Epicurus

•Daniel Klein: Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life.. New York: The Penguin Group, 2012. 164 pages. ISBN 978-0143-12662-1.

Eastside Road, January 18, 2015—

NEARLY TWENTY YEARS ago I was handed a serious diagnosis and an appointment with surgery. I was already retired, but barely sixty years old, not really ready to face mortality. On arriving at the doctor's office to discuss scheduling a nurse noticed I was carrying a small book with me.

The nurse was slim, tall, rather elegant, probably in her thirties; clearly of Ethiopian stock, with that beautifully chiselled brow and nose that I associate with the heritage. I see you're reading Epicurus, she said. Good. Especially read the Letter to Menoeceus. Oh: and be kind to your wife, who is suffering, and who will work hard for you.

The surgery was successful; the recovery took only a month or so; I'm still living with the diagnosis; I've treasured Epicurus ever since. I think it one of the great tragedies of human history that Christianity did such a solid job of shouldering Hellenism aside — co-opting what it could distort to its ends, of course. In this no doubt I am influenced by my mother, who was a stoic and an agnostic, and who subtly shaped me in the only way that made any sense to her.

Last month at Christmas Lindsey and I played the O. Henry game, giving one another the very same book, Daniel Klein's Travels with Epicurus. We will be eighty years old this year, and we're aware of the lessend span ahead of us. It's time to begin putting things in order, setting aside vain thoughts of works and legacy, enjoying the rich though simple pleasures of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, daily routines, the table, contentment.

Epicurus believed that the purpose of life was pleasure, and that pleasure lay in the avoidance of pain — by renouncing commerce and industry as far as possible, and complex and costly tastes, and ostentation and concern for position. According to Klein's refreshing, easily read narrative, Epicurus treasured above all a simple life, eating from the garden, with friends of all backgrounds (women as well as men, exceptionally for his society), with conversation at the center of daily activity.

Klein is an interesting author, a man with one foot in philosophy and the other in humor. He's written half a dozen mysteries, a couple of plays, and three novels, as well as a series of little books aimed at presenting the parade of western philosophy to the general public. Last month I enjoyed a quick read through Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, which he wrote with Thomas Cathcart.

Travels with Epicurus finds the 72-year-old Klein spending a few weeks on the Greek island of Hydra, where he's gone with a few books and the intent to ccome to terms with the great conundrum of post-career life: How To Live Well (in the face of the Grim Reaper). The books on his his list are on my own reading pile — the pile of Books Currently (or Constantly) Being Read, be it understood, not Books To Read Some Day. They are Montaigne, William James, Erik Erikson. Also a couple that have been on the To Be Bought list for years: Huizinga, Lars Svendsen, Eva Hofmann.

Reading them confirms what is learned more readily by the simple observation of life on this apparently relaxed island, where there are no motor vehicles, where old men spend their time eating simply, drinking ouzo, playing cards, and conversing gently about not very important but eternally rewarding mundane things. Oh: and occasionally dancing — seriously, intently, ritualistically.

What emerges is a short course on practical philosophy:

…the prime purpose of a philosophy: to give us lucid ways to think about the world and how to live in it.

Travels with Epicurus, p. 26

…pleasures are to be aoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.

Montaigne, quoted in Travels with Epicurus, p. 32

…[to want to reactivate] one's libnido… amounts to wanting to want something you currently don't want

ibid., p. 89

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, smiles, and says yes.

Wm. James, The Variety of Religious Experiences, quoted in Travels with Epicurus, p. 116

We must not expect more precision than the subject-matter permits.

Aristotle, quoted ibid., p. 159

You get the idea. The book is calm, persuasive, sensible, friendly, easily read, easily kept at hand for late night re-reading. It should be given to every retiree.

Exposition, Development, Recapitulation

I think there's something to be said for the idea that Modernism stands at the beginning of the third of three great ages of human existence: the one preceding the awareness of consciousness, which Julian Jaynes puts at about the time of Homer; then a long age which is characterized by the long slow crescendo of human consciousness; and then a third age that begins with the awareness of the awareness of consciousness.

