My trip to the interview turned out to fail for a thoroughly stupid reason in an equally thoroughly unexpected way. The surprising thing is how many things could go wrong and didn't. I carefully figured out where the café is located, decided to walk there (which is a fairly heroic measure, but I didn't have much else to do and didn't want to use up two transit tickets) along a route that was familiar, left myself an hour and a half and decided to use public transit if I was running late, briskly completed the walk (though after the Brandenburger Tor I let myself stroll along at a relaxed pace) and found the café in at most 1 hour 10 minutes. This was ca. 20 minutes early so I sat outside and tried to read more of Humboldt's Ansichten der Natur, specifically a lecture on the characteristics of vegetation based on the latitudinal zone which described in the usual nice manner the formation of lichens on bare rock and the luxuriant growth of the tropical zones (he emphasizes that, though to Europeans of his day hot climates may be associated with the desert, the desert did not always exist in its present extent and in any case the equatorial jungles prove the impression wrong). But it was hard to concentrate.
At nine or ten minutes to 12:30 I entered the café and mentioned to one of the girls at the counter that I had come for the interview. The café owner (who, funnily enough, is (almost) in her 30s and wears her hair in a pixie cut just as I had guessed from her voice over the telephone) was still talking to someone, so the girl said I could sit in the corner nearby and then they would tell me when it's my turn. It was awkward because I was within close earshot of the other interviews, but I turned away and tried very hard not to listen but to read. It didn't entirely work, and I overheard for instance that several people were late, through which I had the impression that the whole interview schedule was dragging anyway. So there were three interviews, and since someone was sitting between us and the café was fairly noisy I was only aware of snatches of the last and was therefore unaware when it ended. At length, however, I did become aware, and asked the lady (who was sitting there a little forlornly) if someone else would still be having an interview before me.
At that moment the person who would be having the next interview arrived. The interviewer inquired how long I had been waiting, and I said "half an hour" (which was a mild understatement, even ignoring the time spent outside), and when she asked I explained about being told to wait, etc., careful not to blame anybody (which I genuinely didn't; the café really was busy and so on and so forth). Then came the shock when she, though expressing commiseration, cancelled my interview so that the schedule wouldn't be wrecked; she asked me to send an "Anschreiben" instead, but it sounded as if the ship had sailed anyway.
So I went outside, where it began to rain just like in a film, very much wanting to burst into an ear-shattering wail like a baby. Instead I took deep breaths to avoid such a drastic reaction and (walking along to the bus station at the Tor) felt sad. The only thought that cheered me up occasionally — besides the standard ones: it can be helpful to channel the disappointment into something else, another valuable (ha!) experience has been gathered, and in the grand scheme of things this may have been a fortunate mishap — was the horrid irony that the one time I plan things perfectly, come truly early, and altogether act in what seems to be the most exemplary manner, I encounter grievous injustice!
The thing with the "Anschreiben" is that the interviewer already has my c.v. as well as an informal cover letter in which I state what my intended career direction is and why I would like the job. Besides, aside from the problem of culinary inexperience, I would have to get the health pass at the last moment (which, as I once read — though perhaps it would be best to doublecheck that —, should be procured in the district of Berlin where the workplace is located), so my chances appear tiny. Thirdly the interviewer seemed harried and mentioned, if I understood the context correctly, that she had tonnes of applications. And frankly I'm grumpy about the whole affair. So I'd like to move on.
Fortunately Gi. and Ge. and J. have been full of sympathy. Gi. even asked if I wanted anything special from the grocery store, like ice cream or chocolate, and returned with a small feast of both before going off to babysit. It also makes me feel better to remember being called overqualified after the last interview and the way it still reassures me that I'm not useless, and to be conscious that for once I did pretty much everything right.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
An Interview, Romance, Gourds, a Model, and Ravel
Tomorrow I will be going to an interview for a job at a café in Mitte, and I was very excited during the morning, only to lose some of the optimism as the day progressed and my cautious and wet-blankety side asserted itself. Before going to sleep I'll probably put everything in order for tomorrow, then shower and breakfast after waking up again; I'm still undecided whether to go to the interview per bicycle (J.'s, to be precise) or U-Bahn.
***
To be honest I'm becoming bored with the ways I like to waste time. For instance, 19th-century popular novels already grew stale half a year ago, which is unsurprising considering that I was immersed in them for about five years. Admittedly I still read them occasionally. Yesterday I started Susan Warner's Diana, expecting as usual to become (enjoyably) incandescent with indignant rage at her brand of happily obsolete New England Christianity and her preachy, arrogant, and dictatorial heroes. On the other hand I've already encountered a very amusing passage. After a meeting where the heroine, her mother, and a group of fellow parishioners meet the new vicar, the heroine's mother claims that the vicar is too "masterful." The heroine implicitly pish-poshes the charge. It seems Miss Warner temporarily forgot the fact that she literally named the man Mr. Masters.
As for Gawker and the sister site for women, Jezebel, I'm not as absorbed in either of the blogs as I used to be, perhaps in the case of the former because the prospect of moving to New York is more distant than ever and so I don't have an immediate motivation to stay as up-to-date and become as informed as possible.
***
Besides that I've been reading tonnes of harlequin novels since around June, but it turns out that I'm too much of a skeptic, can't find much in them after at the very most four readings (this coming from an inveterate re-reader), and become easily irritated at the deception, cowardice, and emotional coercion which all too often characterize the behaviour of the main characters, especially if the author never makes them realize the error of and change their ways.
