The Goldilocks Planet

I recently read two science fiction novels, written some 50 years apart, with similar premises. One was underwhelming, the other was much better.

At the heart of these two novels was a paradox that's probably endemic to science fiction: the fact that our planet is balanced between precarious conditions that would make it unsuitable for human life. The size of our moon, the thickness of the ozone, the distance of our planet from the sun, the rate of its spin ... the list goes on. Scientists (like Michio Kaku) say our planet inhabits a Goldilocks zone. And yet, the imagination wants to go out into space and find "new worlds and strange civilizations" (to quote an old favorite, though I didn't quite get it right, I think). Given the odds, will we ever find another planet that humans can live on? Could some hypothetical future civilization fare any better?

Most "sci-fi opera" novels (and films) just ignore this problem. Luke Skywalker can breathe the air on any number of planets. So can Edgar Rice Burroughs' hero, John Carter. But the two novels I read recently are more in the "hard sf" camp, taking the "science" part a lot more seriously.

Both novels share the premise that a remarkably earth-like planet has been discovered. A team has been sent to take a closer look. Both planets prove to be too earth-like, too livable for coincidence. And so the major puzzle at the heart of each book is ... how? What's really going on here?

The first one I read was Ben Bova's New Earth, published in 2013. In this novel, humans cannot travel faster than light, and so the humans who arrive at the paradisaical New Earth cannot easily leave or get help from old fashioned earth. Their technology fails them, thanks to the inference of a native species, and they spend the novel trying to find out who these aliens are and why they're messing with the crew.

The second one I read was Mark Clifton's Eight Keys to Eden, published in 1960. Here, humans have mastered FTL travel, mostly because of a group of super-scientists who exist and operate above the law. A team of settlers is sent to "Ceti II," nicknamed "Eden," and find it very easy to thrive--almost too easy. Until, that is, their technology fails them and a super-scientist-in-training is sent in to help them. The hero here gets trapped with the other settlers and has to solve the puzzle with very limited clues, to finally arrive at a way to release himself from the planet--and other things, as well.

By far the more exciting and mind-bending was the older one, by Mark Clifton. Bova's novel was slow-paced and turned on a conflict of mistrust, with a minimum of tension about whether that mistrust was misplaced. Clifton's novel left the reader wondering (until the last minute) both about the alien species and the puzzle that was keeping the humans imprisoned on the planet.

In the end, neither novel solved the riddle, of course. They both concluded (or at least implied) that a planet safe for human life will be too good to be true. But one did this in the interests of encouraging humanity to trust and unity (Bova) and the other in the interests of imagining a higher destiny than space exploration--another level of evolution, so to speak.

Well, that's it. Thanks for reading. Weigh in below if you have any ideas ... I'd love to hear it.

The Origins of Mythology: "Comparison and Theory"

This is an old-school weblog series, tracking my progress through The Origins of the World's Mythologies, by Michael Witzel, a thick monograph published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

My initial impressions about this chapter were overly optimistic. I thought I was going to find here a survey of the author's method, with some discussion of the theory of comparison. And that's how it started.

But about halfway through, I realized that instead I was being given a close-up tour of the method as it applies to the results that I will become more fully acquainted with in the next chapter.

Quick Summary

The question that drives this chapter is this: "Why do we find the same myths all over the world, even in cultures that don't have any recent connection to each other?" And the solution Witzel provides forms the heart of his method: Humans took these stories with them through all their migrations around the globe.

Two General Impressions

One, a memory: I was once given a tour of a chapel by an overly enthusiastic organist. About fifteen minutes into it, I realized it was not going to end anytime soon. My guide knew the date and cost of every piece of equipment, from floor to roof tiles; the names of all the key donors; the unique history of every piece of artwork commissioned (at x sum) for placement in the space. For a historian of that particular chapel, it would have been fascinating.

Witzel's second chapter is a bit like that. I like where his method is taking us, I like the overall design, and some of the decorative fine points are pretty appealing. But the exhaustive explication is a tad wearying. Even so, I have mixed feelings about this chapter. What Witzel is proposing is truly mind-boggling. The dispersion of key mythological bits and pieces, filled out with material recovered from this or that corner of the globe, is going to take us back more than 40 thousand years, to a mythological complex that was practically born with human language. Or at least that's what he's hoping to prove.

