Tim Winton. Cloudstreet

It's quiet for a few moments and then they begin to sing, and once they start it's hard to give it up, so they set up a great train of songs from school and church and wireless, on and on in the dark until they're making them up and starting all over again to change the words and the speed. Quick isn't afraid, and he knows Fish is alright. He lies back with his eyes closed. The whole boat is full of their songs -- they shout them up at the sky until Fish begins to laugh. Quick stops singing. It's dead quiet and Fish is laughing like he's just found a mullet in his shorts. It's a crazy sound, a mad sound, and Quick opens his eyes to see Fish standing up in the middle of the boat with his arms out like he's gliding, like he's a bird sitting in an updraught. The sky, packed with stars, rests just above his head, and when Quick looks over the side he sees the river is full of sky as well. There's stars and swirl an space down there and it's not water anymore -- it doesn't even feel wet. Quick stabs his fingers in. There's nothing there. there's no lights ashore now. No, There's no shore at all, not that he can see. There's only sky out there, above and below, everywhere to be seen. Except for Fish's giggling, there's no sound at all. Quick knows he is dreaming. This is a dream. He feels a turd shunting against his sphincter. He's awake, alright. But it's a dream -- it has to be.
Are we in the sky, Fish?
Yes. It's the water.
What dyou mean?
The water. The water. I fly (114).

Is it the war that's done it to you?
It's all war, she said.
What is?
I don't know. Everythin. Raisin a family, keepin yer head above water. Life. War is our natural state.
Well, struggle maybe, said Lester.
No, no, it's war.
Ah, things come along. You take the good with the bad.
Oriel rears with sudden passion: No you don't. You know about boats. You can't steer if you're not going faster than the current. If you're not under your own steam then yer just debris, stuff floatin. We're not frightened animals, Lester, just waitin with some dumb thoughtless patience for the tide to turn. I'm not spendin my livin breathin life quietly takin the good with the bad. I'm not standing for the bad; bad people, bad luck, bad ways, not even bad breath. We make good, Lester. We make war on the bad and don't surrender.
Some things can't be helped.
Everything can be helped (pp. 229-30).

At dawn, and the first raw-throated stirrings of hidden birds, Cloudstreet floats soundlessly from the gloom to join the day. Down on the tracks a Fremantle freight creeps past under a limestone sky, and in her tent, towelling the water from her face and chest in a manner so delicate as to be secretive, and to someone who knew her, completely uncharacteristic, Oriel Lamb feels the vibrations in the duckboards. When she's finished washing she applies a little talcum powder and dresses in her floral frock, stockings and hardsoled sandals which look more like work boots with ventilators cut into them. She notes again the ugliness of her feet all distorted with corns and bunions. She still remembers her own bare running feet on the dirt of the home paddock when the world was a place given by God for the pleasures of children, when all that was good was unbroken (p. 251).

No. No. I'll stay a cop. But it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us. That's what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, I just want to do right. But there's no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts (Tim Winton. Cloudstreet. Simon & Schuster / Scribner Paperback, 1991, p. 402).

(It's a rare novelist I can bear reading these days, which I intend as a comment on my (dis)abilities as a reader rather than on the novels themselves. But in too many, the details seem inconsequential, the prose style plodding or predictable, the characters as aimless as the plot itself. So it was a real pleasure this Christmas break to read Tim Winton's Dirt Music, which is about something like love and hope, rooted in the broken, unfamiliar soil of Western Australia. And then from there to Winton's magnum opus, Cloudstreet, a great, sprawling novel, a cross between Dickens and Faulkner -- the tale of two over-sized families, the Pickles and the Lambs, tripping over one another in an equally over-sized mansion in Perth during WWII and then in the 50's and 60's. It's hard to say what makes this novel so great -- in part, its elegance and eloquence; in part, its quirky humor (including a talking pig and an addled young man named Fish who appears to glow at times); in part, its love of its extraordinary cast of characters, not despite but because of their gloomy passions, quirks, and obsessions; and in part for its faith and resilience. Among many things, Tim Winton's in love with music, and the lilt and thump and beat and rhythm of instruments and songs make these broken lives whole. I really loved this novel. It was one of those rare books that, once finished, sends you back to the beginning, half because you can't bear to let it go, and half because you want to find out what else the author has written, because you can't let him (or her) go either.)