Some of the books, while well-meant, are too embarrassing to read with full enjoyment, especially when they are written by British or American authors and depict foreign characters like sheiks and businessmen of the Italian, Spanish, or Greek persuasion. For the sheik books I have to metaphorically pinch my nose to get past the titles and premises, studiously ignore the obligatory mention of the word "harem" and the obligatory explanation that harems no longer exist, and then sigh patiently through a parade of stereotypes like camping in the desert, camels, veils, Arabian horses, souks and bargaining, peculiar "traditional" marriages, and the inevitable civilizing western influence exerted by the heroine. But the Italian, Spanish and Greek businessmen are often quite funny, as the author dutifully sprinkles their conversation with "Accidenti!", "Dio!", "gatita," "ochi," and "ne" as the situation requires to convey their nationality (for their Gallic counterparts "Zut!" generally suffices); and of course they are required to be as vaguely hypermasculine as possible.
But it's also hard for me to take the Italo-Graeco-Spanish books seriously since, given my limited circle of acquaintance, the first names that pop up when I think of "French man" or "Italian man" are "Sarkozy" and "Berlusconi" respectively, and of Napoleon complexes and bad government policy and (especially in the latter case) contempt for the law. After this point thoughts of romance are impossible. For "Greek man" I admittedly just think of a random burly person with a curly brown beard and hair, in his forties, who could be a Plataean soldier from the 5th century B.C., Macedonian shepherd, medieval fisherman or taxi driver. Which is admittedly also a stereotype, and not romantic either.
There are also the historical novels. Georgette Heyer is I think the most widely respected authoress in the Regency genre, but I find her books peculiarly cold and unsatisfying in their frivolity (I've had the same problem when reading P.G. Wodehouse) and a little too derivative of Jane Austen. Frankly there are lots of Regency novels that owe their debt to "A Lady" too obviously; I become disproportionately disgruntled when the only streets in Bath are Laura-Place, Camden-Place, and Milsom Street: not subtle hommage, just lazy research. But then there are writers who take the trouble to independently research the 18th century, presumably also in university; so I learn a bit of social history during the read, besides which a new perspective on the era is valuable (even though I grouchily believe that it's far too easy to be a feminist protagonist and a Friend of the Servants with the benefit of centuries of hindsight).
What's more amusing is (are?) the medieval and Scottish novels. Having read Chaucer, etc., I am perfectly well aware that the dialogue in the novels is totally inauthentic, even if the gentlemen in the kilts say "Aye" now and then and employ terribly cheesy metaphors. What was also fun to read was the medieval romance whose author was almost entirely concerned with touting the virtue of cleanliness in general and baths in particular. Said author is almost certainly a North American woman who considers "Thou shalt shower daily" as one of the Ten Commandments. But I can sympathize a little, because two years or so ago I started a story set in 15th-century France about a woman who wanders through the countryside in solitude, and my escapist mellow was thoroughly harshed when I realized how stinky she would presumably have been.
Lastly, very few romance novels are in the least convincing if one asks one's self whether the relationship as depicted in the novel could prove a solid foundation for 50, 30, or even 15 years of marriage. So I may suspend disbelief, and succeed to a certain degree — besides which I like picking out the stray germs of truth, psychoanalyzing the books in an amateur way, and dissecting the author's craftmanship and thought processes; besides it's depressing if I don't indulge any romantic illusions — but the fact remains that the sensational course of reading has run its course.
***
So I've grudgingly turned to the television, and while yesterday I ended up contentedly watching a children's animé film entitled Neko no ongaeshi in Japanese, Königreich der Katzen in German and The Cat Returns in English, today was devoted to High Culture. There was an excellent documentary, shown on the French-German culture channel Arte, about a cooperative in a village in Paraguay's southeast, where women earn a supplementary income by turning loofah gourds into sponges and — in an eco-friendly experiment — into wall panels and insulation. These cucumber-like fruits are harvested, hanging dark and green from the tanned, wilted vines, then soaked in water, and then peeled and emptied of their seeds, so that the porous flesh remains; then they are hung up to dry, tinted (at least I think it happens at this point) with natural dyes, lain on the sandy grass to dry again, and sent off to be sold. The film also had an interesting interlude in the slums of Asunción, from which a father and his son set out in a horse-drawn cart, rolling along on incongruous metal-hubbed, rubber tyres, along the muddy roads to the asphalted streets where the rich and middle classes live, and the man collects garbage for reuse. (A literal illustration of the saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure," though "treasure" is too strong a word.)
After that there was a concert with Georges Prêtre conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. First there was a symphony by Beethoven (or "Luigi," as Mama likes to flippantly refer to the Grand Teuton), which seemed generic and unimpressive, especially since Prêtre's light approach uncomfortably highlighted how slight its comparative musical merit really is. But Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2, was a fine showcase of his and the Philharmonic's skill. It might be mood music presumably intended to plunge its listeners into an abjectly stupid narcotized state, but it was played with disembodied grace, sensitivity, and an unexpected seriousness and complexity. Thanks to The Rest is Noise I was better able to pick up on the compositional structure and musical influences. But I didn't recognize any part of it from the concert we attended last November.
Then there were Debussy's Nocturnes, which did come across as effect-mongering sadly familiar from the soundtracks of Disney movies, but again it was excellently rendered. The "Sirens" was a bit of an oddity. In a laudable inspiration the camera direction was arranged so that we were treated to views of the gilded caryatids along the sides of the concert hall. These sculptures have, however, rather stolid faces and incipient double chins, and are not altogether what I'd picture under the word "siren." A woman's choir was assisting the orchestra by intermittently breaking into what was intended to be an eerie ethereal howl. But, though perhaps intentionally, their notes mostly sounded a trifle flat, and when at one point two especially resonant voices rang out together one of them was as flat as ever and the other was ostentatiously swelling at the right note just above that to show how it should be. The camera also narrowed into one singer's face who was presumably deemed especially picturesque, with blue eyes and golden hair; she appeared peeved by the attention. Altogether I think that the New Year's Concerts have ruined me for Viennese music, because now the mental images of kitschy dancing, wide-angle shots of palaces, camera lenses lingering on stray lemons in an orangerie, and choreography of all kinds, persist on intruding, so I become distracted and nitpickish and I only make silly surface observations about the music.