Understandably, the author may be concerned that his project won't be given a fair hearing, and so he layers on methodological justifications, giving weight and clear explanation to the choices he made. Also, Witzel clearly hopes others will carry forward this research, so he's laying the groundwork for future researchers. Cutting a path.

But the tradeoff (here's my second thought) is that Witzel's account loses all dramatic appeal in the process. He has to give huge chunks of his results away to make sure we understand his method, and that robs the book of any revelatory quality. It's like a strip tease with no tease. That might be an asset in scholarly studies, but it makes the reading quite a bit duller.

Setting Up the Problem

So let me try to restate some key points I've gotten from the chapter so far, in more dramatic fashion than Witzel has done. I'll try not to distort it too much. Here goes.

When you compare the earliest recorded mythologies from remote parts of the world, such as Mesoamerica (Mayans, Inca), Polynesia, India, and Greece, certain stories emerge into a kind of three-dimensional clarity. What explanation could exist for the remarkable similarities between myths told in such far-flung places? There are really only four possibilities:

1. these stories were spread from major cultural centers to outlying areas by trade routes ("diffusion")
2. these stories emerge in each culture because human beings are hardwired, neurologically or linguistically or in some more psychically mysterious way, to tell them ("archetype")
3. these stories emerge in each culture because of environmental factors (say, rainstorms and agriculture), and such things are accidentally explained the same way ("convergence")
4. these stories have been inherited from a common source and passed down through countless generations as humans migrated to these far-flung places ("common origin")

The first explanation, "diffusion," doesn't work for myths that lie close to the center of a remote culture, because traders and visitors and immigrants don't easily insert their stories into the center of a foreign culture. This is especially true since the myths have religious dimensions and uses. We all know how open traditional religions are to innovations from passing foreigners and trade-partners. Or anybody else. Enough said.

The second explanation, "archetype," works well in theory as an explanation for the similarities, but it has two strikes against it. One, it sort of looks like mumbo-jumbo (my word, not Witzel's). It takes a bit of hand-waving to get universal archetypes embedded into the human soul as an explanation for anything. Possible, but unprovable. (Jung made the effort; some people still accept that; most scholars of this material don't.) Two, it doesn't work well for explaining the differences between the mythologies of these peoples. In other words, if it's embedded into the human psyche, why over here and not over there? (The myths aren't everywhere, they're just incredibly widespread.)

There's another thing, too, that makes the human-hardwiring explanation hard to fit to the evidence. The mythical bits and pieces we're talking about are interconnected. They follow a storyline or plot that transcends and links together the individual mythical units. What archetypal patterning could account for that? (Could a storyline really be embedded into human brain matter?)

This last wrinkle causes trouble for the third explanation, too ("convergence"). If human cultures are making these stories up spontaneously, thanks to similar environmental conditions, why are they also slotting them into the same plotline?

This question cuts deep for the "convergence" model: Witzel can point to clear examples of convergence. And guess what? Despite outward similarities, convergent myths don't serve the same functions within the two myth systems. Not so the stories we're looking at here.

So that leaves the last option: a common origin. Is that possible? To be clear: the migrations that separated humans who wound up telling tales in the Mayan tongue from the humans who scratched out the Rig Veda and the Theogony of Hesiod go back twenty thousand years or more. That's a long time to pass down a tale.

There are some supporting clues, though. For instance, in both Hawai'i and central Australia, a great flood myth is told. But neither area is subject to flooding--the one, thanks to mountains, the other, arid conditions. (If this was "diffusion," the only possible alternative here, the Australian aborigines would likely have told the outsiders, "What's a flood?" But if they had inherited the tale before they came to Australia, they're much more likely to hold onto it. See remark above about religious conservativism.)

Even with this kind of support, though, common origins is an extraordinary claim, so it requires several checks. How to proceed? How to get past guesswork to something more like proof?

Witzel's "Genetic" Solution

The answer lies in science, actually. Genetics, linguistics, taxonomy. Treat mythical units ("mythemes") like genes. How does an organism come to possess a trait? Through inheritance and mutation. Your possession of a certain trait (say, vertebrae) suggests common descent with many kinds of creatures who share that trait (vertebrae), whereas your five-digit hands and feet suggest a much smaller pool of shared DNA.

Or look at linguistics (Witzel's primary field). Shared vocabulary, overlapping declension patterns, shared but unique grammatical rules, point to kinship--again, common descent from an earlier language that wasn't exactly either descendent language but, over time, gave birth to both.

