington. (A widow in a postwar London publishing firm reminisces. Somewhat autobiographical.)

Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge. (This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Comprised of thirteen stories, centering around its eponymous protagonist, it narrates the fear of change, yet the hope it may bring.)~~

E. B. White. Charlotte’s Web. (Among the most beloved stories for children, White, celebrated for his prose mastery, wrote it late in his career, narrating the friendship between livestock pig Wilbur and barnyard spider Charlotte. Publishers Weekly thought it the best children’s story ever written. Adults admire it too.)

Non-Fiction

Bradatan, Costica. In Praise of Failure: Lessons in Humility. (Failure can help us find our better selves. Portraitures of Weil, Gandhi, Cioran, Mishima, and Seneca by a renowned contemporary philosopher guaranteed to inspire.)

Dawidziak, Mark. A Mystery of Mysteries.(Edgar Allen Poe’s last days and untimely death have been shrouded in mystery. Dawidziak’s research into primary resources offers convincing explanatory evidence unveiling Poe’s final days.)

Hume, David. Treatise on Understanding. (Must reading by a landmark empiricist that continues to reverberate in its bold analysis of the human mind.)

Malik, Kenan. Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity. (A stunning refutation of identity politics on the subject of contemporary racism by a noted Observer columnist.)

Marsh, Henry. And Finally: Matters of Life and Death. (A neuroscientist confronts his mortality with lessons for all of us. Of Marsh, The Economist writes, “neuroscience has found its Boswell.”)

Mill, John Stuart Mill. Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism. (In these essays, published posthumously, “the saint of rationalism” advocates a humanism grounded in reason, and serving human needs. Mill is among those who have influenced me profoundly.)

Nussbaum, Martha. Justice for Animals. Our Collective Responsibility. (One of the most salient pleas for the rights of animals you’ll ever read.)

Raban, Jonathan. Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meaning. (Acclaimed literary travel writer, Raban pens a biographical travel venture of middle-age. Many consider this book his finest.)

Saunders, George. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. (Seven masterful Russian short stories, with subsequent analysis. You’ll never read a short story the same way again. Saunders is one of America’s most gifted writers and winner of the prestigious Booker Prize.)

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom. (A sobering review of the rise of contemporary authoritarianism by an eminent Yale historian.)

Thunberg, Greta. The Climate Book. (A compendium of the latest on the past, present and future of climate change compiled from more than 100 experts.)

Thurman, Judith. A Left-Handed Woman: Essays. (Second volume of New Yorker essays by one of our preeminent biographers and essayists, winner of the National Book Award for her biography of Isaac Dinesen. Vivid, unforgettable portraitures of bold, independent women.)

—rj

E.B. White: Beauty in Complexity

I finished reading E.B. White Essays moments ago. Since the essay genre happens to be my favorite indulgence, I found White fascinating, the great master, and among the finest American essayists of the last century that includes the likes of Didion, Dillard, Wallace, Baldwin and Sontag.

White wrote several thousand essays, 1800 of them for the New Yorker. I have liked his modesty, his unaffected style, keen powers of observation, evocative musings, and love of nature.

He adored Thoreau’s Walden, my favorite American classic. Like Thoreau, White questioned some of the assumptions of his fellows, that technology assured happiness and that man could improve upon nature.

How can I not admire this good man who found beauty in life’s complexity and changing moods?

I must say a chill went up my spine when I read “Here is New York,” written in a steamy 1948 summer and, for many critics, the finest tribute ever rendered to Gotham. White was deeply troubled by the advent of the atom and hydrogen bombs, fearing their exponential future consequences. America had escaped WWII’s destruction, but danger stalked its future, with New York vulnerable as a primary target:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers….

I can’t say I’ve ever encountered anything more prescient than this foreboding passage written 52 years before 9/11.  

But this is partially witness to why White is worth your time, observant, asking the hard questions, sifting out the implications.

Unfortunately, if you google “greatest 20th century American essayists,” he gets omitted.  This is perhaps due to his three best selling children’s books, including Charlotte’s Web, resulting in his essay prowess being overshadowed.

Those of us who did English composition in our freshman year of college are more apt to associate him with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, one of the most effective writing guides ever published. White had studied at Cornell under Dr. William Strunk, Jr.  who had originally published it in 1920.  White revised it in 1959, adding to it substantially.  A no nonsense guide, it called for concise prose, accurate grammar, unified paragraphs, concrete description, and avoidance of the passive voice.

