The Love Triangle Comes Full Circle
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen is a good story. It is not a beautifully-written book, but it is a wonderful story. And it is a story with everything.
It is a story with a love triangle. Not just any ordinary love triangle, mind you, but one including a man, a woman and an elephant. Incredibly, the triangle is probably the most normal part of the tale.
It’s also a story about the circus, the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, no less. I haven’t read a book about the circus since Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes came out back in ’62. Circuses have always been dark places for me. It is not surprising then that I found Water for Elephants a dark book. It is about the seamier and steamier side of a life not evident under ‘The Big Top’. It takes place during the Great Depression, adding a layer of dreariness and desperation.
It’s a story about being trapped. Jacob Jankowski, in a decrepit body dumped in a claustrophobic nursing home where only memories of his days in the circus provide relief. Marlena, the star of an equestrian act, in a bad marriage to an abusive husband. Rosie the elephant, in a circumstance hardly of her choosing only seconds away from the painful prodding of a bull hook. All three in a world of wonder, excitement, passion and abject cruelty.
Most importantly, it’s a story about escape. Jacob loses everything when his parents are killed in a car accident. He runs away with the circus where his training as a veterinarian would come in most handy. He then has to escape the circus when the darkness begins to close in. Finally, altogether too many years later, he has to escape the straightjacket of his confinement and run back to the only home he ever really knew.
Inevitably, the book, as life, comes full circle. It is the way.
Interesting sidebar on this book and on Sara Gruen, a Canadian born and bred author currently residing in an environmentalist community outside Chicago. Despite the moderate acclaim earned by her first two novels, Riding Lessons and Flying Changes, her publisher turned down Water for Elephants. Eventually, she struck a cheap deal with Algonquin. 12 weeks on the N.Y. Times best-seller list and a quarter million dollars later, Gruen was set. Spiegel & Grau paid $5 million for her fourth novel, Ape House and another as-yet-unnamed book.
Eventually, talent, as life, becomes its own reward. It is also the way.
Uncertain About Word-of-the-Year
Last month, the Oxford American Dictionary (Oxford American? How’s that for an oxymoron?) picked the word ‘unfriend’ as the Word-of-the-Year.
According to the dictionary, the verb unfriend means to “remove someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook”.
This is a most unfortunate word, coming out of the unlovely side of social media. I am not unaware of the networking realities of Facebook and I am not unsympathetic to those not yet friended who are unhappily burdened with being unattached in a vast interconnected world. In that context, unfriending seems particularly unkind and makes friending in the first place an almost capricious exercise. Being thus uncoupled undercuts one’s sense of belonging and underscores the fleeting uncertainty of friendships altogether.
I am unsure of how the dons of the Oxford American Dictionary made their selection. Apparently, part of the appeal of unfriend was the rarity (unusuality?) of an ‘un’-prefixed word assuming a verb sense of friend, i.e., to friend, that is not used. You do not friend, you befriend. As such, says Christine Lindberg, a senior lexicographer with the dictionary, “unfriend has real lex appeal”.
Oh, really?
Among the contenders for the WOTY Award were a number of sniglets, including:
- intexticated - distracted by texting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle; and
- freemium - a business model in which some basic services are provided for free with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content.
There were the compound words and images, my favourite being ‘tramp stamp’, a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman. My only issue here is that I am sure tramp stamp is already several years old.
I also admit to being impressed by the seemingly endless stream of neologisms Twitter is contributing to the English language, many of which vied for Word-of-the-Year. If you don’t like the words, you at least have to love the chutzpah inherent in twitterati and twitterature. With such pretension, it is no wonder that people become tweetaholics.
In fact, the web contributed disproportionately to the lexicon in 2009. Sad, really, when you consider that the beauty and strength of the English language stem directly from the diversity of its sources.
The WOTY winner must “reflect the ethos of the year” and it must “have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance and use”. Unfriend, begat by the spread of social media, may well reflect the ethos and, indeed, the pathos of 2009. But as to having lasting cultural significance, I would think it most unlikely.
(For more on neologisms, please see: Don’t Snigger at Sniglets and A Case of the Twiggles.)
Alexandria: Of Pharaohs and Philosophers
If you are reading this, odds are you were bedeviled by those horrible deductions in the back of your high school geometry books. That’s the geometry introduced to the world by Euclid of Alexandria in his seminal work, The Elements, way back during the reign of Ptolemy I (323–283 BC).
With its famed Museum and Library, Alexandria was the centre of the world for learning and Euclid was just one of a host of distinguished alumni.
Ptolemy, with his Hellenic philosophical bent and Pharaonic aspirations, saw Alexandria as a nexus for commerce, knowledge and dynastic control. The city was a jewel in its conception, planning and construction. The lighthouse at Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was just one of many architectural marvels. But it was the intellectual capital that made Alexandria so rich and its legacy so enduring.
The Library’s collection was vast, housing virtually all the written works of the age. Its only competition was the Library at Pergamum, said by Plutarch to house some 200,000 volumes. Until, that is, Mark Antony turned over the entire Pergamum collection to the Library at Alexandria as a wedding present to his beloved Cleopatra (last of the Ptolemys).