If a similar comparison between traits, genes, vocabulary, grammar, can be undertaken for mythologies, it should be possible to trace out "path dependencies" for myths--mythological elements or traits that have been passed down to more than one mythological system. Close comparative work could allow the researcher to trace these "genes" back to the parent, and so to reconstruct some of that parent's genetic blueprint. The parent (the mythological sequence or plotline) that gave birth to these far-flung descendants will not be identical to any of them. And some of the parent's traits may be difficult to define with certainty. But something of its shape, its contours, should emerge.

In the process of building up the family tree for these mythologies, layers of divergence and resemblance should appear at higher and lower levels on the genealogical chart--like your backbone and your five-digit hands and feet. So, for instance, traits shared across Eurasia but not found in Mesoamerica would suggest a branching of the mythological "family tree" at the point where humans crossed the land bridge into America. As humans migrated, they took some stories but not others--perhaps because those stories hadn't been told yet. After the migration, the ones who migrated invent new stories again, which will be spread to different parts of America but won't be found among the population that didn't cross to America.

Once such stories get injected into the DNA of a particular region or language family, some few survive and go on to shape the regional, and then local, mythologies. All the way down to your own tribe's interpretation. The result is obvious, and a lot like genetics: over time, you have tremendous variety, built on an underlying substrate of common inheritance.

Two Key Terms

Here are two key terms worth defining, as they're central for Witzel's work:

"path dependency" - defined as "the set of foundational topics in each civilization that have exercised extraordinary influence on all its subsequent stages" (p. 39, emphasis original). Witzel uses this concept to explain why particular myths and "doctrines" persist over countless generations of humans. (The idea of an eternity spent in "heaven" or "hell," for instance, he traces back at least 3,000 years to Zoroaster.)

"cladistic analysis" - the effort to establish a "family tree" of mythological tales, "just as botanists, zoologists, paleontologists, geneticists, linguists, and philologists habitually construct from their data" (p. 3)

Last Thoughts

That's the project as I understand it. I'll let you know next time if I need to correct anything in my explanation.

But meanwhile I hope you can see why this is exciting stuff. Witzel is promising to take us back to a Cro Magnon mythological system, and his method for doing it has at least a decent chance of getting the picture into reasonable focus.

Quietly Writing

"Solitude" (Flickr: vonderauvisuals)

In this loud culture of "all talk, all the time," where even taciturn writers like myself are asked to "create a web presence," network like high-powered corporate types, and "market yourself relentlessly," I'm learning to pull back and enjoy a nice long steep in solitude.

This summer, I spent a lot of time reading, joined a critique group, bought a one-person fishing kayak, edited like mad, and sometimes wrote new material. It was nice to give myself permission to enjoy what we in our house call "alone time." That's where we all go when we get overstimulated, stressed, and in need of a recharge. Maybe you have your own version of alone time. Maybe you golf or go for a jog. My version often involves reading or writing quietly in a chair.

It occurs to me that one cannot read or write loudly, or in a vivacious and extroverted manner. A writer, alone in a room, with the implements of his trade--laptop or paper--before him, all distractions tuned out. The door closed. This, as we all know who write, is how you get things written. There is, as the old proverb has it, a time for everything under the sun. A time to speak boldly in front of others, a time to be gregarious and delight new acquaintances. Even a time to promote oneself. But of course the quiet labor of writing belongs to a different time from all of that, and can only happen where that separate time is set aside and the outside world is shut out.

Or, actually, not the outside world per se. The world of nature, the colors and sights and sounds, all enter into the thing. And even the world of human society, from which I will have retreated for the sake of doing the actual writing, nonetheless leaves its echo on my mind. In fact, I think of this tendency to become overstimulated as a gift, because it makes human society vivid in my memory. The brilliant impression of being around others helps me see human interaction clearly when I'm alone in my study, like a well exposed photograph. And that in turn helps me be true to it when I'm writing in solitude. It's a gift, because, again, I can't write except in solitude. And it usually happens that there are going to be people in whatever I'm writing--people I'd like to get down on paper, now that I've taken their measure out there in the real world.

When I'm out in the world, if I've had time to recharge quietly--like I did this summer--I'm more alive to what I'm seeing. I take all this human flux into me, and all the texture of nature, or city streets, or the thick air of a summer afternoon. When I can get it like that, I can distill it within, until I'm full and it's time to retreat again.

I wonder what it must be like to ride on the surface of all that sensory input? I'm so deep in its throes that I get overwhelmed. But again, that's a gift, because from where I am down in the pounding pulse of that cacophony of noise and color, I might get lucky and see what drives it.

Of such good summers are rich autumns made. I expect to be more fully alive to the people and things around me, and so all the richer in my interior life. And that can only go to improve the quality of what I write, or think, when I'm in that solitary place. Quietly writing.

Jack London, old and new

Source: The Bancroft Library

Jack London was the writer who ignited my lust for books. Weirdly, I don't remember how old I was. It might have been 10, could have been 12. I had laughed over Dr. Seuss, of course, and I'd read a lot of stuff lying around our rambling old house. But it wasn't until The Call of the Wild fell into my hands that I experienced the impelling desire for books.

I remember that experience common to a lot of us: searching through the stacks at the library for "another [insert favorite author]." I found and devoured White Fang. But that was all our library had of Jack London. I moved on to other dog stories, thinking (hoping) that it was "dog stories" I wanted. It would have been too unbearable to imagine that I wanted only something that did not exist: more Jack London books.

In retrospect, it was an unexpected spark, that book. A more unlikely steel to my flint would be hard to imagine. I was a dreamy-eyed kid, anything but hardened by my travails, such as they were. I'd been raised to believe in a different ethic, not the one Jack London preached in all the pages of that book. I was taught to love my enemies; London's hero and mine, the reborn dog Buck, taught me valor, strength, cunning. Survival of the fittest. Later someone would label this for me: it's the heroic code in modern dress, the code of Beowulf and his ilk, and before him of Achilles and Hector, stalking glory on the battlefield. Here you boast, not in weakness, but in strength. Humility, on this field, is taken for weakness. And prowess is valued, not buried in shame.

There is no accounting for loves. What I devoured when I read those books was not social Darwinism, but the cold austerity of courage, stripped down, made vital. And the language--London's words are often deeply moving, merciless in their confrontation of that wildness he courts. Poetic, inspired, impassioned.

Maybe it was just that--his passion. Maybe I took that up in my veins through the ink that was, as it were, his blood on the page.

I couldn't say. I only know this: I revisited The Call of the Wild last month. And still, though I shrink back from that brutality, and though I sense better now the cost of embracing his vision of what and who we animals are, I felt the call of the wild in its pages, even so. It moved me, drew something from me, as Homer still does, and Beowulf.

And there's more, I think. In my exhausting efforts to lay low, bury my prowess at this or that, not vaunt myself--I start to hear that call drifting down from the timberland. Some day, I will meet that call. Not to become a brute, but to reconcile my desire and my skill with the things I've been taught, the civilizing influences I've taken in.

You can read The Call of the Wild at Project Gutenberg, or on an e-reader near you.
Here's a nice, brief biography, by Dr. Clarice Stasz.
Here's a nice summing up of its potency and value, by Robert McCrum.
Here's how you treat this book when you're afraid of the wild: "Common Sense" Media

The Origins of Mythology: "Introduction"

This is an old-school weblog series, tracking my progress through The Origins of the World's Mythologies, by Michael Witzel, a thick monograph published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

Photo credit: Oxford University Press

In the intro, Witzel, a Harvard Sanskrit professor, lays out the terrain for his study, which intrigued me the moment I read this: review of it. I have formal education in religious studies and mythology, and I like writing what some folks call "mythic fiction" (which isn't actually limited to mythology). So I was intrigued enough to buy a copy, partly because I immediately recognized that the premise for this book is unusual, even unique. Let me explain.

Witzel claims that the far-flung mythologies of the world can be traced, scientifically (on the model of linguistics), back to an original mythological complex or "storyline." He promises to use various methods to recover this storyline in the upcoming chapters. But here (in the intro) he's setting out what's unique about his approach, and why it just might work. This is common fare for academic books (for good reason), but I won't rehash all the arguments. A brief catalog of the 36-page intro:

• some older theories about why myths from different eras and geographical locations share so many similarities
• weaknesses in said older theories
• a survey of various attempts to interpret myths
• how all of the above differ from the approach of Witzel in what is forthcoming in the book

The take-aways are more interesting than the bits just referred to. Here are a couple.