Then there was an interview with the model Iman, carried out painfully by a (starstruck?) CNN interviewer who was apparently incapable of responding naturally to her subject and instead asked questions and, at receiving the answers, acted out sympathy, shock, and amusement in a gruesomely unnatural and clumsy way. Iman was, by contrast, intelligent, a fluent conversationalist and possessed of a lovely speaking voice, and what she said was thoroughly interesting. A misguided article at the outset of her modelling career in New York claimed that she had been "discovered" by Peter Beard in a jungle, herding goats or something of the sort, and it was generally believed that she could speak little or no English. In fact her family had been well-to-do before they fled Somalia; she was a political science student at the University of Nairobi and knew five languages. Beard came across her in the city, and she agreed to be photographed for the sake of paying her tuition. I also liked that she emphasized in the interview that contrary to popular belief, refugees are often not parasites who like to exploit foreign governments, and that nobody in his right mind would voluntarily leave his home country in order to throw himself on the tender mercies of strangers in an unfamiliar nation.
Anyway, aside from that I practiced the piano a little — Scott Joplin, the fifth and sixth Spanish Dances of Enrique Granados, Bach's Concerto in d minor (just the keyboard part, obviously), and the first movement of a Mozart concerto in C major (ditto). Then Papa and I went through our duet repertory, even including movements from Beethoven's very difficult cello sonatas. And I started but lost a game of Age of Empires (II) on the computer. But now I intend to check my e-mail, prepare things for the next morning, and go to sleep.
[N.B.: Apologies for the length of this post. /c:]
***
To be honest I'm becoming bored with the ways I like to waste time. For instance, 19th-century popular novels already grew stale half a year ago, which is unsurprising considering that I was immersed in them for about five years. Admittedly I still read them occasionally. Yesterday I started Susan Warner's Diana, expecting as usual to become (enjoyably) incandescent with indignant rage at her brand of happily obsolete New England Christianity and her preachy, arrogant, and dictatorial heroes. On the other hand I've already encountered a very amusing passage. After a meeting where the heroine, her mother, and a group of fellow parishioners meet the new vicar, the heroine's mother claims that the vicar is too "masterful." The heroine implicitly pish-poshes the charge. It seems Miss Warner temporarily forgot the fact that she literally named the man Mr. Masters.
As for Gawker and the sister site for women, Jezebel, I'm not as absorbed in either of the blogs as I used to be, perhaps in the case of the former because the prospect of moving to New York is more distant than ever and so I don't have an immediate motivation to stay as up-to-date and become as informed as possible.
***
Besides that I've been reading tonnes of harlequin novels since around June, but it turns out that I'm too much of a skeptic, can't find much in them after at the very most four readings (this coming from an inveterate re-reader), and become easily irritated at the deception, cowardice, and emotional coercion which all too often characterize the behaviour of the main characters, especially if the author never makes them realize the error of and change their ways.
Some of the books, while well-meant, are too embarrassing to read with full enjoyment, especially when they are written by British or American authors and depict foreign characters like sheiks and businessmen of the Italian, Spanish, or Greek persuasion. For the sheik books I have to metaphorically pinch my nose to get past the titles and premises, studiously ignore the obligatory mention of the word "harem" and the obligatory explanation that harems no longer exist, and then sigh patiently through a parade of stereotypes like camping in the desert, camels, veils, Arabian horses, souks and bargaining, peculiar "traditional" marriages, and the inevitable civilizing western influence exerted by the heroine. But the Italian, Spanish and Greek businessmen are often quite funny, as the author dutifully sprinkles their conversation with "Accidenti!", "Dio!", "gatita," "ochi," and "ne" as the situation requires to convey their nationality (for their Gallic counterparts "Zut!" generally suffices); and of course they are required to be as vaguely hypermasculine as possible.
But it's also hard for me to take the Italo-Graeco-Spanish books seriously since, given my limited circle of acquaintance, the first names that pop up when I think of "French man" or "Italian man" are "Sarkozy" and "Berlusconi" respectively, and of Napoleon complexes and bad government policy and (especially in the latter case) contempt for the law. After this point thoughts of romance are impossible. For "Greek man" I admittedly just think of a random burly person with a curly brown beard and hair, in his forties, who could be a Plataean soldier from the 5th century B.C., Macedonian shepherd, medieval fisherman or taxi driver. Which is admittedly also a stereotype, and not romantic either.
There are also the historical novels. Georgette Heyer is I think the most widely respected authoress in the Regency genre, but I find her books peculiarly cold and unsatisfying in their frivolity (I've had the same problem when reading P.G. Wodehouse) and a little too derivative of Jane Austen. Frankly there are lots of Regency novels that owe their debt to "A Lady" too obviously; I become disproportionately disgruntled when the only streets in Bath are Laura-Place, Camden-Place, and Milsom Street: not subtle hommage, just lazy research. But then there are writers who take the trouble to independently research the 18th century, presumably also in university; so I learn a bit of social history during the read, besides which a new perspective on the era is valuable (even though I grouchily believe that it's far too easy to be a feminist protagonist and a Friend of the Servants with the benefit of centuries of hindsight).