White carried out its precepts and is famed as a writer of the unembellished  style, direct, easy to follow, yet sophisticated in its declarative sentence structure and keen observations with their implications.  You’ll not find many subordinated clauses or inverted sentences.  No semicolons or dashes.  No arcane vocabulary.

Of the 31 essays in this collection, chosen by White for inclusion, my favorite is “Back to the Lake,” moving in its reminiscence as he takes his eleven year old son back to the Maine lake of his childhood, an essay critic Joseph Epstein remarks “shimmers like a perfect poem; everything in it clicks” in its theme of birth, rebirth, and death:

When the others went swimming, my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

Though critics often refer to White’s humor, there looms a stubborn apocalyptic streak in his writing as in “Here is New York.” Or take this passage:

I think when the end of the world comes the sky will be its old blue self, with white cumulus clouds drifting along. You will be looking out of a window, say, at a tree; and then after a bit the tree won’t be there any more, and the looking won’t be there any more, only the window will be there, in memory—the thing through which the looking has been done. I can see God, walking through the garden and noticing that the world is done for, reach down and pick it up and put it on His compost pile. It ought to make a fine ferment.

White struggled with general anxiety, beginning in his childhood. There were so many fears that plagued him, especially about his health. He was afraid of meeting people and of giving speeches. He didn’t show when being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He avoided parties and weddings.  

White would ultimately be honored with virtually every literary prize, including a Pulitzer, yet remained a shy, unassuming man, modest in his wants, relishing farm life in Maine.

Some readers may find White too dry or intellectual for their taste and some of his essays dated or discursive. White was never fated to win the Nobel, but he always made sense in half the space, which would have made Strunk smile. White excels when he foregoes political commentary, taking up instead depictions of everyday life:

I like the cold. I like the snow. I like the descent to the dark, cold kitchen at six in the morning, to put a fire in the wood stove…. I steal down in my wrapper carrying a pair of corduroy pants…and fill the kettle with fresh spring water…with a poker I clear the grate in the big black Home Crawford 8-20, roll up two sheets of yesterday’s Bangor Daily News, and lay them in the firebox along with a few sticks of cedar kindling and two sticks of stovewood on top of that” (“The Winter of the Great Snows”).

I have loved keeping company with White these last several days, his honesty, clarity, remonstrances, love for animals and nature uplifting. So many passages, wise and luxurious in sentiment like this one from “Letter from the East”:

With so much that is disturbing our lives and clouding our future, beginning right here in my own little principality, with its private pools of energy (the woodpile, the black stove, the germ in the seed, the chick in the egg), and extending outward to our unhappy land and our plundered planet, it is hard to foretell what is going to happen. I know one thing that has happened: the willow by the brook has slipped into her yellow dress, lending, along with the faded pink of the snow fences, a spot of color to the vast gray-and-white world.

White passed from us at his beloved North Brooklin home in Maine on October 1, 1985.  He was 86.

His legacy, like that of Thoreau, will endure, for talent always makes room for itself.

—rj

 





No Room for Palestinians: Israel’s Calculated Violence

The photos featured in today’s media of masses of Palestinians fleeing Israel’s incessant bombing validates the truth that “a photo is worth a thousand words,” but in a sad way.

As I write, more than 11,000 Palestinians have died, 4000 of them children, and 25,000 have been wounded. The violence continues, Israel stubbornly ruling out a cease fire, demanding Hamas first release its 240 hostages.

The news on the West Bank is dismal as well. An area much larger than Gaza and an Arab majority, it has seen 175 civilians killed, nearly all of them Palestinians, 33 of them children, since Hamas’ incursion into Israel on October 7. Israel holds several thousand West Bank prisoners, hundreds without charge or trial.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that more than 1000 Palestinians with title to their land have been forcibly removed from their homes on the West Bank since October 7.

This follow a long history of settler intimidation, abetted by Israel Defense Forces, targeting Bedouin herders, Palestinian olive groves and farms. Homes are burned and protestors killed, yet the media allows this criminality to go unreported. It cares only about normalization, not Palestinian grievances.

Al Jazeera has it right: “Were the American media and political establishment not so firmly committed to transmitting a thoroughly decontextualised version of this war – and of Israel/Palestine in general – perhaps a news anchor would ask whether it never occurred to Israel that the Palestinians would ever “retaliate” for 75 years of ethnic cleansing, suffocating blockades and massacres” (https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/12/how-americas-bloodthirsty-journalism-cheers-on-israels-war-on-gaza).

While Hamas’ barbarism is surely condemnable, it’s the nature of Israel’s disproportionate response that troubles the international community. Disallowing humanitarian aid, curtailing food, water, and energy, bombing hospitals, ambulances and mosques, a refugee camp two days in a row, justifies growing international rage.

Ordering 1.2 million Palestinians to abandon their homes in north Gaza, with no real place to flee while denying them subsistence, constitutes a glaring war crime.

Concurrently, the United States, Great Britain, and France have contributed to Israel’s unmeasured response, accelerating arms shipments to Israel and making themselves complicit

Israeli repression of Palestinians, often violent, has its lengthy narrative. With the seizure of the West Bank following the 1967 War, a new chauvinism of a greater Israel ensued to the detriment of Palestinians in the Negev, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, resulting in the rise of Hamas, a Palestine offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 1983, Israel conspired with Christian Phalangists in Lebanon in the massacres of several thousands of Palestinians and was found culpable by both the UN’s and Israel’s own subsequent investigations. The UN termed it “genocide.”

In the aftermath of 1948’s birth of the state of Israel and its victory over Arab armies, Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, many of whom populate today’s Gaza and West Bank.

Five years ago, during the Great March of Return in Gaza, Israelis killed hundreds of peaceful demonstrators and wounded several thousand others.

While we hear a lot about a two state remedy, it’s unlikely, since it takes a marriage of minds for that to happen. Palestinians don’t trust Israelis, especially a government led by nationalist leadership under Netanyahu. They’ve also witnessed the second class citizenship of Arabs granted citizenship.

There do exist Israelis who want to address Palestinian grievances, but do so at great cost. Many have been arrested, their identities and addresses posted online, their families threatened.

In 1995, a religious extremist killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had sought to implement the Oslo Accords with its provision for Palestinian self rule in Gaza and the West Bank: “We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough… We are today giving peace a chance and saying to you and saying again to you: Enough.”

In the aftermath of Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu came to power, resulting in negotiations for a just settlement with the Palestinians being abandoned in favor of surveillance and military might. Hamas was to be controlled, not dismantled. Netanyahu needed Hamas to offset the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, open to negotiation. October 7 changed the venue.

Zionism is the real culprit here. Israel has never subscribed to the two state idea in which Palestinians would be masters of their own house.

Addressing Palestinian members of Knesset in 2021, far right Defense Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “It’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”

Recently, Smotrich has voiced sentiment for a one state Israel: “Peace will not emerge so long as we maintain our hold on starting assumptions that this land is fated to contain two collectives with conflicting national aspirations. If this is the case, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren will inevitably be destined to live by the sword….The ‘Palestinian People’ is but a counter-movement to the Zionist movement. Those who choose not to let go of their national ambitions will receive aid to emigrate to one of the many countries where Arabs realize their national ambitions, or to any other destination in the world.”

Is it conceivable that Israel’s vociferous response, defiant of the international community’s call for a ceasefire, is deliberately strategic? That not only Hamas should be eliminated, but the Palestinian presence once and for all? Make it so intolerable for them that they’ll leave?

Ominously, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing his country on October 28, quoted Deuteronomy: 25:17: “You must remember what Amalek did to you.” If you continue to verse 19, you’ll read, “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Never forget!” In 1st Samuel 15: 2-3, the Hebrew Bible exhorts, “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!”

He didn’t have to go on. He had made his point.

–rj

Jane Goodall’s “Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey”

Finished reading Jane Goodall’s Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey, minutes ago, a compelling, yet difficult read, as Goodall bares not only triumphs, but personal tragedies in her long life.

Renowned for championing chimpanzees, our closest relative and, now, an endangered species, at 89 she travels widely, raising funds and informing audiences of the myriad challenges of entrenched poverty, species loss, and climate change. In 1950, 2 million chimpanzees roamed Africa’s then teeming wilderness. That’s dwindled to just 150,000 currently.

A compassionate woman who empathizes keenly with all who suffer, whether humans or animals, she’s not without hope that the human capacity for good as well as evil will ultimately triumph, saving not only mankind, but a beleagured Mother Earth. Above all, abides Jane’s vigorous faith in a greater Consciousness that pervades our universe and seeks our good.

Salient passages:

“But I have tried to write my story honestly—else why write the book at all?”

“It is probably the case that inappropriate or morally wrong behaviors are more often changed by the influence of outsiders, looking with different eyes, from different backgrounds.”

“In particular I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees. The feel of rough sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant, or the cool, smooth skin of a young and eager sapling, gave me a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches, high overhead.”

“I saw chimps use and modify other objects as tools, such as crumpled leaves to sop rainwater from a hollow in a tree. Stones could be missiles; some of the males threw with good aim—as I sat there, keeping vigil, I thought, as I have thought so often since, what an amazing privilegeit was—to be utterly accepted thus by a wild, freeanimal. It is a privilege I shall never take for granted.”

“I found that my whole attitude to eating flesh abruptly changed. When I looked at a piece of meat on my plate I saw it as part of a once living creature, killed for me, and it seemed to symbolize fear, pain, and death—not exactly appetizing. So I stopped eating meat. For me, one of the delightful side effects of becoming a vegetarian was the change in my own health.”

“And people are beginning to suffer; in some places women must dig up the roots of trees long since cut down to get the firewood they need for cooking. And all this change is because the numbers of people have increased dramatically—mainly due to the explosive population growth, but also due to repeated influxes of refugees from troubled Burundi in the north, and more recently from eastern Congo. And this scenario is repeated again and again across the African continent and other developing countries: increased population growth, diminishing resources, and the destruction of nature, resulting in poverty and human suffering. Yes, we are destroying our planet. The forests are going, the soil is eroding, the water tables are drying, the deserts are increasing. There is famine, disease, poverty, and ignorance. There is human cruelty, greed, jealousy, vindictiveness, and corruption.“

“Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other. Together we must reestablish our connections with the natural world and with the Spiritual Power that is around us. And then we can move, triumphantly, joyously, into the final stage of human evolution—spiritual evolution.”

—rj

When the Japanese Don’t Look Japanese

I remember Japan fondly, falling in love at first sight. It was twelve years after WWII and a place remarkably different from anywhere else and, in large measure, it has remained so.

It had been a long flight from Travis AFB in California, a brief stop in Honolulu for a crew change, then on to Wake Island, where President Truman had a few years before confronted a defiant General MacArthur, then on to Yamoto Air Station, 23 miles from Tokyo.

I was 17, an airman headed for Korea for the next 12 months. Yamoto meant processing before continuing on a C-47 for Osan AFB near Seoul.

Japan was then this kaleidoscope of sensuous bombast—human drawn rickshaws, coolies in straw conical hats, buckets suspended on long poles between their shoulders, and everywhere, women garbed in flowery kimonos on densely packed streets.

I would return to Japan twice on rest leave, the first time centering on Tokyo and its Ginza, even then, bustling with elegant department stores, game shops, restaurants, art galleries, theaters and night clubs, illuminated at night by a swarm of neon lights rivaling those of Vegas and New York. I would visit the grounds of the Imperial Palace, the Great Kanto Earthquake Memorial, and the Great Buddha of Kamakura bronze statue originally cast in 1252.

One of the supreme highlights was keeping company with American Quaker friends in Tokyo, who arranged a get-together with university students, fluent in English. They gave me a different war vista in narrating the American fire bombing of Tokyo, March 9-10, 1945, killing 100,000 civilians and leaving 1,000,000 homeless. I learned that it’s the victors who write the history we imbibe and I remain moved by their civility to me, an American serviceman.

A few days later, I journeyed by car with my friends, laboring up twisting mountain roads to the shrine city of Nikko 97 miles from Tokyo, where I lived several days in traditional Japanese manner, sleeping in minimalist fashion on a tatami soft mat made with rice straw fill, rolled out on the floor, then layered with a Shikifuton, or thin mattress, and a buckwheat hull pillow. To keep warm, an added Kakefuton , or soft quilt.

Following a hot bath, dressed in kimono, served a fish-seaweed meal, no links to an external world, I slept soundly.

I’m not certain how prevalent this ancient sleeping mode survives in modern Japan, though I know traditional inns abound in Kyoto, that magical city of April cherry blossom.