Well, perhaps Modernism is really best understood as a logical development of the Renaissance, whose “moment” is the true beginning (as if a single moment can define it) of this third age. But if you draw a rough analogy to the development of an individual human, maybe it would be:

1: Human life unaware of consciousness. Infancy-childhood: human history up to the Renaissance. (Sorry, Age of Pericles; I know you really belong later; you jumped the gun.) Prehistory.

2: Human life aware of consciousness. Adolescence: human history Age of Pericles-Modernism. History.

3: Human life aware of the consequences of the awareness of consciousness. Adulthood: Modernism on. Will there be an early senescence? Probably. Metahistory, or Historicism.

This looks like college-student late-night talk, I know. And it’s influenced by a book many think of as dubious, Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977). Jaynes, an American psychologist who published no other book, held consciousness to be a cultural construct, not an autonomous function of the individual human “mind.” (Those are precautionary quotes; let’s not take up the question of “mind” here.) As I recall — I read the book a long time ago, and haven’t revisited it — he takes care not to fix an exact date or cultural “moment” at which this construct appears; but he does identify it, in the Mediterranean context, with the Homeric age, arising between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Jaynes cites evidence for his hypothesis in linguistic and economic models, among others, and finds in psychological evidence of our own time parallels to the historical (and prehistorical) patterns of unconsciousness, consciousness, and their interfaces. I found his discussions persuasive; and am particularly interested now to read scientists arguing for the abrupt big changes that can determine human behavior, collectively (politically) as well as individually. Nassim Taleb, in The Black Swan, discusses such cataclysms in the economic sphere; the research geologist Dave Wahl, in the current issue of Terrain, discusses them with respect to climatological changes. (Taleb; my earlier blog on Taleb ; Wahl.)

Historicism is inevitably recursive. I’ve always loved Francis Ponge’s description of recursive irony — he cites Maurice Ravel's La Valse — as typical of periods "when rhetoric, dying, examines itself.” (Lane Dunlop's translation, in Soap [London: Jonathan Cape, 1969]; in the original Ce genre est particulier aux epoques ou la rhetorique est perdue, se cherche: [Le Savon: Paris: Gallimard, 1967]). [Cited in my article “What's the Matter with Today's Experimental Music? Organized Sound Too Rarely Heard,” Notes, December, 1993.]

To continue woolgathering: there may be a parallel between all this and the inevitable process which finds "art" declining from Religion to Art to Entertainment. (See Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ; and see also Wikipedia on Walter Benjamin. Come to think of it, Benjamin himself should be added to Jaynes, Cage, Duchamp, and many others as a seminal organizer of aware-or-consciousness consciousness.)

"Values," abstraction, accumulation, chaos

FOR SOME TIME NOW I've wanted to write about a fascinating book read last month, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007). Alas, I read it from the library, and did not take notes; I won't write about it in any critical detail here. (There's an extended discussion of the book online.)
Briefly, it's Taleb's point that history is the litany of convulsive unexpected events punctuating daily predictability. (It occurs to me that The Blog is a convenient analogy.) The title refers to the scientific and philosophical certainty, going back to Aristotle, that swans are white, a black one being exceedingly improbable — a certainty convulsed by the discovery of black ones when Australia was "discovered" in the 17th century.
Taleb uses analogy and metaphor to propel his book, analogy and metaphor and above all humor; and he does this so well that one races through it where one should stop and consider, take note and perhaps demur.
Another bird metaphor intrudes: his Turkey Narrative. The turkey, according to Taleb, assumes that tomorrow will be just like today, someone will come and feed it as has happened every day of his life. The turkey does not suspect that final morning, when instead of being fed he'll be sent to slaughter.
As you might have suspected, The Black Swan is largely about Wall Street. It is also an assault on the idea of the Bell Curve, on the notion that Experts Are Infallible, on The narrative fallacy which, according to the Wikipedia discussion referenced above,

refers to our tendency to construct stories around facts, which … may serve a purpose, but when someone begins to believe the stories and accommodate facts into the stories, they are likely to err.