What's more amusing is (are?) the medieval and Scottish novels. Having read Chaucer, etc., I am perfectly well aware that the dialogue in the novels is totally inauthentic, even if the gentlemen in the kilts say "Aye" now and then and employ terribly cheesy metaphors. What was also fun to read was the medieval romance whose author was almost entirely concerned with touting the virtue of cleanliness in general and baths in particular. Said author is almost certainly a North American woman who considers "Thou shalt shower daily" as one of the Ten Commandments. But I can sympathize a little, because two years or so ago I started a story set in 15th-century France about a woman who wanders through the countryside in solitude, and my escapist mellow was thoroughly harshed when I realized how stinky she would presumably have been.
Lastly, very few romance novels are in the least convincing if one asks one's self whether the relationship as depicted in the novel could prove a solid foundation for 50, 30, or even 15 years of marriage. So I may suspend disbelief, and succeed to a certain degree — besides which I like picking out the stray germs of truth, psychoanalyzing the books in an amateur way, and dissecting the author's craftmanship and thought processes; besides it's depressing if I don't indulge any romantic illusions — but the fact remains that the sensational course of reading has run its course.
***
So I've grudgingly turned to the television, and while yesterday I ended up contentedly watching a children's animé film entitled Neko no ongaeshi in Japanese, Königreich der Katzen in German and The Cat Returns in English, today was devoted to High Culture. There was an excellent documentary, shown on the French-German culture channel Arte, about a cooperative in a village in Paraguay's southeast, where women earn a supplementary income by turning loofah gourds into sponges and — in an eco-friendly experiment — into wall panels and insulation. These cucumber-like fruits are harvested, hanging dark and green from the tanned, wilted vines, then soaked in water, and then peeled and emptied of their seeds, so that the porous flesh remains; then they are hung up to dry, tinted (at least I think it happens at this point) with natural dyes, lain on the sandy grass to dry again, and sent off to be sold. The film also had an interesting interlude in the slums of Asunción, from which a father and his son set out in a horse-drawn cart, rolling along on incongruous metal-hubbed, rubber tyres, along the muddy roads to the asphalted streets where the rich and middle classes live, and the man collects garbage for reuse. (A literal illustration of the saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure," though "treasure" is too strong a word.)
After that there was a concert with Georges Prêtre conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. First there was a symphony by Beethoven (or "Luigi," as Mama likes to flippantly refer to the Grand Teuton), which seemed generic and unimpressive, especially since Prêtre's light approach uncomfortably highlighted how slight its comparative musical merit really is. But Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2, was a fine showcase of his and the Philharmonic's skill. It might be mood music presumably intended to plunge its listeners into an abjectly stupid narcotized state, but it was played with disembodied grace, sensitivity, and an unexpected seriousness and complexity. Thanks to The Rest is Noise I was better able to pick up on the compositional structure and musical influences. But I didn't recognize any part of it from the concert we attended last November.
Then there were Debussy's Nocturnes, which did come across as effect-mongering sadly familiar from the soundtracks of Disney movies, but again it was excellently rendered. The "Sirens" was a bit of an oddity. In a laudable inspiration the camera direction was arranged so that we were treated to views of the gilded caryatids along the sides of the concert hall. These sculptures have, however, rather stolid faces and incipient double chins, and are not altogether what I'd picture under the word "siren." A woman's choir was assisting the orchestra by intermittently breaking into what was intended to be an eerie ethereal howl. But, though perhaps intentionally, their notes mostly sounded a trifle flat, and when at one point two especially resonant voices rang out together one of them was as flat as ever and the other was ostentatiously swelling at the right note just above that to show how it should be. The camera also narrowed into one singer's face who was presumably deemed especially picturesque, with blue eyes and golden hair; she appeared peeved by the attention. Altogether I think that the New Year's Concerts have ruined me for Viennese music, because now the mental images of kitschy dancing, wide-angle shots of palaces, camera lenses lingering on stray lemons in an orangerie, and choreography of all kinds, persist on intruding, so I become distracted and nitpickish and I only make silly surface observations about the music.
Then there was an interview with the model Iman, carried out painfully by a (starstruck?) CNN interviewer who was apparently incapable of responding naturally to her subject and instead asked questions and, at receiving the answers, acted out sympathy, shock, and amusement in a gruesomely unnatural and clumsy way. Iman was, by contrast, intelligent, a fluent conversationalist and possessed of a lovely speaking voice, and what she said was thoroughly interesting. A misguided article at the outset of her modelling career in New York claimed that she had been "discovered" by Peter Beard in a jungle, herding goats or something of the sort, and it was generally believed that she could speak little or no English. In fact her family had been well-to-do before they fled Somalia; she was a political science student at the University of Nairobi and knew five languages. Beard came across her in the city, and she agreed to be photographed for the sake of paying her tuition. I also liked that she emphasized in the interview that contrary to popular belief, refugees are often not parasites who like to exploit foreign governments, and that nobody in his right mind would voluntarily leave his home country in order to throw himself on the tender mercies of strangers in an unfamiliar nation.
Anyway, aside from that I practiced the piano a little — Scott Joplin, the fifth and sixth Spanish Dances of Enrique Granados, Bach's Concerto in d minor (just the keyboard part, obviously), and the first movement of a Mozart concerto in C major (ditto). Then Papa and I went through our duet repertory, even including movements from Beethoven's very difficult cello sonatas. And I started but lost a game of Age of Empires (II) on the computer. But now I intend to check my e-mail, prepare things for the next morning, and go to sleep.