Robert Clark. Dark Water

You could have called the gaps that needed to be filled [in Cimabue's Crocifisso] injuries, insults, and wounds to the figure of Christ except for the fact that they were more akin to decapitation, dismemberment, or flaying. The forehead and right side of the face were destroyed. So too was the center of the torso, the breastbone and heart down to the navel; and so too the left-hand side of the rib cage, upward to the armpit. . . . The palms of both hands were destroyed precisely in the places where Christ's real wounds ought to have been.

All that would be covered in chromatic abstraction -- in what from a distance would look like a loosely woven mat of green-gold flesh -- and perhaps abstraction was precisely the right word. Because when on the tenth anniversary of the flood the Crocifisso was returned to Santa Croce, you could not say it had been restored in the sense that something that had once been part of it and lost had now been put back; or could you say that the wounds had been closed or healed. Rather, they'd become like the phantom limbs of an amputee: they were, for all their self-evident absence, still there, still palpable to the eye even as the eye registered the space they'd once occupied and moved on. In sum, what was once concretely present and then concretely absent in the Crocifisso was now present again, but as an abstract presence. You couldn't put your finger or eye on it, but your mind grasped its reality, the specter of what had been lost (pp. 249-50).


Beauty, like truth, was supposed to be timeless, but the fact was that beauty was always falling apart or decaying. It needed constant shoring up, and the labor could make you weary. Beauty was, al fondo, in the final analysis, very like human flesh and bone. In Florence, where they'd made so much of it, there was that much more of it to break or injure. Left alone, without restauro, it would all eventually disappear. Really, art was always dying, beauty forever decaying. "I had not known death had undone so many," Dante marveled. . . .

But the art in an artwork might not be located precisely where you thought it was. Perhaps it was just as much in the damage and decay as it was in the intact original. Perhaps it was in the gaps -- in contemplating and tending those insults and injuries -- that we find ourselves, by compassion; by bandaging, however imperfectly, those wounds. Art may be a species of faith, the assurance of things hoped for. It contains nothing so much as our wish that we persist (Robert Clark. Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces. New York: Doubleday, 2008, p. 258).

(Robert Clark went to Florence on a fellowship to write about the intersection of art, beauty, and faith, and discovered instead the devastation of the flood of November 4, 1966 -- the destruction of human lives and of tens of thousands of manuscripts and priceless works of art. Clark's eloquent and moving account of loss and restauro, restoration, is in part a celebration of the angeli del fango -- the "mud angels" -- students from around the world who dropped everything to spend years of their lives retrieving and washing and drying out the manuscripts. But this extraordinary work's brooding account of the destruction and restoration of priceless masterpieces -- especially Cimabue's ground-breaking Crucifixion -- turns this into a tale of not only the restoration and loss of art and beauty, but of faith itself.)

David Foster Wallace. Consider the Lobster

The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism "prepared," which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they come in ... whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you're tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container's sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle's rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster's fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature's claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it's in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven-timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over ("Consider the Lobster," pp. 247-48).

The psychology of jokes helps account for part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it -- to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name Who for the interrogative pronoun who, and so on. And we all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling of not so much boredom as offense, as if something has been blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher's feelings at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad critical analysis -- plot to chart, symbols to decode, themes to exfoliate, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty. Franz Kafka, after all, is the story writer whose "Poseidon" imagines a sea god so overwhelmed with administrative paperwork that he never gets to sail or swim, and whose "In the Penal Colony" conceives description as punishment and torture as edification and the ultimate critic as a needled harrow whose coup de grace is a spike through the forehead (David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster [Back Bay Books, 2006], "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness," pp. 61-62.)