and on the division of information among the categories Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
That last will sound familiar to those whose memories go back to the early days of the present Iraq war. I always thought in not amusing that Secretary Rumsfeld talked about "unknown unknowns"; it seemed a perfectly legitimate concept to me. Turns out that Nassim Taleb was a consultant, on occasion, to the Department of Defense. Indeed he writes, in The Black Swan, of a brainstorming session he attended in Las Vegas, of all places:

The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and ated like philosophers… I came out of the meeting realizing that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. … the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defense people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk. (p. 126)

TALEB REFERS TO HIMSELF as a "skeptical pragmatist," a phrase I like; and divides the world we live in into two mental constructs: Mediocristan, "the province dominated by the mediocre, with few extreme successes or failures," ruled by the bell curve; and Extremistan, "the province where the total can be conceivably impacted by a single observation," like that of the final arrival of the turkey-farmer. His book goes a long way to suggesting reasons for the institutional failure of the market this year, and indeed the statistical near-certainty that such failures will happen. Another publication, much smaller and less public, discusses a different philosophical approach to the problem: Money and the Crisis of Civilization, an essay by Charles Eisenstein published at Reality Sandwich, an online forum-magazine-construct so visually cluttered I haven't had the desire to explore it further.
I am impressed, though, with Eisenstein's essay (and thank Richard Burg for sending it to me). It explains the paper credit crisis very clearly (perhaps too simply, economists might object), and then comes to a startling conclusion. The entire affair is of course a gigantic Ponzi scheme (here again Wikipedia is entertaining): moreover, Eisenstein suggests, the entire history of capitalist economy is a Ponzi scheme, and the current crisis is another in what may be the death throes of capitalist economics as we've known it for the last century or so.
The startling conclusion is that Capitalism has very nearly eaten itself to death. The problem lies in the conversion of Things to Money. Money originated as a token of a pledge, an object to stand for the promise to pay in the future, with a service or a product, in return for a temporary loan symbolized by the token: a shell, gold, a slip of special paper, whatever.
Eisenstein recites the dismal litany of Things sacrificed, one after another in the several centuries of capitalist history, to the conversion into Money — which had gradually grown from token of delayed repayment to retained "Wealth":

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. …
The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the "developed" world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

---

WHICH LEADS ME TO the phrase in today's subject-line. I think of this latest crisis, the one centered on the Global Economy and its collapse (though no doubt to be set right temporarily by the infusion of money promised, yet again, by an unknowable Future), as more evidence that contemporary social life is accelerating itself to death. Matt Matsuda writes about this in his book The Memory of the Modern (Oxford University Press US, 1996):

One key, recurring word explains all: acceleration. Pierre Nora begins Les Lieux de mémoire under its sign: "The acceleration of History: let us try to gauge the significance, beyond metaphor, of this phrase. An increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear." As History accelerates, the "lieux de mémoire" are designated sites which defy time's destroyer, the places of commemoration where memory anchors the past. My studies, rooted in the biology, technologies, and political economy of the late nineteenth century are somewhat differently oriented: they attempt to approximate Henri Bergson's understanding of memory as action and transformation. In looking to shattered monuments, financial markets, high-seed machines, and the nervous system, my subjects are not the memories preserved from an accelerating history, but histories of accelerated memory, subjected to the dramatic rhythms of an age.

(Think of Francis Ponge's note, in Soap, that that (French) literary device the momon is typical of late historical eras in which rhetoric, dying, turns on itself; Ravel's La Valse is a good example.)
If we're indeed in a "downhill slide," acceleration is as inevitable as gravity; putting on Henry Paulson's brakes will generate a lot of heat, very little light, and only somewhat slow the collapse of the monetary economy. So what should we do? In Taleb's words,

Snub your destiny. … You stand above the rat race and the pecking ordere, not outside it, if you do so by choice.
Quiting a high-payiing position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved… (p. 297)

And in Eisenstein's:

Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. So stop resisting the revolution in human beingness. If you want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, do not seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, allow your perspective to shift toward reunion, and think in terms of what you can give. What can you contribute to a more beautiful world? That is your only responsibility and your only security. The gifts you need to survive and enjoy will come to you easily, because what you do to the world, you do to yourself.