Witzel's definition of myth (a bit complex, but worth tackling):

a 'true' narrative that tells of cosmology and society as well as of the human condition and that is frequently employed to explain and justify social circumstances (p. 35)

 Or, more eloquently:

myth tries to make a significant statement about human life itself: 'where do we come from, why are we here, where do we go?' Just like Gauguin's enigmatic painting, myth artistically combines many motifs into a meaningful whole, modifying the older (even the reconstructed original) layout according to individual local conditions… Myth still binds humans to their natural habitat and social background; it provides people with reasons for the cyclical seasons of nature, for festivals, rituals, and social strata; myth also tells of a deep underlying meaning of human life itself, satisfying basic spiritual needs (p. 34)

This description nicely brings together some important observations about myth. One, that it "combines many motifs." In fact, its vitality and "meaning" are related to its combinatorial quality, the complex interactions of elements in the myths (see Claude Levi-Strauss). Another, that myth is tied to ritual and festival. That makes it public, social, cultural. And finally, Witzel helpfully keeps in view the religious dimension of myth, or its "spiritual" dimension if you prefer, which is important but surprisingly rare (among scholars of this material).

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to give a glimpse of his main methodological point, which is the purpose of his introduction. Witzel's unique contribution here is going to be to take whole complexes of actual mythologies (say in Japan, India, Greece, etc.) and compare them, searching for "path dependencies" or "descent lines" still in evidence across those cultures. Older approaches (some of them groan-worthy if popular) just compare individual stories. So Witzel's work is massive, cross-disciplinary, and so far pretty compelling. I'll let you know when I get through chapter 2, which promises to be a fairly quick run through theories of comparison.

I linked to Frederick Smith's review of the book above, but here it is again (PDF).
And I found a good shorter review of it here: "Comparing Mythologies on a Global Scale: A Review Article By N.J. Allen" (PDF)

Reading Undine

"Ondine," photo by Eva the Weaver

 Of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful

- George MacDonald

I'm not ready to go as far as MacDonald, but I will say that reading Undine, the classic fairy story by Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué (how's that for a French-German hybrid name?), was very pleasurable for me. Here's why.

When I read a new fairy tale, or one I've forgotten, it's like eating a nectarine. You know what it's like. You sit at the table, and in just a moment the soft peel is off that perfectly round fruit. Then it falls apart into slices, tailor made for human mouths. Twelve, thirteen little bites, and it's done--delightful, tangy, juicy, sweet. A perfect snack.

But never a meal.

Now imagine you could have a tangerine and you could eat it for a good half hour, like you would a full dinner. Sound nice?

<< Well, no, you might say. Halfway through the meal, my tongue would get so cloyed from the sweet, juicy, intense thing that I'd lose my appetite.

But suppose I could make it last that long without cloying your palette?

<< Then it would be so watered down that it wouldn't have any flavor, you might object. Or any nutrition at all!

Ah, and there's the beauty of Undine. Somehow, reading this story was like reading a fairy tale that lasts and lasts. Its sweetness is strong enough to engage the palette, but not so strong that it cloys. Its substance is light enough to draw you into the magic of faerie, but not so light that it feels empty or watery.

Somehow--I don't know quite how--Undine draws you into a longer adventure, all framed in the old fairy tale storytelling tradition, with light touches of description and only glimmers of the inner life of the players. Just like a real fairy tale. And yet it doesn't lose your interest in the places where it takes you or the people who live there.

A meal of tangerine. A meal where the tangerine is somehow transformed into something much larger, more substantial even, without losing its essence.

So maybe I can see why MacDonald called it the most beautiful fairy story. Still seems like strong praise. But surprisingly good? I can agree with that.

Note: You can find Undine free at Project Gutenberg, or on an e-reader near you.

Twice-Read Authors

I recently listed some “twice-read books” as a way to share my interests as a reader. But some of my favorite authors were left off, because though I’ve read more than one book of theirs, I haven’t necessarily read any of their books twice.

But if reading a book says something about you, I think reading more than one book by an author might, too. After all, these are folks I came back to because they offered me something—however lowbrow or highbrow that was. They represent only a small percentage of all the authors I’ve read. Life is full, and there are many books. If I’ve dipped back into the well of an author, that probably means something.

Not counting trilogies and series as more than one book, or authors that after reading a second one I knew it was mistake, here are the ones I remember, in roughly the order in which I read them (or came back to them):

Jack London

C. S. Lewis

Mark Twain

H. G. Wells

J.R.R. Tolkien

Stephen Lawhead

George MacDonald

Patricia McKillip

Ray Bradbury

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Pushkin

Tolstoy

Shakespeare (not just for school!)

