Poems in English by Samuel Beckett, Book 45 0f 2022

I picked up this book at the Franklin and Marshall College Library Book Sale. I have lately been reading Shakespeare's sonnets, so I thought I would reading 20th Century verse by a witty playwright.  The wit and wordplay are there, but after reading the hope and ardor in Shakespeare, Beckett is very sad in a visceral way. 

From a summary of his work by the Poetry Foundation:  

Throughout Beckett’s work we can find evidence of his conviction that everything is hopeless, meaningless, purposeless, and, above all, agonizing to endure. Beckett’s people are leveled off and merged into each other by being all more or less physically disabled—as if this were really the common condition on earth. … Beckett is a prophet of negation and sterility. He holds out no hope to humanity, only a picture of unrelieved blackness; and those who profess to see in Beckett signs of a Christian approach or signs of compassion are simply refusing to see what is there.” Perhaps Beckett himself stated his dilemma most succinctly in L’Innommable: “Dans ma vie, puisqu’il faut l’appeler ainsi, il y eut trois choses, l’impossibilite de parler, l’impossibilite de me taire, et la solitude.” (“One must speak; man cannot possibly communicate with his fellows, but the alternative—silence—is irreconcilable with human existence.”)

Which is what I felt reading the book.  

Here is the poem "What I Would Do Without This World"

what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness

Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.  

First 44 Books of 2022:

Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide by Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh

Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide by Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh, Book 44 of 2022

 I first read about epigenetics in Nature magazine almost 20 years ago. The feature article summarized the current state at the time of research into what happens around genes and how it affects our lives--and future generations.  

This fall I have been reading Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer. The two books work well together.  Zimmer shows the reader how difficult it is to draw a line between living and not-living.  

In Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh demonstrate that the dividing line between the influence of our genes and our environment is as blurry as defining life.  A human genome lives at the center of all our cells. If it were stretched straight it would be a meter long. So those millions of genes that make up our genome are folded thousands and thousands of times. 

All of this folding and the mechanisms protiens use to copy genetic instructions from folded genes mean that the shape of the genome and the cell it is in influence our lives.  Folded genes can be activated and inactivated by attaching and detaching small methyl molecules. This methylation process is part of life, but can go wrong.  Epigenetics studies who these processes outside the genome influence our lives.  

I was left with more questions than answers, but glad to know a little bit more about how deeply complex life is.  

First 43 Books of 2022:

Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Life's Edge:The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer, Book 43 of 2022

 

The book for this semester at the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College is Life's Edge: The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer.

Zimmer has been writing about science since the 1990s for the New York Times, Discovery, and National Geographic. He is the author of several books, Life's Edge is the latest.  

Every chapter of the book brings up another question about what it means to be alive, what is life, and what is not life.  

We are intro­duced to a mena­gerie that perches in the gray area bet­ween alive and not-alive: creatures like tardi­grades and nema­todes that can re­emerge from crypto­biosis with the touch of water. 

Zimmer describes pythons whose basal meta­bolic rates can grind almost to a halt, slime molds that display a brain­less kind of mem­ory and problem-solving abil­ity, and a girl named Jahi McMath, who was dec­lared brain-dead yet had a beat­ing heart and con­tinued to grow before dy­ing (again) five years later. 

COVID makes an ap­pear­ance. A book on the def­ini­tion of liv­ing would not be com­plete with­out a look at viruses. Zimmer intro­duces to var­ious def­ini­tions of life, coming from many sources from sci­entists to phil­osoph­ers. From them he derives five special hall­marks of life: meta­bolism, infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing, homeo­stasis, re­pro­duc­tion, and evol­ution. 

The sheer diver­sity with­in these traits is clear in his beautiful writing, as is the elu­sive­ and com­plex nature of life. As Zimmer says, biol­ogy is a "sci­ence in which the most impor­tant object [life] has no defin­ition." 

Wonders abound through the book. Zimmer's description human reproduction and when life begins shows the kind of complexity that makes absolute beliefs on where life begins look hopelessly ludicrous. 