[N.B.: Apologies for the length of this post. /c:]
Monday, November 09, 2009
Sense and Sensibility, Part I
This was written when I should have been sleeping, which should explain any logical or other peculiarities. If corrections are necessary I'll probably make them, silently, later.
One of the stumbling-blocks in my research about Brittany and the French Revolution is that I have deemed it necessary to read the relevant works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but after repeatedly starting the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (catchy title, by the way) it's evident that I won't finish it anytime soon. It's a bit embarrassing because Rousseau's sentences are hardly labyrinthine or lapidary and their meaning is not so knotty, but still. So yesterday I decided to approach the matter differently and read the chapter on Rousseau in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. While Russell is not the most even-handed commentator, his skill at capturing the gist of things is undeniable and, due to the succinct, lucid, and entertaining manner in which he does so, I knew that I would probably understand and remember the key points of Rousseau's works and life best by reading him.
***
As it turns out, Russell's take on Rousseau is entertaining even by his standards, and I was both interested and laughing while reading it. First and foremost Russell emphatically states that the Swiss philosophe was by no means one of the great philosophers, and that his ideas must be examined rather for the sake of their influence in politics and culture than for their soundness and worth. (Which is pretty much what Papa unenthusiastically said when I asked him about Rousseau a week or two ago.) So the British philosopher despatches the subject by providing a scathing overview of Rousseau's life, character, Discours, and Confessions, clearly giving his irritation free rein, and by only providing a serious summary of The Social Contract.
A major contribution of Rousseau, particularly in the light of the Romantic movement, is his preoccupation with sensibility in the 18th-century sense and his very idealized views of man in relation to nature ("noble savage," etc.). Already in the previous chapter on Romanticism Russell gives the cult of sensibility short shrift, and points out its inherent egotism and hypocrisy. He drily defines "la sensibilité" as
***
Nowadays I think most of us know this concept of sensibility through Jane Austen. And since Marianne Dashwood is selfish, rude, and blind to the harm she does to herself and others during her pursuit of the fashionable ideas of natural and refined feeling, it is evident that Austen saw the same general flaws in the trend. But there are many other critics even among her contemporary colleagues. Despite her reputation as the author of Gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe is one of them; in Mysteries of Udolpho Emily St. Aubert's gentle but preachy father warns her about the dangers of thoughtlessly indulging in feeling, however fine, and altogether her heroines are fairly quiet and restrained. I admittedly don't have much use for the cult of sensibility either, because it is (or was) so often artificial, unfairly demanding of the people who were forced to put up with the outpourings and histrionics of its devotees, and unhealthy. In my view noble feeling is much lovelier when it is unselfconscious and unadorned, and it enriches life especially when it is mostly kept sacrosanct and private. But perhaps that's a miserly way of proceeding.
***
But, to return to Rousseau, while summarizing the Discours Russell quotes a very funny passage (which I've given below in the original French) out of a letter which Voltaire sent to Rousseau after reading the work:
(In the History it is translated as, "I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it." In the quotation above the last sentence goes on a while longer to say, approximately, "and I leave that natural [bearing?] to those who are worthier of it than you or I.")
One of the stumbling-blocks in my research about Brittany and the French Revolution is that I have deemed it necessary to read the relevant works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but after repeatedly starting the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (catchy title, by the way) it's evident that I won't finish it anytime soon. It's a bit embarrassing because Rousseau's sentences are hardly labyrinthine or lapidary and their meaning is not so knotty, but still. So yesterday I decided to approach the matter differently and read the chapter on Rousseau in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. While Russell is not the most even-handed commentator, his skill at capturing the gist of things is undeniable and, due to the succinct, lucid, and entertaining manner in which he does so, I knew that I would probably understand and remember the key points of Rousseau's works and life best by reading him.
***
As it turns out, Russell's take on Rousseau is entertaining even by his standards, and I was both interested and laughing while reading it. First and foremost Russell emphatically states that the Swiss philosophe was by no means one of the great philosophers, and that his ideas must be examined rather for the sake of their influence in politics and culture than for their soundness and worth. (Which is pretty much what Papa unenthusiastically said when I asked him about Rousseau a week or two ago.) So the British philosopher despatches the subject by providing a scathing overview of Rousseau's life, character, Discours, and Confessions, clearly giving his irritation free rein, and by only providing a serious summary of The Social Contract.
A major contribution of Rousseau, particularly in the light of the Romantic movement, is his preoccupation with sensibility in the 18th-century sense and his very idealized views of man in relation to nature ("noble savage," etc.). Already in the previous chapter on Romanticism Russell gives the cult of sensibility short shrift, and points out its inherent egotism and hypocrisy. He drily defines "la sensibilité" as
a proneness to emotion, and more particularly to the emotion of sympathy. To be thoroughly satisfactory, the emotion must be direct and violent and quite uninformed by thought. The man of sensibility would be moved to tears by the sight of a single destitute peasant family, but would be cold to well-thought-out schemes for ameliorating the lot of peasants as a class.His incredibly concise elucidations of Rousseau's life tend to illustrate the point. Whilst professing a great capacity to fine feeling, Rousseau in fact displayed only the loosest conception of morality, and was quite ready to lie, steal, take mistresses, betray friends, and behave however he wished without thought for the wellbeing of others. Besides Rousseau did not invent the cult of sensibility.
