A. Fire on the Track is a great documentary about the long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine (“Pre”). Born in Oregon, Pre was a sensation in high school, and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a freshman at the University of Oregon. His college coach, Bill Bowerman, was a legend in the sport, and studied the fine points of shoes, running-surfaces, etc. Bowerman started Nike with one of his runners, Phil Knight.
Pre’s charisma made him a fan favorite; he was known for his brash predictions. The highlight of Pre’s career was the 5,000m at the 1972 Olympics, when he was 21; though he didn’t win a medal, he challenged a strong field, following his usual strategy of going out in front, then trying to hang on at the end. Prefontaine died in a car accident at age 24.
Fire on the Track is available on Youtube. Two movies were made about his life, Without Limits and Prefontaine.
B. Untold: Johnny Football is a good sports movie from ESPN (it can be streamed on Netflix). It deals with the remarkable and short career of quarterback Johnny Manziell, who won the Heisman Trophy after a spectacular freshman season, then was overwhelmed by fame, and seduced by money. After leaving Texas A & M, and being cut by the Cleveland Browns, he hit bottom, and planned to commit suicide. But the gun didn’t go off. “To this day, I don’t know what happened. The gun clicked.” He’s now 30, older and wiser, but hasn’t found a niche, an outlet for his energies.
C. The Witches of the Orient is about the Japanese women’s volleyball team, which won the gold medal at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The film is a study in discipline and endurance; the team trained extremely hard, sometimes all night. One wonders, is it worth it? Many of the players thought it wasn’t worth it, and wanted to quit. The film has little to say about volleyball strategy. Documentary is interspersed with animation, but the animation adds nothing.
The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain....
Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
But it seems like the sea’s return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when after doubt
Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.
I’m trying to update my Realms of Gold: A Sketch of Western Literature with authors I’ve read recently.
G. B. Edwards was born in 1899, fourteen years after D. H. Lawrence. As a young man, he had contacts in the London literary world, and he was hailed as a genius, as the next D. H. Lawrence. After a few years, however, his literary friends gave up on him, and he became a teacher and civil servant.
Edwards had grown up on the island of Guernsey, but he spent most of his adult life in England. After marrying and having children, he drifted away from his family, and didn’t see his children for many years. He lived a Spartan life in a tiny room in a boarding-house.
In his last years, Edwards met a young writer/artist named Edward Chaney, who believed in him, and encouraged him to finish his magnum opus, a novel called The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. After Edwards died, Chaney managed to find a publisher for the book. Chaney also wrote a biography of Edwards, Genius Friend: G. B. Edwards and The Book of Ebenezer Le Page.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is an extraordinary novel, a readable novel, a beautiful novel. It has little plot, but it holds your interest with its lively language and lively characters. Edwards was indeed a worthy successor of D. H. Lawrence.
Arthur Koestler was one of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century. His two-volume autobiography is extraordinary, it’s one of my favorite books, and probably the best autobiography ever written (the first volume is called Arrow in the Blue, the second Invisible Writing). Koestler knew both Fascism and Communism from the inside, and has much to say about both; he also lived in Palestine, and knew Zionism from the inside. His stories are interesting, his ideas profound.
Koestler started his career as a hard-headed scientist, and he has a good grasp of science. But he’s also receptive to the occult, and wrote much about the occult. He questions the Establishment view of evolution; few writers have argued more forcefully against materialistic Darwinism. He wrote about the history of science in The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959). He wrote about both art and science in The Act of Creation (1964), and Janus: A Summing Up (1978).