Franz Kafka

Ernest Hemingway

Isaac Asimov

Orson Scott Card

Ursula K. Le Guin

Jane Austin

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Dean Koontz

Daphne Du Maurier

Henry James

George Eliot

Stephen King

Jane Yolen

W. P. Kinsella

Paulo Cuelho

Neil Gaiman

I think that list shows a few things about me: I tend to gravitate toward (and enjoy!) classical authors. If I’m adventurous (and sometimes I am), it’s only for a short fling—so they don’t make the list. Paperback writers are almost unknown to me (this is quite true). For me reading is an event, a cultural experience. That might make me limited in some ways, particularly in knowing what may appeal to the masses. But we are what we are. I like an intensely well crafted story, careful language, depth of meaning—except when I don’t.

Who’s on your list?

Meeting Brer Rabbit

When I was a boy, my father, who was always too busy, would sometimes refer to (but not tell) stories of Brer Rabbit. I suppose, in retrospect, he didn't remember the actual stories, just the gist. Or maybe he feared he wouldn't get the dialect right.

Even so, it awoke in me a thirst to meet this compelling creature, and find out about his mischievous deeds. I did, too, many years later--perhaps as many as thirty years, to be exact.

It happened like this: I had a gift card for a bookstore. A friend, apologizing needlessly for the "lack of thought," had sent me something I would actually use and that felt like a luxury. I used most of it to buy a hardcover edition of The Hobbit, to replace the old paperback that I had foolishly tossed out in a move. (Well, donated to the library ...)

Then, a couple of weeks later, or perhaps a month, I was back at the bookstore with my youngest son, then four years old. He liked to play with the train set they keep in the kids' section of the store. So I went back with him and started browsing the kids' books. You maybe haven't looked in a while; I hadn't. There were depressing quantities of "series" and relatively few stand-alone books. Shelves and shelves and shelves of these series, all with look-alike spines. And then in one corner, half a shelf or so, some "fairy tales."

This is my shelf, but you get the idea. Can you spot Uncle Remus?

I snooped through them. Most were reproductions of classic tales. But tucked among them, small, in a yellow cover, with a reddish-orange spine, there it was:

JULIUS LESTER The Tales of Uncle Remus PUFFIN. 

I took it off the shelf. You know the feeling: a little tingle goes up your arm. The book has a bit of magic in it. It's been waiting for you. I get that sometimes at the library. Only this time, it could be mine.

The front cover:

PUFFIN MODERN CLASSICS

THE TALES

OF UNCLE REMUS

The Adventures of Brer Rabbit

AS TOLD BY JULIUS LESTER

ILLUSTRATED BY JERRY PINKNEY

I flipped to the introduction. The LAST thing I wanted was a bowdlerization of a set of tales I'd heard of (but never heard) my whole life. But then again, it was Puffin … A charming introduction by Augusta Baker, dated 1985, calmed my fears. I read part of a story (to the tune of my son's choo-choo). And that was that. I took it to the register and handed it to the clerk.

"Someone's getting a treat," she said, looking at my son.

"Well, we both are," I said, with a shy smile.

I took out my gift card, depleted the last penny of my balance, added a couple of bucks, and it was mine.

Postscript: I read these tales to my boys, with much pleasure, over the course of the next couple of months. I followed it up with a free iBook collection of original Joel Chandler Harris tellings. I like those old ones, yes; but Lester's renderings have a soft spot with me.

Twice-Read Books

"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads."

- François Mauriac (courtesy of Kara Monterey, @kmonterey)

Intrigued by this quote, I’ve pulled together a list. This is the order in which they occurred to me. I’ve not been one to read many things more than once, so the list is short. When you’ve looked through it, and been duly shocked and amazed by my tastes, I’d love to see what would be on your list.

The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters

The Bible

Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, The Gambler, Notes from Underground

The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit

Strunk and White

The Brothers Grimm

Stephen Lawhead’s Song of Albion Trilogy (The Paradise War, The Silver Hand, The Endless Knot), Dream Thief

Patricia McKillip's Riddle of Stars Trilogy

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Phantastes, by George MacDonald

The Odyssey

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre

My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett

Alice in Wonderland

The Wizard of Oz

Beowulf

Selected Poems of Ezra Pound

Any number of picture books, but especially Dr. Seuss

I don't know that this reveals my "heart," but it says something about the kinds of stories I like. There's a bit of my history in there too, and no doubt some of my personality comes through.