On my second visit, I took a long distance train from Tokyo to Fukuoka, one of Japan’s most populated cities on the southern island of Kyushu. I wish I could remember what I took in there, but I draw a blank, though I recall being dazzled by its department store elevators, on each floor, a young girl, often giggling at this lanky Westerner, helping you get on and off the escalator, and from my train window a passing landscape of brick houses contrasting with the fragile wooden structures dominant in central Honshu, Japan’s largest island.

There’s much I admire in the Japanese culture, still unique in spite of the cultural leveling you see in other nations, or what can be called Americanization, hastened by film and TV.

They’re surely the most hygienic-centered people I’ve known, indulging nearly daily in the hot bath and painstaking to remove their shoes before entering your home.

Streets are free of trash, yet you won’t find trash cans.

Politeness is the hallmark of Japanese culture, san often added to to a surname to render respect. It extends even to the language’s several pronouns, a tier gauged approach to courtesy.

Some of the customs are especially endearing. If given a gift with the donator present, you don’t open it, lest you hurt their feelings or, worse, feel pressured to masquerade your dislike on unwrapping it.

You reciprocate by sending a gift, usually candies.

Etiquette extends to not eating on a train or while walking.

Not interrupting

Not talking loud.

Not bragging.

Then there’s the ubiquitous honesty. Unlike in many countries, you don’t have to safeguard your pockets in a train station, not even on a packed commuter train.

Leave a camera on checking out of your hotel, housekeepers will see it to the registration desk.

You don’t shake hands or hug, bowing instead as a way of modesty and respect.

Sample your rice first, before nibbling other dishes, then go back to the rice, viewed as a palate cleanser.

Japanese gardens obsess me. I’ve always wanted one. With their emphasis on simplicity, harmony, and verisimilitude with nature, they confer sanctuary from everyday bustle and induce an inner calm. Many Japanese homes feature their own courtyard garden, bringing nature close.

Then there’s the tea ceremony, derived from Zen Buddhism, emphasizing mindfulness and bonding between host and guest. Thankfully, it remains a revered ceremony.

As for crime, it’s rare in Japan, mass shootings virtually unknown. Contrast with this, the 400 mass killings (4 or more dead per incident) in the U.S. in the first six months of 2023.

Unlike America, it’s not about doing your own thing. It’s thinking about others and not bringing shame to your family.

But Japan’s changing, inevitably because unless it does, it will simply vanish in several generations. The Japanese aren’t replacing themselves and unless they do, its present population of 124 million will dwindle to 87 million by 2070.

Consequently, traditionally xenophobic and homogeneous Japan has turned to immigration to solve its labor needs and sustain its population. 3,000,000 immigrants now call Japan home, triple the number in 1990. They come from not only Asia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia especially, but from Africa and the Middle East. There are cities where 10-15% are foreign born.
Today, you’ll find 113 mosques across Shinto-Buddhist Japan. In 1999, there were 15.

Will Japan’s new citizens bring their resentments with them, as in France, England, and Sweden?

Will they end-up in ghettoes of the unassimilated?

As their numbers swell with immigration and higher birthrates, will they overwhelm the world’s most exemplary society?

Will the Japanese fade like countless fauna and flora into memory, their substantial contributions to civilization relegated to history books like those of the fabled Pharaohs’ Egypt or Nebuchadnezzar’s Hanging Gardens of Babylonia?

In sum, what happens when the Japanese don’t look Japanese?

–rj

A Profound Influence: My Debt to Tolstoy

I’ve had this fever to devour books since I was a child.
It began when my brother, David, returned from the army and gave me Huckleberry Finn to read. I was eight.

There was this small news store on Philadelphia’s busy Girard Avenue in Fishtown. I don’t remember how I discovered it, but I’d often stop there on the way back from elementary school or in summer time, when I roamed the city as a street urchin, sometimes poking my nose where it didn’t belong.

They had this big box filled with what were called Classics Illustrated, which featured comic-style adaptations of literary classics. Founded by the Kanter family in 1941, Classic Illustrated made it into the 21st century.

I’d fish out comics featuring works like Swiss Family Robinson, Moby Dick, Kidnapped, Mutiny on the Bounty, Oliver Twist. They went for no more than a nickel and there were lots of them.

I enjoyed them so much, I didn’t want them to end. This led me to the Montgomery Street library, where I would read their originals. By age 12, I had read scores of literary works. By the way, that library still exists.