Koestler first became known as a novelist. His novel Darkness At Noon (1940) sold millions of copies. Darkness At Noon deals with totalitarianism, the Communist Party, and how the Party turns against its own members. Koestler also wrote a historical novel (The Gladiators, 1939), and a novel about Palestine (Thieves in the Night, 1946). Like other writers, Koestler moved from fiction to non-fiction as he grew older.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a major figure in Latin literature, known for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez is a great stylist (even in translation), he has a firm grasp of politics and war, and a deep knowledge of the occult. But he stretches the occult into wild fantasy; he’s part of the literary school known as Magical Realism. His fictional world doesn’t have “the ring of truth,” it seems contrived and artificial, one can’t “suspend one’s disbelief,” one can’t relate to his characters. There’s nothing hopeful or upbeat in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The plot fits together perfectly, like an elaborate puzzle, but it doesn’t touch the reader.
Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is more sincere than Marquez’ novel, and more hopeful. Coelho may not have the genius of Marquez, but he has a deep understanding of the occult, of the power of will to bend circumstances. Coelho urges the reader to pursue his dreams; one might describe The Alchemist as self-help literature in fictional form. Coelho would approve of the quote that Melville kept on his desk: “Stay true to the dreams of thy youth.”
Coleridge’s poetry has long been popular. Poems like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” struck a chord with many readers, and still make pleasant reading. Along with Wordsworth and Blake, Coleridge is considered a “First Generation Romantic” (Byron, Keats, and Shelley are “Second Generation Romantics”).
But Coleridge was more than a great poet, he was a great philosopher, too. While his poetry is usually clear and readable, his philosophical writing is often obscure. His best-known philosophical work is Biographia Literaria, which blends autobiography, literary criticism and philosophy. His reputation as a literary critic is very high, perhaps the highest of all English critics.
The literature on Coleridge is vast. He left behind numerous notebooks, and countless letters, so a biographer has a wealth of material to work with. I highly recommend Richard Holmes’ two-volume biography of Coleridge. Holmes focuses on Coleridge’s life and poetry, he pays little attention to Coleridge’s philosophical work. Mark Edmundson says that Holmes’ biography is “one of the best literary biographies in English, in the league with Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel Johnson.”
Coleridge was almost an exact contemporary of Hegel (Coleridge was born in 1772, Hegel in 1770). Both Coleridge and Hegel had a deep interest in opposites — what Hegel called “the dialectic.” Hegel argued that human thought tends to form a thesis and an antithesis, and these positions are often reconciled in a synthesis. Coleridge believed in two fundamental forces operating throughout nature. Perhaps both Coleridge and Hegel were influenced by the new sciences of magnetism and electricity, both of which dealt with opposing forces, positive and negative.
In his youth, Coleridge impressed people with his lively and eloquent conversation. When he was older, he became even more voluble, though his voice had lost its former fire. He always had time for a young stranger like Carlyle or Emerson. A collection of his conversation was published under the title Table Talk.
Coleridge’s interest in the political/religious debates of his day prompted him to write On the Constitution of the Church and State. In politics, he was conservative, a defender of the status quo. In religion, he was a believer, and a defender of the Church of England. His interest in the medical/biological debates of his day prompted him to write Hints towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life.
Owen Barfield tried to summarize Coleridge’s philosophical writings in What Coleridge Thought; this book is of some use, but is often obscure. Perhaps the best way to approach Coleridge-the-philosopher is through an anthology like the Norton Critical Edition (Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose), or Donald Stauffer’s Selected Poetry And Prose Of Coleridge, or Kathleen Coburn’s Inquiring Spirit.
Coleridge distinguishes between attention and thought. He says that attention is intellectually passive. On the other hand, thought requires energy, thought is “the voluntary production in our own minds of those states of consciousness, to which... the Writer has referred us.” Barfield illustrates the difference between attention and thought by describing a lecture
| which holds our attention from start to finish. A day or two later someone who was not there asks us: “What was the lecture like?” “Very good indeed!” “What did he say?” Whereupon we find ourselves completely at a loss; we just cannot answer, though we can recall plenty of disconnected observations. So it is not our memory which is at fault.
