Well, dear readers, it finally happened. I’ve been remarkably healthy the past 4 years, more than anyone could hope to be. But last Tuesday I came down with a tedious cold (or something) that threatens to linger through this week. Making the best of it… I have hot tea, food in the pantry, and just enough energy for making progress on Read What I Own and my Goodreads challenge.
Table of contents, since this is a long post:
The Library of Babel
I read my first Jorge Luis Borges the other day, a short story called “The Library of Babel.” I was vaguely reminded of Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” On the surface, there is an explanation of a mystical structure, but it’s clear the story is trying to say more than just speculative science fiction. The ideas behind “The Library” felt more esoteric than “The Great Wall,” and I found myself frustrated by it. But I poked around online a bit and became very interested in the mathematical implications of the Library, which contains all permutations of a particular set of characters and punctuation. It was like wandering back into a computer science lecture. Finding the digital visualization made me want to dig deeper. My next step (at some point) is to get a copy of The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel (2008), which goes into this in detail.
Plato on Aesthetics
Yesterday I finally picked up The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics which was recommended to me by a friend. (My brother kindly acquired a copy of it from his university library; nobody has been wanting it for several months, so I’ve had a lot of time to procrastinate.) The book contains various essays on aesthetics—as in, the branch of philosophy, not Cottagecore or Dark Academia. 😉 The reason this came up is because we were reading A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for Ireland, and the protagonist’s musings on aesthetics were going over my head. We had also covered Aristotle in my priest’s theology class, so the timing further piqued my interest. The Routledge Companion is a huge book that spans many time periods and thinkers, so at my friend’s suggestion, I’m just going to read the first three chapters – Plato, Aristotle, and Medieval Aesthetics.
My notes from Chapter 1 “Plato” are as follows:
- Art should be edifying above all else. Plato did not approve of gods being portrayed as problematic and was quite prepared to censor Homer (!).
- Poets as practitioners of mimesis do not achieve or represent genuine knowledge, because what they create is a mere representation or imitation of the real world.
- Poetry corrupts and should be banned in the ideal city (see Plato’s Republic).
- “[the Form of] beauty (kalon) is love’s highest object” and is eternal, unchanging, and divine, only accessible by the intellect.
- Capital-b Beauty is associated with truth, wisdom, and virtue.
- The poet may be divinely inspired, but Plato ranks poets lower than the philosopher-lover (eros).
- Apparently Plato believed in reincarnation (I didn’t know this).
From this chapter—a short yet lucid summary, just the kind of writing I like—I gained a better grasp on the link between Platonism and Christianity. One route this takes is Augustine’s references to Plotinus, a Neoplatonist, in Confessions (which, er, I’m still reading…). I’m sure other writers have written about this at length.
Personally, I don’t like to draw such a strong connection between art and the Divine that we must only evaluate art by whether it is edifying or not—or at least not in the idealistic way Plato seems to suggest. I grew up reading a lot of moralistic tales and used to review books in this way, always trying to sus out a message or lessons to learn, then giving a lot of weight to that in my rating. I see a fair number of fellow believers reviewing novels in that way now… and, I get it. I just think there is more to literature than looking for Beauty. You can find insights and wisdom from a variety of stories and story structures. Other cultures challenge you to see the world from another’s eyes and build Christlike empathy. And different books just speak to people in different ways, since the reading experience is extremely personal. There are also books that might technically check off the boxes for Beauty but are a chore to read, having failed to engage effectively with emotions or build great characters. All that to say… applying value to books based on a singular, objective definition of Beauty is, in my opinion, not a great heuristic.
Anyways, I’ll be the first to say I still find this topic a bit mind-bendy and there’s almost a language barrier I feel when reading about it. So I will keep learning and post updates as my understanding (or outlook) changes.
The Quiet American
Finishing this book left me with so much snark. Luckily I am too sick to film a full video, so I had to content myself with a YouTube Short.
As with East of Eden, I’m well aware many people love this novel. And in a similar way, this novel disappointed me immensely. I am just glad it was not 600 pages.
The Quiet American is narrated by a British journalist named Fowler who is living in Vietnam (then part of French Indochina) during the demise of French rule and the communist uprising. If all that sounds incredibly exciting, contain your enthusiasm—most of the book is about Fowler moping around in vaguely Vietnamese settings. He can’t get a divorce from his wife back home and is afraid he’s going to lose his young local mistress to an American upstart. Alden Pyle is fresh from Boston, full of political science theory and excited to be the purveyor of the “Third Force,” an American alternative to the French colonists and the Việt Minh. Intrigued? Too bad. You’ll get a glimpses of Pyle’s activities, but for the most part you’re stuck in Fowler’s head, and he can’t stop thinking about his mid-life crisis.
If you combined and remixed the good parts of The Quiet American, it would make for a very good and prescient short story about American folly in East Asia (and elsewhere) and the civilian cost of war. When Fowler isn’t navel-gazing, he sometimes says some pithy things.
“They don’t want communism.” [said Pyle]
“They want rice,” I said, “they don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.”
My Vietnamese dad does not talk about his childhood often, so my understanding is an ongoing effort, being built slowly and in recent years. Even from the little I’ve gathered, I feel Greene manages to at least hint at the complexity of the situation. Trying to put the French, the communists, and the Americans into rigid “good guys vs bad guys” boxes is a mistake. Ordinary Vietnamese people did not have good options (does that sound familiar?) and were stuck between a rock and a hard place. They also absorbed a lot of the French culture that is prevalent in Greene’s novel. When Fowler’s mistress Phuong treasures her pictures of British Royalty, it’s not a political statement—it’s a kind of fairy tale for her.
Again, this would have made a great short story, but as a novella, I found it to be pretty pathetic. Greene left his family in 1947 for an affair which ended in 1951, and this book was published in 1955. Like East of Eden, the author’s relationship issues seem to be the driver for all the action, and his bitterness is as pernicious as the anger expressed by Steinbeck through the character of Cathy. Thus, the more interesting parts of the book—the political commentary, the setting, and the mystery-thriller—seem to hang about the book like ill-fitting clothes. The descriptions of Vietnam are sparse, and we never get to know any of the Vietnamese characters on a personal level like Fowler and Pyle. Phuong is an exoticized female body with vaguely mercenary motives, unsettlingly young (18 when she meets the middle-aged Fowler) and submissive. The Quiet American exemplifies misogyny and racism to a degree that overshadows its forward-thinking critique. I’m no intersectional feminist, but I found myself (perhaps for the first time) understanding what they critique, because this novel has it in spades.
Classics Considered 
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