Thoughts?

This Year - A Few Highlights

Here are some highlights of year 2012. (I'll keep it brief.)

I published my first story, “The Unicorn Hunt” and had a second (“Stonepit”) accepted into an anthology (I’ll keep you posted when it comes out).

I sent out about 10 stories, some more than once. That includes the two above (and two mentioned below).

I did a fair amount of writing. By my count, I wrote (at least in first-draft form) nine short stories. I rewrote (yet again) my first and still most maddening fantasy novel, Foldwin the Shepherd. I wrote and lightly revised a very short novella, with the working title A Dryad Dream. And I finished and edited (first round) a new novel, tentatively entitled Unfoldings. Whew. And I had thought it was an off year.

I went on at least three awesome hikes with my wife and boys here in North Carolina. I also took them fishing, and my youngest caught his first ever fish.

I broke down and bought an iPad. I also broke down and got a Twitter handle (@pylefantasy). Those things aren't related, I swear it.

I discovered a fascination with Middle Grade fiction. The Tale of Despereaux was an ally in this.

I took a sudden and powerful interest in my family tree. I’ve made astounding progress tracing it back, in some cases into the sixteenth century. All this from scratch as of April.

As an outworking of that, in October I made a meaningful trip to Tennessee, to the gravesite of my ancestor Conrad Pile. Saw the valley where he settled down, among the first to till the land there.

I don’t mean to make it sound like there weren’t any bumps along the way. But I like to lift out the good days, don’t you? What highlights, celebrations, joys, for you this year past?

Readers Wanted: Mortimer Adler on Talking Back to Books

On the order of “books I should have read a long time ago,” I’ve just completed the classic How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler, published in 1940 by Simon and Schuster. (My 1967 paperback originally cost $1.75; but that’s another topic.)

In case you haven’t been introduced: this is a practical how-to guide to reading well. Its subtitle, “The art of getting a liberal education,” will give some sense of its scope. It mostly deals with reading non-fiction, “expository” books, and its focus is on “great books.”

The book is full of rules. All sorts of rules. These rules have to do with accomplishing deep reading of well-written books. And one set, in particular, has to do with how to talk back to a book. That’s where I want to focus in this post.

Adler’s first claim is that you have to really understand a book before you can critique it. (He earlier teaches you how to make sure you understand it.) He asks readers to be honest, not arguing for the sake of arguing or self-aggrandizement. For fiction, he advises that we abstain from critique until we “fully appreciate what the author has tried to make [us] experience.”

Ah, if only.

Behind this recommendation is Adler’s concept that what imaginative literature does, more than anything, is communicate an experience that is ultimately beyond words. Great works of fiction do this by drawing the reader into the imaginative world that the writer creates--or perhaps creating it within the imagination of the reader. Within this world is an “experience” that the author has had, and this is conveyed to the reader through the episodes and characters of the novel. He writes, "[The author] has used words to get into our hearts and fancies and move them to an experience that reflects his own as one dream might resemble another."

For Adler, you haven’t read a novel (or play, or poem) until you’ve made “an honest effort” to have this experience that the author tried to produce for you. And this in turn requires an “active” reading approach, not a passive one where you simply let your eye pass over the page.

Naturally, Adler doesn’t recommend that every book be given this kind of reading. Frankly, some novels don’t demand that much work—and that’s all right; they aren't meant to. But he does suggest—and with good reason—that if you’re going to critique a book, you’ve done this part: your part.

Seems only fair to me. I’ll try to hear what this book really has to say before I talk back to it.

Like this? Come see my new blog, Fairy Spell.

Arabian Nights - First Impressions

I own this very fine-looking, old edition of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Trouble is, it’s almost unreadable. It has gems like, “The sultan having revolved these matters in his mind, took leave of the unhappy king, when he found he was a little composed, without acquainting him with his intention, lest a disappointment should aggravate his affliction.”

The book was, in its day, “A New Edition” and “Illustrated.” Pity it wasn’t translated into English. It was published in 1887, and given as a gift in 1890 to somebody in Fanneytown, M.D. (I’m guessing: the dedication is almost unreadable.) I think we found it in a bookstore.

Not surprisingly, I’ve had trouble in the past reading it. But this time, for some peculiar reason, I’ve managed to get far enough in that I’m enjoying—yes, enjoying—the stories.

