Three hundred sixteen pages from Viking Press. This is my first book by this Nobel winning author and I'm quite impressed. Sometimes when I read a book that belongs to me I turn down a corner of pages that I want to come back to later. Since I've begun writing these desultory commentaries on books I have read, I find myself doing this more frequently. (Sometimes I even underline passages!) I tried to use some discretion this time, but at the end of the book, I found that I had turned down 21 pages. Turning a page down usually means I've found something that seems so profound, I wanna quote the whole passage. Maybe 21 quotes is a little extreme for an informal list of thoughts that occur to a person with no training in literature.
A criticism of sorts: This is definitely a literary work, by which I mean it's kinduva a high class book. It's not so much the words I had trouble with, as their connection. Several times I found myself reading a passage over and over without understanding what purpose it served. What was Mr. Sammler trying to tell me? And I must say that Mr Sammler is someone I wanted to understand. I couldn't help liking him, admiring him, respecting him, sympathizing with him. A sane and profound man able to retain his compure when surrounded by insane and inane people.
Mr. Sammler was born in Poland, was a prisoner in Germany during WW II, escaped and returned to Poland to find that Poland had decided it needed fewer Jews, hid out in a cemetery (if I recall), lived in England, and ended up in the US. A man of the world. A educated man, who had survived a great many harrowing experiences and become somewhat wise along the way. [It doesn't always happen that way now. I know the popular myth is that older people are wise. It's true that youth is the antithesis of wisdom. But it's not true that age is equivalent to wisdom. If a person was an idiot in his youth, he will probably remain an idiot during his sojourn.] Mr. Sammler pays attention to what's going on around him. And that, combined with his willingness and ability to examine his life and the people in it is what (seems to have) developed his wisdom.
In a way, I hate reading this literary stuff. It's enjoyable (for the most part), but I always wonder if I'm really getting what the author is saying, or if I'm just reading what I want to think into it. Near the end of this one, for example, I got really pissed and when I finished I had to put the book down a few days and think before writing this. I had spent all that time reading and learning to like this Sammler who says so many things that I have wanted to say, but couldn't find the right words to say....but near the end I got the feeling that SB was patronizing him...diminishing the message(s) I perceived coming from Sammler. Hey, it's perfectly natural for people who don't know what's going on to be paranoid that the people who do know what's going on are conspiring against him. And so, I began to think that this literary fellow might have set up a plot to make Sammler look foolish. I got the impression that maybe Sammler had suffered so much in his life that he'd set up this wall of impersonality around him and that the death of his nephew (in law) forced him to understand that. In retrospect, I think that was wrong. He wasn't trying to negate Sammler's view of humanism, but to emphasize it.
A Dr. Lal whose book Sammler's daughter has acquired for him writes about man's future on the moon. Sammler is intrigued. But Sammler's planet is Earth where he is surrounded by loony people. One is left with the distinct impression that when/if we are eventually able to live on the moon, that there will still be a lot of loony people there.
I'll try to keep the quotes down, but I can't help including a few. Early in the book, Sammler gets invited to give a talk on the "British scene in the Thirties." During the talk, he gets shouted down and away by some pseudointellectual twit jumps up and tells him that what he's saying is shit and what he recalls of Orwell (from a personal acquaintance with him) is shit. Later a pensive Sammler is thinking of the student 'intellectuals': "They [the young students] had no view of the nobility of being intellectuals and judges of the social order....Who had raised the diaper flag? Who had made shit a sacrement?"
Near the middle of the book, Sammler talks about relovutions and the fact that what makes them so equalizing is that the revolutionists get to kill with the same impunity (and presumably, heartlessness) that was usually reserved for those of the higher classes.
Later (page 216) is an excellent point "But when people out of contempt for impotence and paralyzed talk throw themselves into noble actions, do they know what they are doing? When they being to call for blood, and advocate terror, or proclaim a general egg- breaking to make a great historical omelet, do they know what they are calling for? When they have struck a mirror with a hammer, aiming to repair it, can they put the fragments together again?"
Powerful stuff that's been on my mind for a long time. All this talk of the glory of revolution makes me sick. These are narcissists coveting a place in the history books. "We're the good guys. We fought and died for a good cause. We risked everything. Weren't we grand?" And they decide for themselves and for everyone else that the eggs they break making their omelete are worth the price. The students protesting at TAM, e.g., tended to be a young lot. And here we were in the west encouraging them to go beyond what was prudent into the realm of the stupid. The old people (not just the communists, but anyone old enough to remember the previous revolution) were terrified of what revolution would really mean. You bet your behind they know what it means. Saul wasn't writing about one particular group at one particular time, though. He was broaching a recurring historical theme.
He really hit the nail on the head. Look at the way pseudointellectuals on college campuses go to lectures of people they don't like and do all they can to disrupt. We witnessed a similar thing on television here recently when Madeleine Albright, et. al., went to a college campus and was shouted down by people. One fellow asked a good question, and while she was attempting to answer there was a lot of jeering and so forth. Then the rude little twit says in a stupidly smug tone, "You're NOT answering my question, Madame Albright!" And somebody pays good money to send this person to school, no doubt. I hope it's not the taxpayers. Of course a person being shouted down is not expected to answer a question clearly by anyone who is honest.
Another example (from memory) Richard Feynman relates in one of his quasi-autobiographical books is how some feminists attempted to disrupt one of his lectures.
A similar thing happened at University of Louisville when two Arabic professors were denied tenure. (One of them was my thesis advisor.) Their case was brought before the board of trustees for the university. A number of students showed up at the proceedings. Two of the campus pseudointellectuals (part of the pseudointellectual student league, PSL) stood up in front of the group with arms crossed and gave some short speech about how they were putting an end to the mockery. They were then told that if they didn't sit down that the proceedings would be resumed at a later time in a private place where they couldn't cause trouble. So the two pseudointellectuals sat down. Thing is that there was a group of other pseudointellectuals with these pseudointellectuals. And none of these people were people I recognized as being from the engineering school - none of them were people who would have any basis for understanding whether these professors really were qualified. It was a sickening thing. Later, The professors won their case (fortunately), and I'm sure the pseudo- intellectual student league and the University of Louisville claims a great amount of credit for the outcome. And it's my opinion they are grossly overestimating their own influence, which I strongly suspect was largely ignored, because it was based on ignorance, browbeating, and politics instead of reason and knowledge of the facts. (I and a few others of their students wrote letters of support for these professors in the campus newspaper and directly to the board. I suspect these had more influence on the outcome than did the shouts by the ignorant of "NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!")
Back to Mr. Sammler though. Last paragraph emphasizes that Sammler is grateful that we (all of us) have some sense of our responsibilities under the social contract - that we have this intuitively. (He says it's given to us by god.) That we understand what our obligations are to our fellow men. I think we can safely assume Mr. Sammler is not a libertarian.
An interesting thing. Der Sammler is the German word for 'collector.' Is this significant? What is it that Mr. Sammler collects? Friends? Family? Wisdom? Surely he collects reminiscences - of his time in the prison camp, of his sojourn in Poland, of his time in the middle east. Maybe that's what he collects. Reminiscences and wisdom. Is he himself a collection of his experiences? Is he the embodiment of wisdom?
I'll probably read some more of Mr. Bellows in the future - hopefully sometime before we start settling on the moon.