I THINK IT'S OUR endless tendency to evade the immediate that gets us into trouble, whether the evasion is prompted by boredom, distaste, laziness, or greed. It has something to do with our apparently also innate tendency to abstract and generalize, to categorize. Obviously it's useful to do that; it makes it possible to sort things out, to lay things aside for future use, to communicate concepts effectively (if not always truthfully) by using analogy and narrative. The problem is that it's so easy to forget that that's what you're doing, that you're dealing with not the thing but the idea of the thing. The Industrial and postindustrial ages have accelerated the extend to which the concept, the idea, has displaced the thing, the real. Profit-based economy is in a state of near-terminal confusion about this, generating commodities sold and bought for their code value, conceiving and generating services serving artificially generated needs.
When Senators Obama and McCain are asked what they will do about the economy they tend to talk about taxes, bailouts, jobs, mortgages: all of them very important politically. Lately Obama has also been talking about government kicking the economy by addressing infrastructure repair, which sounds a lot like a WPA effort: if so, good, say I: that was an triple effort aimed at improving the economy, employing the out of work, and providing for the community.
In the last analysis much of what I've been calling vaguely "the problem" results from the detachment of details from the context in which they exist. Money from an economy; concept from a reality; profit from an exchange; individuals from society. And, increasingly, it seems to me that this kind of detachment grows exponentially — accelerates, in fact — in a society whose numbers increase unsustainably, resulting in greater pressures of various kinds, and the temptation to turn against one's society, one's community, for sheer survival (as one thinks), rather than to trim one's individual sails, turn away from the accumulation of wealth, and take an appropriate place within the world as it is.
As the turbulence accompanying this process, and generated by it, continues, the things that truly matter to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are overcome by an accelerating accumulation of complexity leading to chaos. I hope the next Administration will think about these things. Perhaps the Department of Defense can give the departments of the Treasury and of Health and Human Services some pointers.

Discursive wit

THE BAD NEWS FIRST: Jonathan Williams has died. A fine obit on Ron Silliman's blog brings this to my attention: one of Ron's many virtues is his care to alert the community to such events, which grow, alas, more frequent.

I really know of Williams through only one of his many books, The Magpie's Bagpipe [San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982], a selection of essays. I bought it (used) in 1985, in Capitola of all places, after having opened it at random and read

The large armadillo-=like lady who rattles her bracelets and clicks her compact two minutes before the end of Das Lied von der Erde is not my friend. It is from her million-headed inattentions and carelessnesses that I have tried to remove myself by going to Carnegie Hall to hear Gustav Mahler's song-symphony. Yes, "I too know that the blackbird is involved in what I know," said Wallace Stevens, and I'll add armadillos, but that is something quite different. The lady, then, must be a friend of John Cage's, who once told me he hated all music except his own, and who now tells me that perhaps the noises of the environment are more interesting…

["Surely Reality is More Interesting"]

Elsewhere:

It was Walter Pater's contention that "all arts aspire to the condition of music." Ezra Pound agreed and insisted that poetry atrophies when it gets too far from musc. Goethe declared that architecture was just frozen music. And Arthur Dove gives us a clarification (and alarming complication) in notes to his exhibition at Stieglitz's the Intimate Gallery (1929):

There is no such thing as abstraction.

It is extraction, gravitation toware a certain direction, and minding your own business.

If the exact be clear enough its value will exist.

It is nearer to music, not the music of the ears… the music of the eyes.

["Some Speak of a Return to Nature— I Wonder Where They Could Have Been"]

And so on. You see from this that Williams rambles; his is a large play-space; he turns phrases memorably. Discursive wit is my ice-cream. Now Williams is gone, though The Magpie's Bagpipe is still up there on the shelf, between Emmet (Sweethearts, Something Else Press, 1968) and William Carlos (various). So Jonathan Williams is not really gone: but I wish I had met him while he was closer.

---

THE GOOD NEWS: To Mills College last night, there to see a solo presentation by Margaret Fisher, dancer, choreographer, video producer, author; stage director of my opera The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even when its first act was produced at Mills in 1984; a strong and handsome woman of immense intuitive intelligence and patient expression. (And, I must add, a longtime friend.)