On another occasion, after the lecture is concluded, we summon up the energy to ‘go through’ it in our own minds, reproducing for ourselves the main and subsidiary threads of the discourse. And this time, if we are asked the same question, we can answer it pretty satisfactorily. Or it may be a chapter from a book.1 |
I often do this, I “go through” a chapter from a book, and summarize it in an essay. This helps me to understand the chapter, and perhaps it’s of use to the reader, too, perhaps the reader is learning without expending as much time/energy as I expended. If I’m learning and the reader is learning, then everyone is satisfied, right?
Not quite. In academia, summaries are despised; academia respects the “thesis paper” or “research paper,” an approach that apparently developed in German universities in the late 1800s, then spread to other countries. Which is better, the thesis or the summary?
In defense of summaries, I would argue that a summary is a creative act, partly because every sentence is a creative act (prose style is a creative act), partly because every summary will focus on different aspects of the work being summarized, partly because the writer of the summary brings his own interests/tastes/ideas to the task of summarizing. For example, when I summarized Darnton’s chapter on French folk tales, I compared Darnton’s remarks on French national character with Koestler’s remarks on the same subject. So my “summary” is different from summaries that might be written by others. Hopefully my summary will throw light on Darnton’s book, on French folk tales, on Koestler, etc.
My summary might help the reader toward broad knowledge, in a way that an academic “thesis” wouldn’t. The thesis encourages specialized knowledge, and discourages broad knowledge. And as Barfield points out, a summary helps the writer to understand what he’s read, and retain what he’s read.
Xi Jinping has been ruling China in a despotic manner for several years. People are told what to read, Internet access is controlled, everyone receives a grade for their behavior, cameras keep watch on everyone. After Mao’s death, the Chinese Communist Party tried to prevent one person from possessing total power, but Xi has elbowed past the “checks and balances,” and now possesses near-total power. Not content with crushing freedom in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang, Xi is determined to extend his grip over Taiwan. Obsessed with “national resurgence” and “unification,” Xi wants to channel all the energies of society toward military power and the conquest of Taiwan.
Xi’s bullying of neighboring nations has led to the formation of various alliances, alliances aimed at standing up to China. Xi also bullies Chinese businessmen; he seems to feel that both business and culture should serve the larger aim of national power — nothing matters but national power. When the pandemic struck, he was too nationalistic to buy foreign vaccines, forcing his people into protracted lockdowns.
Now foreign businesses are backing out of China, capital is leaving China, and the Chinese economy is stumbling. All this takes a toll on Xi’s popularity. Lockdowns led to protests. The future under Xi is beginning to look rather bleak; the list of China’s adversaries grows ever longer.
Are some high-ranking Chinese officials beginning to question the wisdom of Xi’s heavy-handed approach? The New York Times reported, “Questions are swirling around recent purges within the top levels of the Chinese government and the Communist Party.... An increasing number of Chinese citizens in elite circles are complaining about the direction of the country, criticizing Mr. Xi’s recent policies.” Could Xi be ousted by other Party leaders, as Khrushchev was ousted in 1964?
Under Xi, China appears to be a major threat to world peace, stability, and cooperation. Neither the U.S. nor Taiwan appears willing to do what it takes to deter China from invading Taiwan. Is it possible that the Chinese themselves, troubled by current trends, could move in a new direction, a less nationalistic, less belligerent direction? Is it possible that the “China Problem” could be solved by the Chinese themselves? Will the Chinese reflect that, in the long run, China’s well-being will depend, to a large extent, on the world’s well-being, and a more cooperative approach is in everyone’s interest?
The Chinese complain constantly that the U.S. is trying to “contain” China. Any day now, I expect that China will lay claim to Mars and Venus, and then cry “Containment!” if anyone questions their claim.
© L. James Hammond 2023
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, Ch. 1, pp. 16, 17
Coleridge discusses the difference between thought and attention in Aids To Reflection, “Introductory Aphorisms,” Aphorisms VII and VIII, and their footnotes. Coleridge is skilled at writing aphorisms. back |