***
Nowadays I think most of us know this concept of sensibility through Jane Austen. And since Marianne Dashwood is selfish, rude, and blind to the harm she does to herself and others during her pursuit of the fashionable ideas of natural and refined feeling, it is evident that Austen saw the same general flaws in the trend. But there are many other critics even among her contemporary colleagues. Despite her reputation as the author of Gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe is one of them; in Mysteries of Udolpho Emily St. Aubert's gentle but preachy father warns her about the dangers of thoughtlessly indulging in feeling, however fine, and altogether her heroines are fairly quiet and restrained. I admittedly don't have much use for the cult of sensibility either, because it is (or was) so often artificial, unfairly demanding of the people who were forced to put up with the outpourings and histrionics of its devotees, and unhealthy. In my view noble feeling is much lovelier when it is unselfconscious and unadorned, and it enriches life especially when it is mostly kept sacrosanct and private. But perhaps that's a miserly way of proceeding.
***
But, to return to Rousseau, while summarizing the Discours Russell quotes a very funny passage (which I've given below in the original French) out of a letter which Voltaire sent to Rousseau after reading the work:
J'ai reçu, monsieur, votre nouveau livre contre le genre humain, je vous en remercie. [...] On n'a jamais employé tant d'esprit à vouloir nous rendre bêtes ; il prend envie de marcher à quatre pattes quand on lit votre ouvrage. Cependant, comme il y a plus de soixante ans que j'en ai perdu l'habitude, je sens malheureusement qu'il m'est impossible de la reprendre et je laisse cette allure naturelle à ceux qui en sont plus dignes que vous et moi.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Sense and Sensibility, Part II
Russell skims over the novels Émile and La Nouvelle Héloise. (At one point I was interested in reading them, but abandoned the former and never started the latter after concluding that they were too tiresome.) He does remark on the furore which Émile unleashed and go into unimpressed detail about the "Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar" ("Although it professes to be what the voice of nature has proclaimed to a virtuous priest [. . .] the reader finds with surprise that the voice of nature, when it begins to speak, is uttering a hotch-pot of arguments derived from Aristotle, St Augustine, Descartes, and so on. ").
But in connection with the "Confession" he credits Rousseau with originating the practice of "proving" God's existence not through intellectual but emotional arguments, which is really a significant contribution. What infuriates me about such "proof" is that it is subjective, so it is unjustifiable to persuade others who of course have different experiences and feelings and needs into accepting one's own theology. Besides, because it is unverifiable I think one should honestly acknowledge one's religion as a hypothesis instead of as the universal truth. But this criticism only really applies to proselytizing. As long as religion keeps us happy and more self-aware and nicer to be around than might otherwise be the case, as long as we freely recognize that it is just a hypothesis, and as long as we keep our grubby little paws away from the souls of our fellow humans, grounding it in emotion is fine by me.
Then I was a little horrified but greatly amused by Russell's tangent — in his rebuttal of the idea that the heart is infallibly a benevolent and worthy guide of human conduct— about the reasoning that the unhappiness of earthly existence is a guarantee of future bliss. In a scarcely respectful analogy he argues indignantly, "If you had bought ten dozen eggs from a man, and the first dozen were all rotten, you would not infer that the remaining nine dozen must be of surpassing excellence; yet that is the kind of reasoning that 'the heart' encourages as a consolation for our sufferings here below."
As for the Social Contract, the summary reminds me pleasantly of PoliSci 100 (we didn't read Rousseau specifically, but the questions and concepts and historical parallels are familiar), but the kind of liberty it espouses is clearly not much to my taste and it sounds tedious. Unfortunately it is hugely relevant to the Revolution.
So I might read portions of the Discours after all because what I've seen of Robespierre's speeches is so directly influenced by it (though Robespierre seems more disingenuous and coldly clever), but I'm mostly convinced that I dodged a tedious bullet by not doing so yet. Either way the Social Contract should come first.
***
I should probably say something about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I can't remember it (due, no doubt, to the fact that we had moved from Berlin to West Germany proper by then) and have no valuable insight to contribute on the subject. What I will say is that the consciousness of the previous existence of the Wall thoroughly fascinated me whenever we visited Berlin after we moved away in 1989. For one thing, I may remember little about living here as a baby and probably imbue what I do remember with greater meaning than is just; but when we glimpsed the Brandenburg Gate while driving past in 1996, I think that I felt a spontaneous, genuine, and profound sense of awe for its forlorn but liberated exposedness and for the fact that one can freely pass through it. Apparently the Wall had loomed vaguely in my consciousness even at the age of three or four without my realizing it until much later when it felt strange that it was gone.
But in connection with the "Confession" he credits Rousseau with originating the practice of "proving" God's existence not through intellectual but emotional arguments, which is really a significant contribution. What infuriates me about such "proof" is that it is subjective, so it is unjustifiable to persuade others who of course have different experiences and feelings and needs into accepting one's own theology. Besides, because it is unverifiable I think one should honestly acknowledge one's religion as a hypothesis instead of as the universal truth. But this criticism only really applies to proselytizing. As long as religion keeps us happy and more self-aware and nicer to be around than might otherwise be the case, as long as we freely recognize that it is just a hypothesis, and as long as we keep our grubby little paws away from the souls of our fellow humans, grounding it in emotion is fine by me.
Then I was a little horrified but greatly amused by Russell's tangent — in his rebuttal of the idea that the heart is infallibly a benevolent and worthy guide of human conduct— about the reasoning that the unhappiness of earthly existence is a guarantee of future bliss. In a scarcely respectful analogy he argues indignantly, "If you had bought ten dozen eggs from a man, and the first dozen were all rotten, you would not infer that the remaining nine dozen must be of surpassing excellence; yet that is the kind of reasoning that 'the heart' encourages as a consolation for our sufferings here below."
As for the Social Contract, the summary reminds me pleasantly of PoliSci 100 (we didn't read Rousseau specifically, but the questions and concepts and historical parallels are familiar), but the kind of liberty it espouses is clearly not much to my taste and it sounds tedious. Unfortunately it is hugely relevant to the Revolution.
