What should we make of Pablo Neruda today? He was a man and writer of extraordinary gifts and a monstrous ego—a sexist, “a purblind Stalinist,” and a “courageous dissident.” If anything, he teaches us that life is rarely black and white: “Neruda’s poetry is embodied, contradictory, expressing public and private iterations of the life of a man, but we live in a time strait-jacketed by either/or thinking: either you’re a womanizer or you’re a flawless saint; either you’re a Libertarian or you’re a Stalinist; either you’re with us or you’re against us. Neruda frustrates contemporary appetites for correctness and justice, and some readers will dismiss him precisely on such limited grounds, as if the past could be purified to meet our astringent demands. To say Neruda was flawed is laughable. Humanity is flawed.”
The young men who love Evelyn Waugh: “Some readers find that Waugh’s novels speak to them in an intensely personal manner that is rare among authors working outside of science fiction or fantasy. Decline and Fall, Kingsley Amis said in a retrospective essay, was the ‘first novel written for me.’ I for one can attest to this feeling. Today it is widespread among young men of a certain type, especially in the United States. If you have ever moved in conservative intellectual circles or attended a liberal arts college with a “Great Books” program or gone to the coffee hour at a traditional Latin Mass, you will have seen him (it is almost never a her). The Waughian wears tweed jackets, often if not always ill fitting. He smokes a pipe or one of the expensive additive-free brands of cigarette. He drinks gin…”
Kyle Smith reviews The Originalist, a play about Antonin Scalia and “an engrossing and surprisingly even-handed portrait of the late conservative titan in his element.”
Three pieces of the Swedish royal family’s crown jewels have been stolen by two men in broad daylight. They fled by boat: “Police pursued the perpetrators by land, sea, and air—in boats, planes, helicopters, and cars heading in all directions—to no avail. Authorities say they still have no notion where the thieves disappeared to. ‘It’s 1-0 to them right now,’ police spokesman Thomas Agnevik told reporters. ‘By boat you can reach Mälaren, Köping or Arboga in the west, or Västerås, Eskilstuna or Stockholm if you drive east.’ He said the search continues.”
The dangers of mistranslation: “Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous statement in 1956 — ‘We will bury you’ — ushered in one of the Cold War’s most dangerous phases, one rife with paranoia and conviction that both sides were out to destroy the other. But it turns out that’s not what he said, not in Russian, anyway. Khrushchev’s actual declaration was ‘We will outlast you’ — prematurely boastful, perhaps, but not quite the declaration of hostilities most Americans heard, thanks to his interpreter’s mistake.”
What can American writers tell us about happiness? Jessica Hooten Wilson reviews Elizabeth S. Amato’s The Pursuit of Happiness and the American Regime: Political Theory in Literature.
A Reader Recommends: Connie Kirk recommends Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka novels (The Fire Dwellers, The Stone Angel, The Diviners, and others). She writes: “I love Wallace Stegner. All his books seem solid, objective, not full of emotion, and yet they leave a felt reality that has stayed with me for years. Margaret Laurence is like that as well, only her main characters are women and boys. I think she gets it right—right about how some women think, feel and act. Her Manawaka series is a wonder.”
Essay of the Day:
Which Steven Pinker is the real Steven Pinker? The one who thinks that “humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits”? Or the one who argues in his latest book, Enlightenment Now, that the world is our oyster thanks to reason and science? Jason Willick in Modern Age:
“To be sure, the most limited thesis of Enlightenment Now—that life has gotten better in many ways over the past several hundred years—is clearly true. With a dizzying array of charts, Pinker illustrates the fantastic increases in wealth, health, safety, and longevity that have taken place since ‘the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment set in motion the process of using knowledge to improve the human condition.’ He delivers some well-earned barbs against the ‘declinism’ that prevails in certain quarters of the left and right. ‘The social critic’s standard formula for sowing panic,’ Pinker writes, is to say, ‘here’s an anecdote, therefore it’s a trend, therefore it’s a crisis.’ He rightly observes that forecasts of doom and gloom often have more intellectual currency than realistic assessments. Enlightenment Now is valuable for reminding us of the fruits of relatively recent moral and scientific achievements, from the elimination of smallpox to the abolition of public executions-by-torture.
“The problem comes from Pinker’s accounting of the way these achievements have been secured and his inferences about the future of the social order. He gestures to a number of institutions, some of which originated in the Enlightenment, as sources of progress: limited governments, democratic decision-making, open markets, freedom of conscience, the peer-reviewed scientific process. Together, these are facets of what we now call liberalism. While thinkers like Notre Dame University’s Patrick Deneen purport to explain ‘why liberalism failed,’ Pinker counters that Enlightenment liberalism is working as well as ever—that those institutions are continuing to make life better for almost everybody.
“But why are they making life better? The utopian vision and the tragic vision offer different answers. In the utopian vision, liberal institutions are worthwhile because they expand our autonomy, allowing us to inscribe our own story upon a blank slate. Markets free us to fulfill ourselves through industry. Elections offer us a chance at self-determination. Free speech allows us to express our thoughts as we please. All these freedoms mold human nature such that we become more reasonable, compassionate, and humane. The purpose of life is the ever greater actualization of liberal ideals—the expansion of autonomy, science, and self-expression into a growing number of spheres.
“In the tragic vision, by contrast, liberal institutions work not through liberation but rather through constraint. The function of markets is to distribute economic power across society and therefore minimize the chances of misjudgment by central planners. The function of elections is to reduce the likelihood of violence by offering an alternative means for transferring political power. The function of free speech is not to give everyone a megaphone but to make sure that bad ideas can be falsified. In the tragic vision, individuals are and will always be status-oriented, tribal, and aggressive, but a society can become incrementally more peaceful and humane by virtue of the liberal machinery for creating knowledge, limiting violence, and protecting certain rights. In this view, liberalism is not the purpose of life but a means of creating a society that people want to live in.”
Photos: Libraries
Poem: Susan de Sola, “The Tulips”
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