Of all the writers I’ve read over the years, Tolstoy stands out head and shoulders above all others, influencing me profoundly. By age 13, I had read War and Peace and at 15, Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy taught me empathy for the poor, disavowal of violence, restraint from eating meat, to live simply and love my fellows.

Tolstoy’s great quest was to resolve life’s riddle: How should we live?

His quest became mine,

I loved his parabolic short stories. I think of The Death of Ivan Ilyich as among the most profound short stories I’ve ever read and taught it for many years.

Tolstoy’s writing creeps up on you. Though simply written, for Tolstoy shunned affectation, it’s the pulsating nuance generated by a passionate insistence that holds you to the end. Make no mistake. He aims to convert you.

Then there is his last novel, Resurrection, moving and powerful, a panorama of Russian life at the end of the nineteenth century. On the attack, he assails the injustices of a repressive, oligarchic society and the hypocrisy of its bulwark, the Russian Orthodox Church.

I wanted to read him in the original, so I studied Russian.

As a college prof, I taught seminars in Russian classics.

In 2001, I went to Russia and visited his lifelong residence at Yasnaya Polyana near Tula, 125 miles southeast of Moscow. I stood in silent tribute at his grave.


If there’s a Tolstoy book you should read sooner than later, my recommendation is The Kingdom of God is Within You.

Mahatma Gandhi, on reading it, exclaimed that he felt “overwhelmed”: “All the books given me … seemed to pale into insignificance.”

Tolstoy and Gandhi exchanged letters till Tolstoy’s death in 1910. Gandhi had also read Tolstoy’s hand-circulated “A Letter to a Hindu,” with its advocacy of love, not force, as the means to freeing India from British rule. We know the rest of the story.

I’m not interested in hagiography. Tolstoy had feet of clay. There existed his stormy marriage to Sofia and his moral intensity in combat with carnal appetites. He endowed his protagonist Anna Karenina with liabilities he despised in himself, annulling her quest for self-realization. In the novel, it’s Levin who Tolstoy aspires to be.

When the Bolshevik revolutionaries violently seized power in 1917, the five year Russian Civil War began. The Bolsheviks, coming upon the Yasnaya Polyana estate, did not blaze it to non-existence as was their wanton elsewhere. Tolstoy had freed his serfs long before the Czar. Dressing in peasant garb, he labored among them, and distributed his wealth.

When German troops approached the estate in their invasion of Russia, the Soviets loaded Tolstoy’s furnishings and manuscripts on a train into the Urals, safe-guarding them for posterity.

Today, Russia continues to revere Tolstoy, for he’s the Russian soul writ large. I never understood the deep spirituality of the Russian psyche until I was on Russian soil. You see it in their art: Bryullov, Kandinski, Aivazovsky. You hear it in their music: Tchaikovsky. Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov. You imbibe it not only through Tolstoy, but in Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. In Russia, poets are celebrities.

Russia is neither European nor Asian. It is itself.

Embraced by the universal human condition, Tolstoy nonetheless intensely sought to free himself from its shackles in pursuit of love, social equity, and non-violence: “The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.”

I take him with me everyday.

–rj

RJ´s 2023 Reading List

One of Keats’ first notable poems, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s
Homer,“ celebrates Elizabethan poet George Chapman’s translation of Homer, an achievement kindling discovery and wonderment in Keats akin to that of the best travel venture. It’s what good books do, transporting us into unforeseen realms, expanding awareness and making us wiser, often lessening our prejudices, wrought by custom, that prohibit pathways to new understanding. Staying close to my drawback booklist for 2022, I read twenty-five books that, even at this stage in my life, have granted me gateways into personal growth. With similar expectation, I’ve again selected from among the very best reads out there, those that inform, challenge, and delight. Even in a time of declining readership, there remain books justifying your investment and, potentially, life-changing. —rj

Fiction:

Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility (Not as widely read as Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion, it’s still worth reading in its exploration of moral dilemmas and, as the title suggests, the role of reason over emotion in solving them.)

Caroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland (The great classic you meant to read, but haven’t. A work inspiring others, and though seemingly a romp in imagination, latent with nuance, momentarily retrieving childhood wonderment lamentably lost by adults).