(I'm really sorry that it was only upon news of his untimely death that I picked up David Foster Wallace's brilliant, eclectic, and subversive collection of essays -- partly because it's ghoulish, but more partly because I've not had the past decade to get to know him better. At any rate, I think these essays are terrific: typically, "Consider the Lobster," which was supposed to be a review of the Maine Lobsterfest for Gourmet magazine, turns into an inquiry into animal cruelty, just as "Up, Simba," a remarkably prescient essay on the 2000 Presidential campaign of John McCain, turns into a manic meditation on the ways in which such campaigns strip human beings of their humanity. Among other things, the remaining essays hang out in Las Vegas at an annual porn awards event (same theme) and review Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage in order to distinguish levels of usage from Standard English. There's also a review of Tracy Austin's memoir, in order to ask how and why a tennis star can play so smart and sound so dumb. But he's terrifically disturbing too: it's like watching an extremely intelligent version of an 18th century scientist dissecting the nerves, ganglia, vessels, and innards of our post-modern society in search of the soul / truth, only to find it exasperatingly elusive and, inevitably, out of reach. His other collection of essays is A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and yes, I know, he's most famous for his 1000-page + novel Infinite Jest, which I'm still working up the courage [and looking for the time] to read. Maybe next summer.)

C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image

In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this [Medieval Model], he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light (pp. 74-75).

To look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest -- trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical (p. 99).

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out -- like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life (pp. 118-19).

Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one's spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one's secular life, the great lovers of old on one's own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one's place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely (C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 185).

(About once every five years I find myself re-reading CS Lewis's luminescent account of the medieval world view, in order to remind myself of why I became a medievalist in the first place. Elsewhere he contrasts the modern view of darkness, which is pervasive except where it is interrrupted by sunlight, to that of the middle ages, which regarded night as but a temporary shadow cast by the earth in the path of the sun -- a shadow cast upon a lawn on a sunny day. Increasingly, however, I've had my misgivings about this happy cosmology. In the final chapter, CS Lewis responds to what seems to be the only possible objection: that it's not true. (To which he replies that we have created an alternate model of the universe for our own age ["nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her" (p. 223)].) But there is something unnerving and finally wrong about this comfortable hierarchical arrangement, in which God is in the heavens and all is right with the world -- "the rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / He made them, high or lowly, / And ordered their estate." It's always been CS Lewis's argument, like Milton's, that we only find true freedom once we discover our true place in the universe -- that Satan, in contrast, was free only to jump off a cliff. But try telling that to the peasantry, the vast majority of the medieval populace, the 90% who lived like animals in grinding obscurity and poverty, no more valued than their cattle -- try telling them that, having found their place at the rich man's gate, that only then were they truly free. It's a self-satisfied, rich man's vision of life that seeks to preserve the status quo -- a stay against confusion, as Robert Frost once said of rhyme; but a stay against liberty and equality as well.)

Ingrid Rowland. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher, Heretic

"Mercury: [Jove has] ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Frather Franzino's melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won't be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that seven shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won't burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. Luarenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all." (from Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; Rowland, p. 17)

"The stupid, insensitive idolaters had no reason to laugh at the magic and divine religion of the Eygyptians, who in every cause and every effect, according to the principles appropriate to each, contemplated divinity, and knew how to obtain the benefits of Nature by means of the species that are in her womb: just as she gives fish from sea and river, wild animals from the desert, metals from mines, fruits from trees, so from certain parts, certain animals, certain beasts, certain plants, there are offered certain destinies, powers, fortunes, and impressions. Hence the divinity in the sea was called Neptune, in the sun, Apollo, in the earth, Ceres, in the desert, Diana, and so differently in the other species, all of which refer back to a god of gods and wellspring of all ideas that exists above nature. That god, being absolute, has nothing to do with us, but inasmuch as he is communicated through the effects of nature and is more intimate to them than nature herself, if he is not nature per se, certainly he is the nature of nature and is the soul of the soul of the world...." (from Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; Rowland p. 166)