So I might read portions of the Discours after all because what I've seen of Robespierre's speeches is so directly influenced by it (though Robespierre seems more disingenuous and coldly clever), but I'm mostly convinced that I dodged a tedious bullet by not doing so yet. Either way the Social Contract should come first.
***
I should probably say something about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I can't remember it (due, no doubt, to the fact that we had moved from Berlin to West Germany proper by then) and have no valuable insight to contribute on the subject. What I will say is that the consciousness of the previous existence of the Wall thoroughly fascinated me whenever we visited Berlin after we moved away in 1989. For one thing, I may remember little about living here as a baby and probably imbue what I do remember with greater meaning than is just; but when we glimpsed the Brandenburg Gate while driving past in 1996, I think that I felt a spontaneous, genuine, and profound sense of awe for its forlorn but liberated exposedness and for the fact that one can freely pass through it. Apparently the Wall had loomed vaguely in my consciousness even at the age of three or four without my realizing it until much later when it felt strange that it was gone.
Thoughts on Twentieth-Century Noise
Accustomed as I am to reading books on the internet, it requires a great deal of effort to read a printed book. My aunt L. queried once whether this practice is not degrading to the intellect, or something to that effect. But honestly I like reading on the internet because whatever the material is feels more alive and immediate that way, and I can scroll over the verbal dead weight or passages I don't much like, and read faster in general because there's no need to turn pages (depending on the document format, of course). The problem with books or articles is, at least in my experience, that they can be dull and meaningless if they are not illumined by one's experience, or explained a little by a friend or relative or someone else who is qualified by their experience, different perspective, or superior intelligence to speak of it. But somehow this problem is not as acute on the internet, perhaps also because I can look up secondary literature, relevant online encyclopaedia articles and pictures, etc., really easily.
In any case, the printed book I am presently slogging through (though I have dozens of started books lying around the bed) is Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, a birthday present from my godfather. I intend to write about it on the Lighthouse blog at some point, but in the meantime I want to ramble about it, not ex cathedra (as it were), but just informally. I'm only on the eighty-somethingth page in the nearly telephone-width volume (the print is large) anyway.
First I'll begin by saying that by and large I find 20th century art unsympathetic, with its pessimistic view of reality, restrictive minimalism, and incarnation of the very inhumanity which it is often intended to protest or counteract. There are all sorts of exceptions to this rule, and if someone explains the appeal of 20th century art to me in intellectual terms I can kind of understand it (if only on the intellectual level, because conscious tolerance is as a rule neither very profound nor lasting). But it still isn't my thing.
One aspect of The Rest is Noise which I like very much is that Ross brings out the humanity of this epoch, the composers, and the music, even when these composers and music have rather cold and hyperintellectual tendencies. Rather than striding into the material with arrogance and prejudice, arraigning one set of composers whilst praising the other, stating absolutely that this artistic movement is superior to that, or characterizing the human subjects with more boldness than accuracy, he practices good old-fashioned American neutrality, attentively following the arguments and recognizing the merits of all sides, and refusing even after coming to a fair and sensible assessment to pronounce an inviolable judgment on the entire affair. Which is refreshing because the European approach does tend to be very dogmatic; and entertaining as this dogmatism can be especially in its aphoristic phases, after the first glow of admiration has passed it is irritating to find one's self left with only a healthy sense of skepticism and a highly biased knowledge of the truth.
In any case, Ross begins by immersing the reader in the Viennese school, as well as the composers who drifted in and out of the Austrian capital. Salome is one of the first works discussed, and even though I don't know the music well, I was quite interested because I've read the libretto repeatedly as Oscar Wilde's play. Whether I'd want to listen to it or read the play again is another question. On the one hand literature and music and so on are only harmful if one lacks common sense; on the other hand common sense only goes so deep, and I like to be a bit selective about the thoughts and images and information that enter and will presumably muck around in my subconscious for the rest of my life. Besides which there's no need — it's even insensitive and stupid — to probe into the realm of misery and darkness when these feelings are rife enough anyway.
Biographies of figures like Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg are woven unaffectedly into the narrative, and numerous anecdotes illustrate clearly enough the childish games (jealousy, covetousness, backbiting, etc.) in which the so-called adults of Vienna's music world liked to engage. Ross doesn't go, or hasn't gone as far as I've read, into salacious detail about their carnal relationships, which is a relief because I have never been convinced that biographers and other writers who thrive on such detail are really highmindedly providing psychological insights rather than just gossip-mongering, prying, and perhaps compensating for their own comparatively unadventurous existence by roaming vicariously. Either way, it's impressive how much research clearly went into the book, and though the trivia interspersed in the text often feel like footnotes, it's also impressive how well Ross has synthesized and filtered the research.
A year or so ago I read Schöpfer der Neuen Musik by H. H. Stuckenschmidt, which covers roughly the same ground. Though Stuckenschmidt was in top form when he was writing about Debussy and Ravel (he integrated the information about their background, education, interests, personality, and compositional philosophy so well into his descriptions of their music that a good reader could probably recognize their compositions even without seeing or hearing a single note of them previously), by the time that Berg and Milhaud came along the chapters had dwindled to dry and rather pitiful music-theoretical synopses of the composers' works. (I'm probably exaggerating, but still, only a very enthusiastic reader would enjoy the book's home stretch.) Besides which, despite my admiration for Stuckenschmidt's brilliant mind and his devotion to 20th-century music, I had major issues with the book's structure and the author's pompous use of language — for instance idiotic compound adjectives in the vein of künstlerisch-schöpferish and natürlich-ästhetisch — and have therefore recused myself from indicting any serious review of the book. It would be unfair to say outright that one book is better than the other; certainly Ross's is friendlier.