To be clear: I sometimes get lost, not only because of sentences like the one above, which being not uncommon cause one to lose threads of storylines which already, having been placed within one another like those Russian dolls within dolls, can on occasion lead the reader to forget the story within which he reads.

Let me try that again. I sometimes get lost, and not only because of this English translation. The stories in the Arabian Nights are, as everybody who’s read them knows, put inside other stories. You get to the point where the genii is about to decapitate somebody, and then the would-be victim talks the genii into listening to a story first. Meanwhile, this other story might be about another genii who’s tempted to turn somebody into a monkey. And so on. After a while, the stories all round out and then—it’s like the bends—you’re back on the surface, unsure how or why you got there.

This would probably be easier if I was reading it more often. Maybe. This must be some Arabian storytelling art. It’s not one we use that often nowadays. I’m out of practice. I never was in practice.

So, given all that, why am I enjoying it? (Parts of it, at least.)

Two things come to mind. There’s the sort of academic reason, that I find it fascinating that these stories, so like fairy tales, were circulating so long ago. According to this reputable-looking site by Rob Hafernik and Margaret Renault, “The core of original stories came out of Persia and India in the early eighth century.” That’s a long time indeed: twelve centuries. The enduring quality of fairy tales continues to amaze me.

The other is these tales are often about encounters with some kind of mysterious power, a magical or supernatural being or force. That’s what I’m accustomed to in fairy tales too: somebody going through a forest encounters a strange and wonderful thing. It might be that fairy tales as a rule have this element, not just as a sideline but as the main attraction. Why do we love them? Maybe because we’d like to meet geniis ourselves. Or talking fairies. Or giants you can outwit. I don’t think that’s the whole explanation, but I think it might be a part of it.

Whatever the reason, I foresee myself picking my way through many of these tales in the days ahead. As Hafernik and Renault put it, “The Nights have a distinctive style that seems to overcome even the poorest translation.” Too true.

Peter Pan & The Outsider

Two most recent reads for me: Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, and Albert Camus’ The Outsider. Let me explain.

There are books that I always meant to read and somehow never remembered to. One of those was Peter Pan. I think I thought, I’ve seen the movie. Heck, I’d seen two of them, if you count Hook. If you’ve ever thought that, then listen up: It’s not the same at all. It’s like school pizza vs. NYC pizzeria pizza. Okay, not that bad, but you get the idea.

Camus is, similarly, one of those authors I’d always heard of but never had the pleasure. The Outsider is a slender 120 pages, tops, and reads pretty fast. I figured, What do I have to lose? (My sanity?)

These two books share something else, besides being on a “should read” list: both deal with the expectations society puts on young men when they grow up. The novels do it very differently. In many ways, Peter Pan is much more imaginative. There’s a playfulness toward reality that couldn’t be more different from The Outsider. In Camus’ novel, everything is described in a matter-of-fact tone. The narrator feels almost nothing; he’s detached. In Peter Pan, the story is told in richer detail and imagery, and everybody’s emotions seem to be on the surface.

Except Wendy’s mother. She has this little corner of her smile that no one can get (except, much later, Peter).

But back to the point: While the very modernist, almost absurdly detached Outsider (Meursault is his name) seems not to be imaginative, the novel deals with the problem of social expectations, and how they burden (or maybe destroy) us. Peter Pan, in a very different way, gives us an equally cold picture of growing up as a normal boy. At least Wendy retains some of her childish memories, unlike the “lost boys,” who are more lost (it seems) when they come to England and grow up.

The books solve the problem very differently. Where Peter Pan might be advocating an enduring child-like wonder, an openness to imagination and newness, The Outsider seems to be advocating a full embrace of sober reality. Open your eyes and taste the tang of the salt air. For Camus, in this novel, emotion mostly serves the falsifying and blinding functions of social expectations. Meursault has his eyes open: he knows the sentence of death is upon him. Peter Pan chooses not to grow up. Wendy can’t help feeling some nostalgia for such an idea. Her aging is sweetened by a backward glance.

So what’s the answer, eh? Do you resist the expectations of other people—your parents, your boss, your “reader”—by facing the hard-edged realities of life and death? Or do you do it by nurturing a little childlike wonder, keeping your imaginary life alive?

For me, the two visions are connected to two modes of writing I enjoy. I wouldn’t want to pick between them. I want my fantasy and I want my realism. I don’t know if you can have them both at once. But I refuse to read (or write) only in one.

What about you?