"It is truly, O most generous Sir [Sir Philip Sidney], the work of a low, filthy animal nature to have made oneself the constant admirer, and to have fixed a solicitous attachment upon or around the beauty of a woman's body. Good God! What more vile and ignoble vision can present itself to a clear-sighted eye than a man, brooding, afflicted, tormented, sorry, melancholy; who waxes now cold, now hot, now boiling, now trembling, now pale, now flushing, now in a pose of perplexity, now in the act of decisiveness, a man who spends the best season and the choicest fruits of his life distilling the elixir of his brain toward putting into thought and writ and sealing in public monuments those endless tortures, those grave torments, those reasoned arguments, those laborious thoughts and those bitter desires addressed to the tyranny of an unworthy, imbecilic, foolish and sordid smut?" (from Bruno's dedication to the Heroic Frenzies; Rowland, p. 175)

"It happens that, against every reason, state, and nature, human law and consequently the true order of Almighty God instilled in all things, the bonds of nature lie unbound, and by the suggestion of misanthropic spirits and the ministry of hell's Furies (who fan the flames among nations rather than bringing peace, and insert the sword of dissent between those who are most closely joined, selling themselves as Mercuries descended from heaven among their tricks and their many pretenses), it has come to the point that humanity quarrels most of all with itself, and is more contested by itself than by any other living creature, and that the law of love that is spread far and wide lies everywhere neglected, which derives not from some evil demon but certainly from God the father of all things, so that it is in harmony with all nature, and teaches a general philanthropy by which we love even our enemies, lest we become like brutes and barbarians, and are transformed into his image who makes his sun rise over good and bad, and pours out a rain of grace upon the just and the unjust. This is the religion that I observe...." (from Bruno's 120 Articles against Mathematicians and Philosophers; Ingrid Rowland. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher / Heretic. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 207)

(Although the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for his reservations about the nature of Christ, transubstantiation, and the Virgin Mary, among other things, he is often considered today as a martyr for science. Like Copernicus, he turned his back on the Ptolemaic, geocentric universe and its implicit hierarchies in behalf of a heliocentric universe. But more than that, he believed in a multiplicity of worlds -- that our earth and sun are no different from an infinite number of solar systems presided over by an infinite God, who has been worshipped by many religious traditions. Stressing Bruno's neo-Platonism, Rowland's biography draws on a rich wealth of materials; more of her literate, readable, fascinating essays on figures of the Italian Renaissance, first published in the New York Review of Books, are collected in From Heaven to Arcadia. (Incidentally, I take no particular pleasure in reproducing Bruno's misogynistic diatribe, which he wrote in response to Sidney's anxious love sonnets in Astrophil and Stella -- it's Bruno's attempt to persuade Sidney to seek out the love of God instead. For the roots of this anti-feminist tradition, see especially Francis Utley's The Crooked Rib.) At any rate, I thought this was a fascinating story of a Dominican monk who sought to free his God from the constraints of his age, and who was killed for his troubles. His books were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. 400 years later, during the papacy of John Paul II, the Catholic Church expressed its sorrow for Bruno's death.)

Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited

That day, too, I had come not knowing my destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford--submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in--Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days--such as that day--when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour (p. 21).

I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning (Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited [Little, Brown, 1945], p. 225).

(Although Evelyn Waugh's account of England's smart set in the 1920's and 30's is probably better read in one's youth, along with the novels of Thomas Wolfe, I thought it was interesting on a couple of counts -- in part, for its nostalgic longing for England's pre-WWI past; in part for its aversion to modernity (apparently he regarded James Joyce's later novels with the same loathing and despair that some regard our own post-modern age), and more in part for its conservative embrace of traditional Catholic faith. In this regard, his account of the drunken Sebastian Flyte, who ends up in a monastery near the end of the novel, is reminiscent of Graham Greene's whiskey priest in Power and the Glory, or even of the fallen Kichijiro in Shusaku Endo's Silence. While the tale of the narrator's off, on, off-again love for Sebastian's sister, Julia, is the stuff of which Hollywood films are made, and while the prose is as baroque as the fountain at the doorstep of the Brideshead mansion, I still think Waugh is an exquisite stylist, in love with the rhythms of the English language. I also think that Waugh is half in love with the debauchery that the novel ostensibly condemns. As in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, there is a genuine tension here between the novel's sermon and its unsettling affection for bone marrow and spices -- for the very whiskey, wine, and cocktails that flow throughout these tipsy pages.)