Among the early librarians was Apollonius, author of the poem Argonautica. That epic tells the story of Jason and the heroes who sailed on the Argo to capture the golden fleece from Colchis. Apollonius’ successor was a brilliant mathematician and scientist, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, credited with having calculated the Earth’s circumference. Eratosthenes was a close friend of Archimedes who came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study and was a frequent visitor of the Museum.
The first head of the Museum was Ctesibius of Alexandria. He wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps, earning him the title of “The Father of Pneumatics.” His protégé, Hero of Alexandria, created the first steam engine, predating the industrial revolution by two millennia.
The Museum was also the centre of philosophical discourse. Platonists and neoplatonists, stoics and epicureans all passed through the hallowed halls. Neoplatonism was one of the most influential philosophies of late antiquity and Plotinus’ metaphysical writings in the Enneads inspired centuries of pagan, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Gnostic and mystical thought.
The Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, was carried out in Alexandria in stages between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC by Jewish scholars, to whom Philo and Josephus ascribed divine inspiration.
Philo used allegory to fuse and harmonize Greek philosophy and Judaism. There are those who believe that his concept of the Logos as God’s “blueprint for the world” formed the basis of Christianity.
No Literarian post would be complete without at least a few quotes and Philo is good for it:
“Those who give hoping to be rewarded with honor are not giving; they are bargaining.”
“Grey hairs are signs of wisdom…if you hold your tongue.”
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
In short, Alexandria was the mainspring from which philosophical, mathematical, scientific, medical, cosmological and religious thought emanated for centuries. It was a coming together of genius, a place where ideas were exchanged and creative energy flowed freely.
In the end, Julius Caesar, possibly a tsunami, certainly the inevitable ravages of time, conspired to bring destruction to the Museum, the Library and much of the city itself. The record is not as certain as the result. The Library of Alexandria and all its invaluable contents are gone. The legacy, though, will last forever.
To learn more, get yourself a copy of The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Birthplace of the Modern Mind. The authors, Justin Pollard and Howard Reid are noted producers of PBS documentaries. Their intellectual rigor, flare for the dramatic, and accessibility to all audiences are well-honed and shine through in this work.
G.K. Chesterton: Tremendous Trifles
I remember a former boss criticizing and ultimately crushing a colleague with this scathing and unforgettable description: “He has only one idea and it is wrong.”
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a versatile and enormously gifted writer. He was also a prolific writer, having published some 80 books, a dozen posthumously. The fact that he was both perceptive and productive, that he combined a discerning eye with a fertile mind, that he saw life through a prism of paradoxes, made it almost inevitable that he would become the source of a near endless array of punchy lines and pithy sayings, so many of which resonate to this day. Unlike my unfortunate and now undone colleague, Chesterton was a man of many ideas and, a century later, there is still little to fault with any of them.
Chesterton had strength of character and conviction. For a self-described ‘rollicking journalist’, he had strongly-held opinions and defended them vigorously.
Still in his 20s, he was one of the few journalists who publicly opposed the Boer War. Over the years, he held fast to his anti-war sentiments. “The only defensible war”, he wrote in his Autobiography (published in 1937), “is a war of defense”.
Chesterton was highly politicized, his politics coloured by his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and power.
On the nations’ leadership, he scathingly wrote: “Democracy means government by the uneducated. Aristocracy means government by the badly educated.” And: “When a politician is in opposition, he is an expert on the means to some end; when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.”
His take on national pride is a classic: “(Saying) ‘My country right or wrong’ is like saying ‘my mother, drunk or sober’.”
Chesterton’s gregarious manner and wry humor belied a deep troubling over the vagaries, paradoxes and inconsistencies of life. He found answers in Christianity; his books on the subject contained some of his most memorable thoughts, not always religious ones.
From his 1905 Heretics: “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” The sequel, Orthodoxy, appeared three years later and provided this gem: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”
Ultimately, the failings of other societal structures gave way to the constancy and incontrovertibility of faith. From his Introduction to the Book of Job (1907), Chesterton makes it clear that “the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man”. In Christendom in Dublin, published in 1933, he wrote: “Once abolish the God… government becomes the God.” And, finally: “When people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything”.
Of course, not all his subjects were lofty; some of his targets were, frankly, of low stature. Consider these observations on thieves: “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become theirs so that they may more perfectly respect it.” And “Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.”Anything and everything was grist for his always turning, ever-churning mill. “There is no such thing…as an uninteresting subject”, he wrote. “The only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
According to Charles Dickens, “trifles make the sum of life”. This has special meaning when it comes to Chesterton, whose keen eyes caught the essence of even the most mundane things. You know someone can put things in their proper perspective when he can write a book called On Running After One’s Hat, All Things Considered. Perhaps the best example of Chesterton’s ability to turn trivia into timeless truths is his wonderfully witty Tremendous Trifles, published in 1909.
From this classic and others, come the following Chesterton observations worth contemplating:
“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”
“One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.”
With a broad sweep from his unique vantage point, Chesterton managed to take in everything, great and small.