The Ensemble Room of the Mills Music Building (which is otherwise being extensively reconstructed) was packed, and a number of faces there were familiar from years ago, from the 1970s and '80s. There were four items on the program:

• A silent viewing of stills from the opera: photographs by Margaret and by Larry Neff, with members of the cast in Cynthia DuVal's memorable costumes (see some of these online). Twenty-five years, nearly, since that production: I really should "finish" that opera one of these days! (Why? Duchamp didn't "finish" the Large Glass…)

• Letters of Duchamp, the striking 1994 twelve-minute video record of the live production of that name, a longer three-act strictly choreographic treatment which I suspect was planned for the central scene of the opera, Act II scene 3, but whose music relied only on my first piano sonata (Bachelor Machine, since there's no recording or even synthesization of the rest of the score. Malic molds, chocolate grinder, bicycle wheel, the marvelous Eliane Lust playing a piano on a platform slowly towed across the stage by strongman Jerry Carniglia…

• a new piece, Heaven's Dark Side: the body, a vocalized meditation on etymology, opposition, and resolution. Nearly half an hour long, this featured Margaret mostly unseen on a balcony above the stage (bride-space from Duchamp?) declaiming, in an exaggerated Georgia accent, a text contemplating Light and Darkness, occasionally wandering into a fictionalized birdsong Sanskrit and a "chiselled" quasi-pedantic Latin. I was particularly struck by her fastening on the Latin word caelum, which she divides into two cells -lum, relating to luminous, illuminate and so on) and cae-, relating to caecus, "blind".

This sends me online where I learn (among much else) that

Cælum is a Latin word meaning both "sky, heaven" and "tool with a sharp beveled point, used in engraving or carving stone." (You'll sometimes see this latter definition over-simplified to "chisel.")

and I begin to wander into uncertain fields: the heavens (celestial, cielo, ciel) as caesura between dark and light, blindness and vision; though the skies themselves are in fact dark half the time, or were before the modern invention of light pollution.

The middle of this piece, Heaven's Dark Side: the body, was in fact seen: Margaret stood perhaps ten minutes on her right leg, her left knee bent, her hands and arms dancing in insectlike motions, while she continued her dispassionate but strangely accented sermon, a Yoga Bride-preacher in a celestial (ceiling) pulpit; and then it was dark again, and she continued; we'd been enlightened, and were then returned to our normal state of enlightenment…

• A thirty-minute video, Exquisite Corpse, a "surreal" (for lack of slower accuracy I'll use that word) video-story recounting seven tales spun, exquisite-corpselike, in a Haifa bomb-shelter, with a magnificent score by Robert Hughes. I can't say enough about this piece; in fact I can't say much: I have to see it again, and again. It is intelligent, and fascinating, and enterprising, and rich and deep, and, I think, Important. It has discursive wit, and I want a copy; I hope it finds distribution.

Mount Analogue

IN 1968 I BOUGHT, second-hand, spurred by what information I no longer recall, a copy of the Vincent Stuart edition of Roger Shattuck's translation of René Daumal's Mount Analogue: An Authentic Narrative. It came to mind again a few weeks ago in a conversation with grandson Simon, 18, who has been climbing mountains in Ecuador. I'm no mountain climber: the closest I've come to the sport was an ascent of Chamechaude, in the French pre-Alps, back in 1976: but mountains are in mind right now, as I'm contemplating a stroll in the Alps this summer.

Chamechaud, seen from the north, 1976

So I took Mount Analogue down from the shelf the other night and read through it again. It's such a strong, brilliant, clear book that virtually every detail I'd recalled from 1968, as well as the general quality of the book, came right back into focus. Daumal was, some think, the finest French author of his time; certainly the most promising. Born in 1908, possessed of a brilliant mind, he was publishing by the time he was twenty. By then he'd experimented with all sorts of drugs, had internalized everything the Parnassiens and Symbolists could offer him, had begun serious study of Indian thought and literature. From then on his principal physical battles were with tuberculosis, and he died in 1944, only 36 years old, in mid-sentence: Mount Analogue is incomplete.

