Land of Lime

Joseph Frank, that heroic Dostoevsky Chronicler, reviews in the New Republic a recently published volume of Albert Camu’s artciles written between 1944-47. As he says:

They provide the English reader with a rewarding immersion in a little-known part of Camus’s work as he was blossoming into a writer of world fame, and also in the social and political questions that provoked Camus’s pieces, which have lost none of their acuity. It is astonishing to see how many of the issues on which Camus comments, and which were broached by the situation in which he was writing, anticipate and prefigure problems that continue to afflict us today. In his commentaries, Camus never stays on the surface of the events that provide his starting point; he is always searching for the deeper causes–moral, social, psychological, or ultimately religious (though he was not a believer of any kind)–that motivate human behavior. For this reason, many of these occasional writings still live. 

London Review of Books has this long essay entitled Blood for Oil. Read it for an interesting, plausible and even compelling explanation of US adventure in Iraq.

One of my favorite writers, E.L.Doctorow reviews The Iliad.

Homer (or the stable of poets incorporated under the name Homer) was either given to polytheistic fantasy or was the genius adapter of a system of cosmological metaphors that no one — not Dante, not Shakespeare, not Cervantes — has ever matched for sheer imaginative insanity. Read Homer’s hexameters and you find gods made in the image of man — jealous, mendacious, erotically charged, vengefully disposed, gender-specific know-it-alls, with empowering aptitudes that they wield as weapons in heaven as they do on earth. …… But who would give up the Iliad for the historical record? Evidence suggests the Homeric epic was transcribed after generations of oral transmission. The historical facts came down through the ages fused into blinding bardic revelation.

The novelist is not alone in understanding that reality is amenable to any construction placed upon it. … The historian and the novelist both work to deconstruct the aggregate fictions of their societies. The scholarship of the historian does this incrementally, the novelist more abruptly, from his unforgivable (but exciting) transgressions, as he writes his way in and around and under the historian’s work, animating it with the words that turn into the flesh and blood of living, feeling people. ….. The consanguinity of historians and novelists may be indicated by recent efforts of distinguished historians who, feeling themselves constrained by their discipline, have taken to writing novels. One presidential biographer has discovered no other way to accomplish his task than by yielding to unattributable flights of fancy. We should not be surprised by these border crossings. Who among writers of any genre would not want to see into the unseen?

Finally on some reflections on Happiness,  which Aristotle defines as “an activity of the soul that expresses virtue.” But as a commentator told the essayist, Jennifer Senior, “anyone who could maintain a state of happiness, given the state of the world, is living in a delusion.”

Question of the week: You think the Soul can express Virtue today or anyone who thinks thus is delusional?