Perhaps my biggest quibble with Ross's book is that the style would be better suited to a series of articles — the sentence structure streamlined and simplified as a newspaper or magazine article would demand it, and the concepts and information pared down to cater to the apparently drosophilic attention spans and preadolescent understandings of the readers. I wish that it were more condensed and enigmatic, as is in my view more appropriate given the scope of a book. On the other hand, one of the charms of Alex Ross's style is precisely that it is unpretending, genuine, and perfectly expressed in its efficient way. (And I like his articles in the New Yorker precisely because they are free from pretention and cattiness.) And non-fiction books are, it seems, rarely condensed and enigmatic anyway.
***
Here is a link to Alex Ross's old blog:
The Rest is Noise
and his new blog, at the New Yorker:
Unquiet Thoughts
In any case, the printed book I am presently slogging through (though I have dozens of started books lying around the bed) is Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, a birthday present from my godfather. I intend to write about it on the Lighthouse blog at some point, but in the meantime I want to ramble about it, not ex cathedra (as it were), but just informally. I'm only on the eighty-somethingth page in the nearly telephone-width volume (the print is large) anyway.
First I'll begin by saying that by and large I find 20th century art unsympathetic, with its pessimistic view of reality, restrictive minimalism, and incarnation of the very inhumanity which it is often intended to protest or counteract. There are all sorts of exceptions to this rule, and if someone explains the appeal of 20th century art to me in intellectual terms I can kind of understand it (if only on the intellectual level, because conscious tolerance is as a rule neither very profound nor lasting). But it still isn't my thing.
One aspect of The Rest is Noise which I like very much is that Ross brings out the humanity of this epoch, the composers, and the music, even when these composers and music have rather cold and hyperintellectual tendencies. Rather than striding into the material with arrogance and prejudice, arraigning one set of composers whilst praising the other, stating absolutely that this artistic movement is superior to that, or characterizing the human subjects with more boldness than accuracy, he practices good old-fashioned American neutrality, attentively following the arguments and recognizing the merits of all sides, and refusing even after coming to a fair and sensible assessment to pronounce an inviolable judgment on the entire affair. Which is refreshing because the European approach does tend to be very dogmatic; and entertaining as this dogmatism can be especially in its aphoristic phases, after the first glow of admiration has passed it is irritating to find one's self left with only a healthy sense of skepticism and a highly biased knowledge of the truth.
In any case, Ross begins by immersing the reader in the Viennese school, as well as the composers who drifted in and out of the Austrian capital. Salome is one of the first works discussed, and even though I don't know the music well, I was quite interested because I've read the libretto repeatedly as Oscar Wilde's play. Whether I'd want to listen to it or read the play again is another question. On the one hand literature and music and so on are only harmful if one lacks common sense; on the other hand common sense only goes so deep, and I like to be a bit selective about the thoughts and images and information that enter and will presumably muck around in my subconscious for the rest of my life. Besides which there's no need — it's even insensitive and stupid — to probe into the realm of misery and darkness when these feelings are rife enough anyway.
Biographies of figures like Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg are woven unaffectedly into the narrative, and numerous anecdotes illustrate clearly enough the childish games (jealousy, covetousness, backbiting, etc.) in which the so-called adults of Vienna's music world liked to engage. Ross doesn't go, or hasn't gone as far as I've read, into salacious detail about their carnal relationships, which is a relief because I have never been convinced that biographers and other writers who thrive on such detail are really highmindedly providing psychological insights rather than just gossip-mongering, prying, and perhaps compensating for their own comparatively unadventurous existence by roaming vicariously. Either way, it's impressive how much research clearly went into the book, and though the trivia interspersed in the text often feel like footnotes, it's also impressive how well Ross has synthesized and filtered the research.
A year or so ago I read Schöpfer der Neuen Musik by H. H. Stuckenschmidt, which covers roughly the same ground. Though Stuckenschmidt was in top form when he was writing about Debussy and Ravel (he integrated the information about their background, education, interests, personality, and compositional philosophy so well into his descriptions of their music that a good reader could probably recognize their compositions even without seeing or hearing a single note of them previously), by the time that Berg and Milhaud came along the chapters had dwindled to dry and rather pitiful music-theoretical synopses of the composers' works. (I'm probably exaggerating, but still, only a very enthusiastic reader would enjoy the book's home stretch.) Besides which, despite my admiration for Stuckenschmidt's brilliant mind and his devotion to 20th-century music, I had major issues with the book's structure and the author's pompous use of language — for instance idiotic compound adjectives in the vein of künstlerisch-schöpferish and natürlich-ästhetisch — and have therefore recused myself from indicting any serious review of the book. It would be unfair to say outright that one book is better than the other; certainly Ross's is friendlier.
Perhaps my biggest quibble with Ross's book is that the style would be better suited to a series of articles — the sentence structure streamlined and simplified as a newspaper or magazine article would demand it, and the concepts and information pared down to cater to the apparently drosophilic attention spans and preadolescent understandings of the readers. I wish that it were more condensed and enigmatic, as is in my view more appropriate given the scope of a book. On the other hand, one of the charms of Alex Ross's style is precisely that it is unpretending, genuine, and perfectly expressed in its efficient way. (And I like his articles in the New Yorker precisely because they are free from pretention and cattiness.) And non-fiction books are, it seems, rarely condensed and enigmatic anyway.
***
Here is a link to Alex Ross's old blog:
The Rest is Noise
and his new blog, at the New Yorker:
Unquiet Thoughts
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