Perhaps it could never have been completed. The mountain of the title is enormous, dwarfing Everest, situated in the South Pacific, unknown because of its capacity of bending space, thus rendering it both invisible and insensible to instruments. It provides the link between Earth and what one could be forgiven for calling Heaven, and its difficult ascent, available only to superbly conditioned adepts, has a physical property of reinforcing an egoless desire for Transcendence.

The novel describes the plans of the author and, even more important, one Father Sogol to outfit an expedition to the mountain. Eight explorers meet to discuss its probably location, then set out, with four crewmen, on the yacht Impossible, to find it. Sogol combines science and logic to succeed in the search; we visit the island; we learn of the unique communities that have grown up on its shores; we begin the ascent — and then the manuscript fails us.

But it doesn't matter. Sogol is so striking, the descriptions so detailed and winning, and the mood and humor of the book so serene and, in a word, good, that in its imperfect state Mount Analogue is perfect enough.

Several online reviewers have mentioned Jules Verne in describing this book. Oddly, Verne never came to my mind, though I enjoyed Verne hugely when I was a boy. Instead I thought of Melville's Mardi, similarly philosophical and idealistic; and of Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus, whose central figure, Martial Canterel, may have inspired aspects of Daumal's Father Sogol.

I thought of Duchamp, too: the artist's language-play and absurd physics — think of infra-mince, the impossibly small values like the weight of sighs — prefigure Sogol. (And, of course, draw on Roussel.) Daumal was a ’pataphysicien, often a very amusing one; but he was also extraordinarily earnest, without ever lapsing into sermonizing.

My edition of Mount Analogue carries a fine introduction by its translator, who notes

[Daumal] had to struggle with the temptation to which poets are prone: the tendency to conceive of life and reality entirely through language. Mount Analogue, in its simplicy of expression and universality of meaning, probably represents Daumal's ultimate reckoning with the problem of language, vehicle and obstacle.

And in fact, early on, Daumal refers to the subject:

The different branches of symbol interpretation had for a long time been my favourite field of study… Furthermore, I had an alpinist's passionate love of mountains. The convergence of these two contrasting areas of interest on the same object, the mountain, had given certain passages of my article [a study of the symbolic significance of the mountain in ancient mythologies] a lyric tone. (Such conjunctions, incongruous as they may appear, play a large part in the genesis of what is commonly called poetry; I venture this remark as a suggestion ot critics and aestheticians who seek to illuminate the depths of that mysterious language.)

The description of Father Sogol's studio is meticulous and striking: it's festooned with hanging scraps of paper on which are written

a veritable encyclopedia of what we call "human knowledge". A diagram of a plant cell, Mendeleieff's periodic table…, the keys to Chinese writing, a cross-section of the human heart, Lorentz's transformation formulae,…

and so on for an entire paragraph. Sogol thinks and speaks while pacing among these pendant notes, with

an exceptional faculty for seeing ideas as external objects and for establishing new links between ideas which appeared totally unrelated.

Daumal reveals certain laws and principles: that of considering a problem as solved, in order to get sufficiently past the problem to be able to deduce its solution. And the "chameleon law," according to which behaviour is governed by "inner resonance to influences nearest at hand."

Daumal got up from his writing-desk, we're told, in the middle of that final incomplete sentence, to answer his door: a friend was visiting to encourage him (knowing of his illness and likely impending death) to draw up some notes describing his plans for the book's conclusion. They are included in this edition, and one of them answers the perennial question, Why climb?

Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. In climbing, always take note of difficulties along the way; for as you go up, you can observe hem. Coming down, you will no longer see them, but you will know they are there if you have observed them well.

…

When you strike off on your own, leave some trace of your passage which will guide you coming back: one stone set on another, some grass weighted down by a stick. But if you come to an impasse or a dangerous spot, remember that the trail you have left could lead people coming after you into trouble. So go back along your trail and obliterate any traces you have left. This applies to anyone who wishes to leave some mark of his passage in the world.

A delicious book, firm and thoughtful and detailed, humorous and poignant (without intended poignancy, bien entendu!), exceptionally wise, aware of its antecedents and careless (and innocent, as far as I know) of followers. I can't imagine being without my copy.