Sunday, December 8, 2002

Does Anyone Understand the Applicability of Darwin's Theory? Reading the New York Times list of Editors' Choices in today's Book Review, I came across this in their summary of Middlesex: This story is epic -- in spirit, scope, and definitely in organization. Jeffrey Eugenides dares to base the plot on genetic theory, so if Homer is a distant ancestor, Darwin is another. The narrator's recessive gene makes "transgender" the governing word here. How he got the gene is traced through three generations of immigrants who escape the Turkish massacre of Greeks in Smyrna in 1922 to live through 80 years of bootlegging, Depression, war, race riots and counterculture in Detroit. Eugenides gets the scientific theory right and lets us understand it in laughter and astonishment. Though genetics is a necessary precursor to Darwin's theory of evolution, he was never an expert in or theorist of genetics. If the narrator's family were followed over thousands of years and shown to evolve in response to its environment over that time, then Darwin might be an appropriate ancestor. Darwin's theory is so elegantly simple. Why is it so frequently misunderstood and misused? 8:01:43 PM     What do you think? ()

But What Has President Bush Actually Done Right? In an editorial today, Thomas L. Friedman wonders: For me, the question is whether President Bush, having amassed all this political capital by effectively responding to 9/11, is going to spend any of it--is going to ask Americans to do things that are really hard to win these wars over the long haul. For me, the question is how exactly has President Bush responded effectively to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or anything else for that matter. Al Qaida is still the threat that they were then, we have no idea where all of that anthrax came from, the economy keeps getting worse, our constitutional rights (except, curiously, for our right to bear arms) are evaporating, and everything has become politicized. I suppose that when visiting the attack sites, he didn't actually urinate on the wreckage, but I can't think of much else to say in favor of his handling of events. 4:43:45 PM     What do you think? ()

Does It All Come Back to Not Me? After an afternoon listening to Michael Hoffman's seductive elaboration of his theory of ego death (with a weird digression into entheogens), I returned to the comfort of my own home and my companion for the last year, Marcel Proust. Half way through "Finding Time Again," the last of six volumes, more than two-thousand pages into the novel, Proust has finally reached his point and explained what he means by Lost Time (or Temps Perdu), and his point (which seems closely related to Michael Hoffman's) is that there's another self (not the "me" with which we are familiar) outside of time and place that is revealed by sensations that overlap across time: The same was not true of the three recollections I had just had and in which, instead of giving me a more flattering idea of my self, I had on the contrary almost doubted the self's current reality. For the truths that the intellect grasps directly as giving access to the world of full enlightenment have something less profound, something less necessary about them than those that life has, despite ourselves, communicated in an impression, a material impression because it enters through our senses, but one from which it is also possible to extract something spiritual. So there it is, the Buddhist notion of reaching Nibbana through the mindful extermination of the ego, the Eastern notion of transcendentalism, which Proust seems to have discovered on his own, without any prior knowledge of those traditions. It's only after a year of reading the novel that I look back over it with some sense of what was there for me to see. It is with this scene in the Prince de Guermantes's library where the narrator discovers the notion of Lost Time that Samuel Beckett begins his book on Proust. Now I can read and perhaps understand that book, which I've frequently heard is the most insightful guide to Proust. Maybe this is the ultimate key to the "difficulty" of Proust--not the length of his novel or the size and complexity of his prose structures (sentences that go on for a page or more, with endless subordinate clauses, and paragraphs that go on for what might pass for a chapter in other books) in and of themselves, but the fact that all of that must be navigated before the novel is elucidated. That's not to say that the earlier volumes can't be enjoyed immensely in and of themselves, but their power is significantly amplified by the ideas of the last volume. More and more, I feel a compulsion to begin again as soon as I've finished. 12:24:45 PM     What do you think? ()

© Copyright 2003 Morgan N. Sandquist. Last update: 11/2/03; 10:32:15 AM.

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