Catha, Willa. My Antonia. (Catha’s classic novel of a female immigrant’s tenacity to prevail on the Nebraska prairies. )

Franzen, Jonathan. Crossroads. (The latest novel by the great master of family dynamics, set in 1970s suburban Chicago, the first of an intended trilogy, a family headed by a minister must confront issues of faith and morality.)

Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie’s World. (Very appealing to both young people and adults, Gaarder’s novel embeds philosophical history that many readers find more compelling than the novel’s story. A favorite read internationally.)

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God (A moving work of the Harlem Renaissance, underscoring black identity, feminism, and love’s vulnerability.)

Ishiguru, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day (Narrated in first person through flashback and travelogue, a retired butler reevaluates his life. A Booker Prize fiction winner turned into a film selected as an Academy Awards Best Picture ,1993).

Labutut, Benjamin. When We Cease to Understand the World (“A monster and brilliant book,” says Philip Pullman. An exploration of the last century’s greatest minds exploring the profundities of existence.)

Percy, Walter. The Movie Goer. (Percy’s debut novel, featuring a post-Korea war veteran, now stock broker, suffering from malaise, in search of life’s meaning. A National Book Award winner listed by Modern Library as the sixteenth best novel of the 20th Century.)

Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. (The writer of acclaimed Overstory pens another literary masterpiece of Man’s estrangement from nature.)

Roberts, Gregory David. Shantaram. (The late Pat Conroy wrote: “Shantaram is a novel of the first order, a work of extraordinary art, a thing of exceptional beauty. If someone asked me what the book was about, I would have to say everything, every thing in the world”).

Rushdie, Salmon. Midnight’s Children (Booker Prize winning novel narrating India’s transition from British rule, a landmark work in post-colonial literature.)

Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz (Surely among the best ten novels of the previous century, a gripping account of repressed memory and the quest for identity.}

Smith, Zadie. White Teeth (An insightful first novel by a contemporary author observant of a plethora of issues: race, immigrants, education, science, religion, and nationalism among still others. Listed in Time Magazine {2005} among 100 All Time 100 Novels.)

Stendhal. The Charter House of Parma (An aristocrat in Napoleon’s army depicts court intrigue with psychological portraitures ahead of its time.)

Yanagihara, Hanya. To Paradise (A powerful narrative of the intersection of privilege and exclusion in America across three generations by one of our foremost contemporary novelists. The Guardian calls it a “masterpiece for our time.”)

Non-Fiction

Gardner, Howard, et al. Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Based on more than 100 interviews across the workplace, a quest at evaluating what good work is and the ethical dilemmas posed by today’s technology.)

Gardner, Howard. Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons in Theory and Practice. Revised ed. (Gardner’s influential thesis that there exist multiple kinds of intelligence, not just one.)

Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brönte. (Classic Victorian biography of the writer of Jane Eyre. Fascinating in its delineation of Brönte family dynamics.)

Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project. Rev. ed. The controversial book that sets America’s beginnings in 1619, not 1776, and argues the American Revolution was a reactionary response to incipient British antagonism to slavery.)

Harris, Marvin. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture ( A leading anthropologist’s explanation of why people believe the things they do. Harris’ many books never cease to allure.)

Kolbert, Elisabeth. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (Pulitzer Prize winner for The Sixth Extinction, this new work explores whether we can still mitigate the damage we’ve done and save our planet. Recommended by Obama and Gates.)

Milosz, Czeslaw. The Captive Mind. (Nobel Prize winner examines the moral and intellectual conflicts posed by life under authoritarianism. Recommended by Elif Shafak.)

Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. (Just maybe the greatest essay writer ever, Montaigne teems with brilliance, helping us live better lives.)

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (A survey of climate change’s brutal impact, but not without hope, if we get on board.)

Wright, Robert. Why Buddhism is True. (An engaging approach to secular Buddhism and its alignment with disciplines like psychology and neurobiology. Buddhism at its best takes on our human predicament and provides strategies for finding peace.)

Wulf, Andrea. Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of Self. (A New Yorker selection as one of the best 2022 non-fiction books, Magnificent Rebels is an intellectual history of early Romanticism, centered in Jena, Germany, ultimately laying the foundation for English Romanticism. )

Yong, Ed. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us. (We humans, anthropocentric as we are, consider ourselves lords of the creation. Yong’s book dispels our pretentiousness as we learn of fellow creatures of myriad, and superior, capabilities. New York Times listed as one of the ten best books of 2022.)