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace

"What is it? am I falling? are my legs giving way under me?" he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the fight between the French and the artillerists ended, and wishing to know whether or not the red-haired artillerist had been killed, whether the cannon had been taken or saved. But he did not see anything. There was nothing over him now except the sky--the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly creeping across it. "How quiet, calm, and solemn, not at all like when I was running," thought Prince Andrei, "not like when we were running, shouting, and fighting; not at all like when the Frenchman and the artillerist, with angry and frightened faces, were pulling at the swab--it's quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite sky. How is it I haven't seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I've finally come to know it. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquility. And thank God!..." (p. 281).

War isn't courtesy, it's the vilest thing in the world, and we must understand that and not play at war (p. 775).

Napoleon, whom we imagine as guiding this whole movement (as a savage imagines that the figure carved on the prow of a ship is the force that guides it), Napoleon, during all this time of his activity, was like a child who, holding the straps tied inside a carriage, fancies that he is driving it (p. 1008).

There is no greatness where this is no simplicity, goodness, and truth (p. 1071).

Though the doctors treated him [Pierre], let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered (p. 1102).

"Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it's only here that the new and the good begins" (p. 1118).

All the ancient historians used one and the same method to describe and grasp the seemingly ungraspable--the life of a people. They described the activity of individual men who ruled the people; and this activity expressed for them the activity of the whole people.

To the questions of how individual men made peoples act according to their will, and what governed the will of these men themselves, the ancients answered the first question by recognizing the will of a divinity who subjected peoples to the will of one chosen man, and the second by recognizing that the same divinity guided the will of the chosen one towards a predestined goal.

For the ancients, these questions were decided by faith in the direct participation of a divinity in the affairs of mankind.

Modern history, in its theory, has rejected both of these propositions (p. 1179).

For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people.

The historian is sometimes obliged, by bending the truth, to bring all the actions of a historical figure under the one idea he has put into that figure. The artist, on the contrary, sees the very singularity of that idea as incompatible with his task, and only tries to understand and show not the famous figure but the human being (p. 1219).

In descriptions of battles it is usually written that such-and-such army was sent to attack such-and-such point and was then ordered to retreat, and so on, as if supposing that the discipline that makes tens of thousands of men obey the will of one man on the drill ground will have the same effect where it is a matter of life and death. Anyone who has been to war knows how incorrect that is; and yet official reports are based on this supposition, and military descriptions on them. Make the rounds of a whole army right after a battle, even on the second or third day, before the reports have been written, and ask all the soldiers, the senior and junior officers, how it went; they will tell you what all these men experienced and saw, and you will form a majestic, complex, infinitely diverse, oppressive, and vague impression; and from no one, least of all the commander in chief, will you learn how it all went. But after two or three days, the reports begin to be submitted, talkers begin telling how what they did not see happened; finally, a general account is put together, and the general opinion of the army is put together from this account. It is a relief to everyone to exchange his doubts and questions for this false but clear and always flattering picture (Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace, transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky [Knopf, 2007], p. 1220).

(Although Tolstoy's massive, epic account of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 (war) and of the lives of the Russian aristocracy (peace) who became entangled in the Napoleonic wars threatens to turn into a "large, loose, baggy monster," as Henry James once wrote, it is also magnificent and moving. Among many things, its interwoven tales of the idealist Pierre, who fumbles for and finds wisdom, of Natalie, coming of age, of boys dashing off to battle-- all of these and many, many more are stories of how very little we are, and yet how very much each of us matters in the scheme of things. Given post-modernity's interest in wresting the pen from out of Shakespeare's fingers, however, and placing it in the hand of society (for which see Greenblatt's Will in the World and, more broadly, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel), I was especially fascinated by Tolstoy's debunking of the myth of the Napoleonic hero already in the mid-nineteenth century. The result is, as Tolstoy wrote of the fog of war, an account of history and humanity that is "majestic, complex, [and] infinitely diverse" (p. 1220). While it is not, perhaps, the after-action report to which we have become accustomed in this internet age, it's the stuff of life itself. And Pevear and Volokhonsky's agile, readable translation has truly brought all this life, to life.)