If you are interested in biology, read the book. It's fantastic. 

First 42 Books of 2022:

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy Book 42 of 2022

 

When I began my Jewish journey after torch-carrying Nazis marched in Charlottesville. In my search after that horrible night, Bernard-Henri Levy in his book The Genius of Judaism was one of the first writers to show me I really am a Jew.  

Jews themselves fight over who is a Jew. My family and Jews I knew growing up said I was not a Jew.  I do not have a Jewish mother. When I joined a Synagogue, it had to be a Reform Synagogue. To be Conservative, especially to be Orthodox, I would have to convert.  

For non-Jews, my Jewish Dad means I am a Jew, the same way that having an Italian Dad would make me Italian.  Of course, every white supremacist and Nazi in America hates me even if my mother is not Jewish.  

Levy went showed me what an amazing tribe I am a part of.  To be a Jew is to have a unique place in the world in so many ways. Who loses their country and gets it back after two millennia? And keeps its culture together during that entire two thousand years.

I wrote this about my first reading of the book in 2018:  

The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah.  Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel.  One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine.   

I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, But this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust.  Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal.  At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism.   

Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter.  Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches.  Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate.  He seems to have succeeded.  I did not.  Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism. 

Which brings up another aspect of Judaism which Levy makes so simple and beautiful. We Jews, at our best, are committed to Justice, to repairing the world.

Until this year, I was ambivalent about Ukraine as was Levy.  From the beginning of the war, I have volunteered for Ukraine, sometimes three or four days a week making combat medical kits.  Levy made a documentary backing the fight to keep Ukraine free.   

When the Russians invaded, Ukraine needed all free people to rally to her defense.  Whatever problems I had with Ukraine before February 24 are insignificant compared to the unjust attack on an innocent country.

Glory to Ukraine.

The book is a celebration of Jewish history and life and is beautifully written.

First 41 Books of 2022:

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como, Book 41 of 2022

Sometimes I have a book for a few years, suddenly remember I have it, and read it in a couple of days. That just happened with C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by Jim Como. I have had the copy since it was first published in 2019. I bought it and had it signed by the author at the 50th Anniversary of the New York C.S. Lewis Society. 

Jim is one of the founding members. I joined a decade after the founding of the group in 1979 just after I left active duty in the Army in Germany.  Jim and I have known each other for four decades. I attended meetings of the NY CSL Society about once a year for the past four decades. Like most NYCSL members, Jim lives and works in the New York City region.

I read the book now because I just finished reading CSL's longest book:  English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama. Lewis referred to it by the series name abbreviation OHEL: Oxford History of English Literature. 

I read Jim's book to as a review of all that Lewis wrote before and after the OHEL.

The short introduction includes a brief biography, brief summaries and evaluations of all of Lewis's books and many essays. He even includes a list of the more prominent critics of Lewis and some of the controversies that cropped up during and after Lewis's life.  

After being so far into the weeds of the 16th Century, it was fun to come back to all the ways Lewis wrote and lived.  I have read all of the 40 books published in during the life of Lewis and most of the collections published after he died--a dozen more.  

Lewis is now known most of all for the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia. All of them made into movies I will never see (I don't watch movies of novels I love.)

But Lewis is also a novelist. His Till We Have Faces is, I think, his best book and among the better novels of the 20th Century.  Jim's description of the book and it's place in 20th Century literature is excellent. 

Lewis is also a Christian apologist, a lecturer, a BBC radio personality during WWII, essayist, book reviewer, and a science fiction writer: Perelandra is a brilliant novel, and a literary critic of considerable reputation. Jim's most recent book is about Perelandra. 

Jim's Very Short Introduction convey's all of this in 128 pages.  If you have read only some of Lewis, this book will tell you what to read next. 

And I will also suggest what to read next:  If you haven't read The Four Loves or the essay "The Inner Ring," they should be your next read.

First 40 books of 2022:

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen