normblog

When Thursday comes

WotN put me on to The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. It's quirky - reminding me a bit of David Sedaris - and funny, and different; and also most illuminating, for those of us who aren't poets, about how poetry 'works', and why it's... well, important and great. Here's a passage from the book that should be recognizable to many others than poets and anthologists:

Thursday is the day of fear. On Monday you're in great shape because you've got the whole week. Then Tuesday, still pretty good, still at the beginning more or less. Then Wednesday, and you're poised, and you can accomplish much if you just apply yourself vigorously and catch up. And then suddenly, you're driving under that huge tattered banner, with that T and that H and that U and that frightening R and the appalling S - THURSDAY - and you slide down the steep slope towards the clacking shredder blades that wait on Sunday afternoon. Another whole week of your one life. Your one "precious life,"... You don't have too many Thursdays left. There are after all only fifty-two of them in the year. Fifty-two may sound like a lot, but when Thursdays come around, fifty-two doesn't seem like a lot at all. I just wish I had more money.

Ugly discussion

Yesterday at Comment Central (£) Danny Finkelstein argued that it's perfectly all right for a survey poll to ask people if they think Ed Miliband is 'too ugly to be Prime Minister'. To try to ascertain people's reasons for voting is a legitimate activity. I think he's right. Research on voting intentions and what lies behind them doesn't imply approval of the reasons given by those surveyed. As a test of my own intuitions on this, I thought about whether it would be OK for pollsters to ask voters whether they considered Miliband's being Jewish an obstacle to voting for him. I think it would be OK, even though not to vote for him on that account would be a display of culpable prejudice. (If I'm not mistaken, there was survey research of this kind about Barack Obama during the last presidential election. Not that Obama is Jewish, mind.)

At the same time, the analogy shows why, as Danny reports, some have been dismayed by the 'ugliness' question posed in that poll. The difficulty arises because, once it becomes a matter of apparently neutral public discussion whether Ed Miliband is ugly and whether this is a reason not to vote for him, it may seem that those discussing this are validating it as a good reason. But it isn't. It's an unfair prejudice and to be condemned and rejected as such - like racism, or sexism, or talking as if fat people are bad in some way. A person's looks don't have implications for their leadership skills or capacity for political judgement.

It is not true, of course, that all of Miliband's personal qualities should be left out of consideration in one's political estimate of him. For some of these are relevant to judging what kind of leader he will make, or is. His tendency to whine, for example, or to sound like he's whining, is not encouraging. But to talk (loosely) as if Miliband's being ugly - if he were - has any bearing, is itself gross. To talk to him about this shows a simple lack of civility, such as seems to have become more common with certain media interviewers.

Writer's choice 333: Lynn Shepherd

Lynn Shepherd studied English at Oxford, and later went back to do a doctorate. This was on the 'father of the novel', Samuel Richardson, and was later published by Oxford University Press. She worked in the City and then in PR, and now works as a copywriter for companies. But she always wanted to be a writer, and her first novel, Murder at Mansfield Park, was published in 2010. Her second is a new murder mystery (inspired by Charles Dickens's Bleak House, which Lynn discusses below): Tom-All-Alone's is published on February 2 by Corsair in the UK and by Random House in North America on May 1st, where it has the title The Solitary House.

Lynn Shepherd on Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I'm sure I'm not the only Dickens fan who's been both surprised and exhilarated to see how much interest has been generated by his forthcoming bicentenary. Adaptations, exhibitions, new biographies, special events, and - last October - a poll in the Guardian newspaper asking readers to vote for their favourite novel. The winner, fairly comfortably, was Great Expectations, followed by Bleak House. These happen to be my own two favourites too, though it's Bleak House that I consider to be Dickens's true masterpiece.

So why Bleak House? What is it about this novel, in particular, that I find so compelling? The short answer is that all Dickens's genius is here. Bleak House does not merely embody the vast scope of his vision of contemporary London, but offers unparalleled richness in every aspect of his art - from the slums of Tom-All-Alone's to the 'houses of high connection' in the fashionable world; from comedy to psychological drama to social commentary and pure storytelling. In this great book, Dickens is truly at the peak of his powers. And should one ever doubt it, yet another self-indulgent re-reading of those marvellous fog-wreathed first pages will convince you - without question the greatest opening he ever wrote, and a contender, I would argue, for the greatest opening of any novel, then or now.

I first read Bleak House in my first term at Oxford, and I still have that battered and much-loved Penguin edition, in which I have carefully underlined the opening line of the now celebrated introduction by J. Hillis Miller: 'Bleak House is a document about the interpretation of documents'. And if this was true back in the 70s when that edition was published, how much more so now. In an age when we are becoming more and more obsessed with the nature of language - with the way words work, and the means by which they are transmitted - Bleak House has never been more compelling. From Conversation Kenge's curiously abbreviated missives (not so very different from modern texting), to the love letters that threaten to expose Lady Dedlock's dark secret, to the anonymous notes that charge her with murder, to the infamous and long-mislaid Jarndyce will, upon which so much depends and through which so much will be lost.

People in novels, of course, can only ever be made of words, but it's one of the special qualities of Dickens's imagination that his caricatures are so intensely verbal. The Reverend Mr Chadband, for example, is that deliciously repellent 'large yellow man with a fat smile and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system', but what makes him so marvellously memorable is the way he talks. Dickens has such a subtle ear, not merely for the language people use, but for the rhythm and cadence of the way they use it:

"My friends," says [Chadband], "what is this which we now behold as being spread before us? Refreshment. Do we need refreshment then, my friends? We do. And why do we need refreshment, my friends? Because we are but mortal, because we are but sinful, because we are but of the earth..."

Now you could, of course, say that all Dickens's comic caricatures are creatures of words, so how is Bleak House any different, but in this novel we find the same idea playing out in much darker and more haunting terms. Nemo, the broken-down law-writer who was once Lady Dedlock's dashing lover, exists for us solely in the words he has left behind - words he wrote but we never see, yet which play such a decisive and terrible role in the story, all the same; the documents Nemo copied at Snagsby's request, which Lady Dedlock recognizes; the letters he wrote to her, which Krook hoards but is unable to read; and the writing in his hand kept by his former sergeant, trooper George, which Tulkinghorn is so anxious to peruse and so intent on exploiting for his own evil ends.

Words in this novel are quite literally instrumental, used to deceive, coerce, blackmail and accuse. And just as the characters struggle to make sense of the documents inside the book, we as readers have to do the same outside. Not just decoding the role and meaning of all these lost, hidden and ambivalent pieces of paper, but working out for ourselves what is really going on. We have to fill the gaps and decide whose word has weight. We have to fill the tantalizing gaps in the story, and interpret a giant cobweb of what Dickens calls 'signs and tokens', so as to come, at last, to the truth.

And in doing this, we must first reconcile two contrasting and sometimes competing narrative voices: Esther's apparently candid past-tense chronicle of her own life, set against the forceful, in-your-face, present-tense account of what's going on in the wider world. Neither of these narratives is as simple as it seems: both tellers of this complex tale are apt to conceal facts for their own reasons, and both can point us - ingeniously or ingenuously - in quite the wrong direction. Both, in effect, require us to judge. Which is of course only appropriate in a novel about the law's delays, and the impenetrable miasma circling about the Court of Chancery, where the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, and the Lord High Chancellor sits at the very heart of the fog.

The other task we as readers are required to perform is to solve the crime. Just as Inspector Bucket has to do, and just as we ourselves have done with so many other murder mysteries since Bleak House. But not - crucially - with any single novel that came before it. Because in among all this book's other claims to pre-eminence is the fact that it's the first detective story in English, which is the last but by no means the least of the reasons why I love it, and why I wanted to pay my own homage to it in a mystery of my own. From Sherlock Holmes to Special Victims Unit, Marple to Morse, Bleak House is the father of them all.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

World without war

Haaretz carries an interview with John Horgan, presented by them as the author of a new book in which he argues against the idea that humankind is just stuck for all time with the periodic recurrence of war. There is no inevitability about it.

Yet an odd tension emerges in Horgan's answers to the interviewer's questions. War is stupid and absurd, he says, and he wants to convince people that it's wrong to think war will always be with us. Now, who could quarrel with the age-old dream of human beings living in peace? But if the thought may have crossed your mind by this point that getting rid of war could also yield some problems, don't worry, because it's crossed Horgan's mind too.

At various times in my life, I've called myself a pacifist. But the more I talked to real pacifists and read classic pacifist literature, the more I realized I'm not. Because there are times when some kind of force is not only justified, but actually morally required. You need to use force to stop a greater kind of violence. I would use force to defend myself, or defend my family.

Might a people do the same, to throw off an oppressive tyranny? Or might a nation, to repel a rapacious invader? Another issue, in other words, than whether humankind could abolish war is whether war may not have to be held in reserve, so to speak, in case it were one day needed (again). It would be good if there were no prisons; but if you don't know the means of getting rid of violent crime, prisons may continue to serve a justified purpose.

Horgan's gesture towards resolving the tension in his thinking - for a gesture is all it is - is to say: 'My hope would be that in a world without war, justice will come more quickly'. A world without injustice would, of course, get rid of the need for wars, uprisings, revolutions, etc to rectify injustice, but a just world is a tall order in itself.

Incidentally, Horgan also commits an oversight when he says:

If there's any benefit of World Wars I and II, these massive, industrial-scale slaughterhouses, it's that they have dispelled to some extent those romantic illusions we had about war as the ultimate game.

I can think of one other, rather big, benefit of World War II than that of helping to dispel romantic illusions. Anybody?

Again those islands

I do not labour under the delusion that in international politics moral principle always or even mostly rules. Power, national interest, economic consideration, diplomatic pressure, traditional legal norms - all of these and more play their part. Still, when actors in and commentators on this area themselves invoke moral argument in writing about issues in international politics, it is hard to avoid critically thinking about the force of their arguments or lack of it.

The Times on Saturday carried a pair of articles about the Falkland Islands, one underneath the other. The first, by Simon Winchester (£), proposes for the Falklands problem - one of 'only two truly contentious post-colonial problems remaining for Britain' - a Hong Kong-type solution instead of further conflict between Britain and Argentina:

[T]alks could take years. But talking is a great deal better than fighting. Just so long as the basic principle - that of exchanging sovereignty for assurances, of allowing a blue Argentine bandera to fly over Stanley's Government House, just so long as an island taxi can drive along Thatcher Drive on the left-hand side - is agreed from the start: then can some sense return to the South Atlantic, and the fear of this bizarre and needless situation spiralling out of control yet again can be averted, once and for all.

Winchester's solution exchanges sovereigty over the islands for Argentina, on the one hand, for a concession to the principle of 'self-determination for the islanders', on the other.

The second article is by Héctor Timerman, Argentine Minister of Foreign Relations. He calls Britain's claim to the islands 'a form of colonialism' (£), appealing to various UN resolutions in support of that characterization, and he also argues for the resolution of the dispute by talking.

If it can be resolved by talking, I'm all in favour. But I do feel impelled to register once more the utter absurdity from any justificatory point of view of characterizing Britain's title to the Falklands as a form of colonialism, when Argentina (laying claim to the Malvinas) is itself a national reality based on European settlement, nothing more nor less. Second, it is as with Scotland: if the self-determination of the islanders matters, then their agreement to any solution must not be negotiated away; it is indispensable.

The Robert Fisk theory of war crimes

According to this report from Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times (£):

The four US marines filmed apparently urinating on Taliban corpses in northern Helmand may face charges of war crimes amid fears that their actions could derail sensitive negotiations to bring an end to the Afghan war.

They are expected to be court-martialled, she writes, and then continues:

At such a sensitive point the last thing the US needed was footage of its soldiers defiling dead Afghans. Top officials acted quickly to express their outrage. Leon Panetta, the defence secretary, Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, and General John Allen, commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, all strongly condemned the incident.

Clinton suggested that the men may be guilty of war crimes. "Anyone, anyone found to have participated or know about it, having engaged in such conduct, must be held fully accountable," she said.

Allen's deputy posted a letter on Facebook to troops reiterating how the dead were supposed to be treated. "Defiling, desecrating, mocking, photographing or filming for personal use insurgent dead constitutes a grave breach of the laws of armed conflict," wrote Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti. "We must treat the living and dead with dignity and respect."

The response seems entirely appropriate: a flat condemnation of the act of desecrating the dead, taking it for the horrible outrage it is; and the resolve to prosecute it as a war crime.

But Robert Fisk has what he considers to be a more sophisticated understanding of the matter. In Friday's Independent he mocked this official response to the incident – a response as if to imply that the culprits might be just 'a few "bad apples", rotten eggs'. He, for his part, put their behaviour down to something much wider and deeper – namely, war. War, for Fisk, is about 'the total failure of the human spirit', and '[a]rmies are horrible creatures and soldiers do wicked things'. True as this may be, his mocking reaction is not deeper or better than the sentiments reported in the Sunday Times article as coming from Panetta, Clinton and Allen. It is shallower and worse.

Whatever may be the horrors of war and the tendencies encouraged by war to contempt for an enemy and sometimes downright criminality, it is better that wars should be fought within some moral limits, under some restraints of law, than with none of either. What would Fisk's reaction have been had the official US response to this incident been 'Oh well, it happens'? One can imagine his sneering denunciation in those circumstances. Yet to condemn the perpetrators, to hold US military personnel to some moral standards, this too has to be the target of his patronizing scorn, as though Clinton et al can't have understood that war itself brutalizes its participants.

It does do that, which is precisely why it is necessary not to give the most brutal impulses free rein. Until Fisk figures out a way of putting an end to war altogether, his disdain is misplaced.

[Could it be that what Fisk really thinks (against both the bad-apples and the war-is-hell conceptions of this matter) is a third thing: that the US military in fact has no standards by which it would restrain its soldiers, but merely pretends to? If so, he should say that openly. But he can't, not only because it isn't true, but also because he in some sort, that is minimizingly, acknowledges that it isn't true: see 'the Americans are not the Nazis' paragraphs.]

The normblog guide to soaps 15

I need to explain something to you about soaps. I have not previously covered it in this series. The thing I need to explain is that a good soap is not only about fragrance. It is not only about texture. It is not only about washing off the dirt (if there is any - I cast no aspersions on my readers). To this you might respond by saying that the three 'not only's are self-explanatory, since none of them can be an 'only' in conjunction with the other two. But that's not what I'm getting at.

What I mean is that other things than the intrinsic properties of the soap itself affect how it plays upon one's person. Take the Punch Studio Green Tea soap that WotN and I were sent for Christmas by a good friend of ours. It comes in a book-shaped box like this. But, of course, by the time you're in the bath, the box is out of things. The soap smells of spring, feels gentle and makes you think of birds and birdsong. All of this is very much to the point. But my own use of the Punch Studio Green Tea soap induced such sensations of harmony that I was at first puzzled. What could be the cause of this? Then I realized: I drink a lot of green tea; it is my main beverage. Green tea on the inside, green tea on the outside - how better to prepare any body, and anybody, to face the day in a non-conflictual, non-jarring, non-jangly spirit?

[For links to the rest of the series go to the soap dish.]

Scottish independence: whose decision?

In yesterday's Times Matthew Parris contrasts two ways of thinking about the issue of Scottish independence - the right way and a wrong way. The right way according to him is as a split: like 'a proper divorce, not an offspring leaving home'. It would create two new states, not one; '[f]or we - the other parts of the UK - would become a new state too.' However, a tendency not to recognize this is encouraged by an alternative approach to the issue (£):

You'll be having difficulty in thinking about the break-up of the Union in this way, and I'll tell you why. It's because there's an unwitting conspiracy between Scottish nationalists and English supremacists to think of Scotland as a colony, or possession, of England. That mindset goes very deep. To this way of thinking, Scotland's aspirations for full statehood become a kind of colonial independence movement, an unstated major premise of the argument being that the "United Kingdom" is the name of a small English empire.

So independence for Scotland is then seen as 'a very late case of decolonisation'. Because Parris resists this other - he believes wrong - way of treating the question, in favour of the right 'break-up' way, he insists that it is a question for everyone in the UK, and not just for Scotland. The implications are far-reaching; but they are that for the English and Welsh and Northern Irish as well.

We're all in this Union together. This is a matter for all of us, not just for Scotland. It's about more than legalism, but our future ideas of country, of identity, of loyalty, of what we are as a nation.

Therefore:

It would be outrageous for the Union to be dismembered without all its parts being consulted in a referendum. The question should be very broad: "Should the British and Scottish governments arrange to consult the Scottish people on a plan for Scottish independence?"

Parris does go on to say that the only part of the Union that might not say 'yes' to that question is Scotland itself, but he thinks elections matter even when their outcomes are predictable - and he's right about this.

Even so, his being right about it is the key to understanding why he's also wrong about the general issue, or so I think at any rate. Whatever may be likely to happen in a UK-wide referendum asking whether the Scottish people should be consulted on Scottish independence, to insist on its necessity as a prior step is to imply that the electorate of the UK as a whole could legitimately deny Scotland its own vote on independence. To put the same thing another way, it is to suggest that Scotland's right to national self-determination is not a matter for Scotland unless, or is only a matter for Scotland if, the UK agrees to its being so. But the right of nations to self-determination is not, morally, in the gift of other nations that happen to be spatially contiguous; it is a universal right. Whether one thinks a colonialist model applies to Scotland or not, the logic of national self-determination entails that Scotland may decide this question irrespective of what the other parts of the UK prefer. Parris's own analogy of divorce is instructive here: no married person should be denied the option of divorce on account of their spouse's having an interest in the outcome of the decision.

Finally, this analogy is also helpful in another way. One can support the right of all married people to divorce without thinking that it would be good for David and Stephanie in particular to get divorced. One might believe the very opposite: that it's in the best interest of both - and of their children - to stay together. But they, David and Stephanie, whether separately or in conjunction, must have the right to terminate the marriage. I hope that Scotland doesn't vote for independence. But the worst thing for non-Scots to do to influence Scotland's decision, if they think like this, is to say or imply that it's a decision for everyone and not just for Scotland.

Afterword.

Charles Moore has a piece in the Telegraph that appears to make a similar point to Matthew Parris's. He too argues that the break-up of the UK is a question for all its citizens. But his column is different from Parris's in two key respects. Moore appears simply to mean that the issues affect us all - as is obviously true - and are to be debated accordingly. He doesn't call for a UK-wide referendum as prior validation for a Scottish one. And Moore also spells out, as Parris does not, that 'if they [the Scots] do clearly express a wish to [leave the UK], then no one should stop them'.

The normblog profile 402: Diane Coyle

Diane Coyle was born (in 1961) and raised in the north west of England, into a cotton spinning and weaving family. She climbed the 11-plus and grammar school ladder to go to Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Her long-standing dream of becoming a philosopher was overturned when she discovered the joys of economics, and she went on to do a PhD in economics at Harvard. She has since worked in a wide range of jobs, serving this vocation. Her blog is The Enlightened Economist.

Why do you blog? > Because I can, and it helps me take stock of my own reading.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Just do it, and as often as you have time for.

What are your favourite blogs? > Stumbling and Mumbling, Understanding Society, Information Aesthetics.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > David Hume, Amartya Sen, Paul Geroski, John Kay.

What are you reading at the moment? > The Institutional Revolution by Douglas W. Allen (University of Chicago Press).

Who are your cultural heroes? > Mikhail Baryshnikov, Twyla Tharp, Daniel Barenboim, J.M. Keynes (for the Arts Council), Howard Hodgkin, Henry Moore.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Zola's Germinal.

What is your favourite poem? > Czesław Miłosz, 'Preparation'.

What is your favourite movie? > Nanni Moretti's Dear Diary.

What is your favourite song? > 'Ashes to Ashes' by David Bowie.

Who is your favourite composer? > Shostakovich.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > When I was younger I believed in the possibility of social engineering, a belief that has evaporated with experience. Many policy aims simply cannot be achieved directly, and attempts to achieve desired results backfire.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > Traditional Enlightenment empiricism.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Religion, when applied to people other than the believer: i.e., religion has no acceptable role in public policy.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which I read at university. It was the first work of feminism I read, and for all its flaws it opened my eyes to the fact that I (and other women, and other minority groups) had a struggle on our hands. We still do.

Who are your political heroes? > Anyone with the courage of their convictions and able to speak and write clearly, in language for everyone: e.g. Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill... and Ellen Wilkinson and Jennie Lee for understanding the importance of education and the arts for everyone.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > It’s the economy, stupid.

What would you do with the UN? > The resolution of conflicts doesn't happen without talking, so a talking-shop is essential. But I'd brutally trim the UN agencies. The kindest thing to say about many of them is that they're ineffective and costly, no more than a vehicle for expenses and foreign trips.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > Battles for resources.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Kindness.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Arrogance.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Watching sport.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > Who, not what - my family.

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > Juliette Binoche.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > Boston, Massachussetts.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Ballet class.

What is your most treasured possession? > My dog, Cabbage.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Ballet dancer.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > Not at all except for buying first class tickets for air travel.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Ada Lovelace, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. I would dress appropriately.

[A list of all the normblog profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

On having a favourite

I don't like to butt in on someone else's conversation, especially when I have no stake in the particular matter of it, but I am obliged here by the elementary requirements of meaning and logical inference. Fred Sanders, an evangelical Protestant theologian, says:

No Christian should ever have a least favorite book of the Bible. All Scripture is God-breathed, and the whole Bible in all its parts is good for teaching, training, and equipping us. But it is perfectly permissible, and even desirable, to have a favorite book of the Bible. It could be the book that first reached us with the good news of salvation, or one through which God spoke to us in a difficult time. It might be the one book or passage that all the rest of Scripture seems to lead up to. As long as we resist the temptation to "play favorites" by letting the particular message of one book silence the distinctive message of another book, and as long as we recognize that the whole canon of Scripture belongs together, a good reader of the Bible can have a biblical book that is a spiritual home base.

OK, so first, you can see what Fred Sanders is saying: if all the books of the Bible are 'God-breathed', none of them is to be passed over, to have its own distinctive message disregarded. As he goes on to explain, if one book is better than another, that will be in some respects only, and the other book will still have its value.

However, if you really can have a favourite book of the bible, as Sanders allows, then you also must have, along with it, a least favourite book, or books, as well - as he forbids. It is in the normal meaning of having a favourite: the latter, according to my New Shorter Oxford, 'a person or thing regarded with particular favour and preferred above others'. Preferring one item to another (as Sanders indicates he knows) is what is involved in the notion of having a favourite member of some set.

If, out of Jane Austen's six novels, Emma is this reader's favourite, then one (or some) of the other five must count as his least favourite(s). It is a consequence which can't even be avoided by his declining to rank the other novels, since all that will mean is that those five books are equal least favourites. On the other hand, if his preference ranking proceeds beyond Emma - Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility etc. - then at the end of the line there must sit a group of Austen novels, in number fewer than five but greater than zero, making up the least favourite Austen(s) of the reader - me - whose preference ranking it is.

This post just shows what can happen to someone in a difficult time.

Claire Tomalin's life of Dickens

Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life is a magnificent achievement. It is a service to all who already love that writer's work and to others who would like to find out whether they do or just to learn about who he was. Every person is a figure of some complexity, but it is perhaps more true of Dickens than of anyone that, like his novels, his life encompassed so much, was so full of energy and activity, of people and words, family, friends, enjoyments and arguments, that no brief sketch can truly capture what he was. It takes the story of the whole life to do it. 'He left a trail like a meteor', Tomalin says, and her biography has done the job of giving us all the facets and contradictions of Dickens's character and holding them in fair-minded balance. She deserves the reader's gratitude as well as admiration.

However much one may know it as a generality, the energy of Charles Dickens and the amount he managed to fit into the years of a single, not very long, lifetime are truly breathtaking. The writings alone - the novels, the stories, the journalism, the letters - are voluminous; but on top of them, the acting, the readings, the long-distance walking, the friendships and conviviality, the exuberance, the game-playing, the loyalties and disloyalties, the humane initiatives and the reforming zeal - one needs to see it all laid end to end to be able to digest its full range and extent.

Then there is the story of Dickens within his family - both the sorrows and the joys of this; and the mundane comings and goings, the entertainments, the low-level frictions and impediments. Tomalin is especially well-placed to recount this side of the story, not only because of her judicious way with familial matters, but also because she has already written of Dickens's relationship with Nelly Ternan. Here again, the combination in Dickens of great humanity, both in the literary and in the more general sense, with the unkindnesses and even cruelties he could visit upon those close to him is skilfully handled by Tomalin. It is all part of the same picture and convincingly shown to be so, with due judgement but without caricature: the unhappy fate meted out by him upon Catherine, his wife and the mother of his ten children; and the varying relationships with those children themselves.

His was a life to leave one stunned - simultaneously in wonder at the heights to which humankind can rise, and saddened by the transience, and the costs, of individual genius. Tomalin writes:

In his will he had expressed his wish to have no memorial. Instead, he said, 'I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experience of me.' Nothing could have been better. He was, and he continued to be, a national treasure, an institution, a part of what makes England England; and he continues to be read all over the world.

Claire Tomalin's biography will add its own excellent weight to the love of Charles Dickens's work. It is the kind of book of which one wants not to miss a single detail. I was sorry when I reached the final page.

Writer's choice 332: Liz Kessler

Liz Kessler grew up in Southport and studied English at Loughborough University. More recently, she gained a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and worked as a teacher and a journalist before becoming a full-time writer. After a trip round Europe in a campervan, she settled in St Ives, Cornwall, where she now lives. Liz is the author of eight books for children. Her 'Emily Windsnap' series, about a girl who is half mermaid, has appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list and been translated into over 20 languages. She has also written a series about a girl called Philippa Fisher and her fairy godsister. Her latest standalone book, A Year Without Autumn, has been shortlisted for the 2012 Blue Peter Book of the Year Award. Here Liz writes about Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Liz Kessler on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

I have a slight tendency to worry about my health.

If you know me, that sentence will probably have made you guffaw. OK, I have quite a large tendency to worry about my health. But not all the time; only when there's something wrong with me. I think it's a common affliction amongst children's authors. Too much imagination, too much time spent on our own, and too many notes from our editors telling us to focus on the little details: it's a heady combination for anyone with a tendency to worry about their health.

The other thing that makes me worry is when I hear of someone with a serious illness. It doesn't matter how rare, or how unlikely I am to get it – my ability to worry that it might happen to me is impressive. It makes watching medical dramas uncomfortable. I recently had to stop watching Grey's Anatomy, because every time a patient appeared with a new illness, I got anxious about the possibility that it might one day happen to me.

In this context, you might think that a book about someone whose life is devastated by a massive stroke would be one for my 'Avoid at all costs' pile. In fact, the book in question is one of my favourite books of all time.

The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly is one of the most astonishing, moving and mind-expanding books I've ever read. Each short chapter is like a story in itself, or a mini-play - or even a poem. The emotions described, the scenes retold and the language used to tell them are at the same time exquisitely beautiful and unbelievably painful. This is a book where you feel every word has been hand-picked. And indeed, it has.

As the author says: 'In my head I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph.'

The reason for this painstaking operation is that the entire book was written by a man whose stroke left him completely paralysed, speechless and able to move nothing but a single eyelid. It was by using this eyelid that he 'dictated' the entire book. One letter at a time.

This fact in itself is enough to make the book a staggering accomplishment. But it is much more than that. It is an incredibly moving memoir and an intricate record of a condition that it would otherwise be inconceivable to imagine learning about in such detail. Above all, it is an act of stunning creativity produced at a time of a man's life when most people would have written him off as a breath away from dead. 'Cabbage' is the word that some would use.

Cabbages cannot write bestselling books.

Best-selling and possibly life-changing. It is certainly one of the best weapons I have come across with which to attack my hypochondriac tendencies.

When I find myself worrying about some minor ailment, all I need to do is think about what Bauby has achieved and I cannot think of any reason to feel worried or negative. His condition is described as 'Locked-In Syndrome'. A more fitting description would be hard to find. We're talking about a man who could do literally nothing apart from this one tiny movement with his left eyelid. Who could hear and see the world around him, but could not interact with it in any way. Whose body's organs needed such a level of medical machinery to function that the mere thought of swallowing was something he fantasized about. That is how paralysed he was. And yet, he produced a book full of the highest levels of humour, tenderness and poetry. I cannot possibly think about complaining that my cold is bothering me when I think about this.

The fact that someone in his condition could produce something so brilliantly written, so compassionate, so intricate and honest - if you'll forgive me sounding a tad clichéd - does make me think we could probably achieve anything we wanted to, if we put our minds to it.

Don't get me wrong. It is not a happy read. It is heartbreaking, in fact. The description of his interaction with his children is almost unbearable:

Grief surges over me. His face not two feet from mine, my son sits patiently waiting - and I, his father, have lost the simple right to ruffle his bristly hair, clasp his downy neck, hug his small, lithe, warm body tight against me. There are no words to express it. My condition is monstrous, iniquitous, revolting, horrible.

The play that the author imagines being made of his life is heart-rending: the final scene, in which the main character rises from his bed for the first time and walks around the stage, followed by the fade to black and his offstage voice declaring, 'Shit! It was only a dream!', sums up the agony of his situation.

All of these moments make the reader aware of two things: one, how unimaginably horrific his condition must have been. And two, the extent of the human capacity to survive, to imagine, and to create. This book makes me believe these things are boundless. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking read, and at the same time a life-affirming inspiration that makes me want to stretch both my creativity and myself to be the best that they can be.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Human nature in social explanation

Towards the end of a long and interesting discussion of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature Claude Fischer points to the fact that Pinker's explanations for a historical decline in human violence rely heavily on cultural factors, and suggests this as a possible reason for intellectual discomfort or embarrassment on Pinker's part. For, as Fischer writes:

Pinker is a famous advocate for biological understandings of the mind and for evolutionary psychology, which insists that human nature was formed millions of years ago and that we moderns are still ruled by that nature.

I haven't read Pinker's book, so none of the following remarks should be taken as a specific defence of any of its theses. However, I don't see that resort to culture-laden explanation need embarrass the general claim - which is obviously true - that there are human-nature-related causes of certain social facts. Of course, because the concept of human nature refers to human attributes that are enduring and universal, or all but universal, it is better at explaining some things than at explaining others. If you want to know why an indispensable feature of any society is its organization of the production of means of subsistence, or why story-telling is so important to human beings, the appeal to permanent human traits is likely to be relevant. Equally, explaining the general human capacity for change, as compared with other terrestrial species, will rely on human-natural characteristics that are general across time.

But it stands to reason that explanations for very particular historical phenomena, certain specific changes amongst these, will not be able to make do with appeals to human nature. Why did parliamentary democracy emerge and flourish in some countries but not in others? Why did fascism and Nazism come to power in, respectively, Italy and Germany but not in Britain? Why did Australia's dominance of world cricket through the 1990s in due course come to an end? Such questions about particular histories obviously cannot be answered by generic appeals to human nature. Yet this doesn't in any way undermine the thesis that there is such a thing as a general human nature and that it has a significant explanatory role in human affairs.

Just for a closing example that is appropriate to Pinker's book and Fischer's discussion, we may consider the fact that in the display of cruelty human beings have shown themselves capable of being far more subtle and inventive than other known species - a fact it would be hard to account for, I believe, without reference to traits that mark our own species (and are also put to much better use).

Rushdie right and wrong about Hitchens

Salman Rushdie has written an accolade to his friend Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair. It is well worth reading. Apropos the fatwa against Rushdie himself, it gets this central thing right:

The spectacle of a despotic cleric with antiquated ideas issuing a death warrant for a writer living in another country, and then sending death squads to carry out the edict, changed something in Christopher. It made him understand that a new danger had been unleashed upon the earth, that a new totalizing ideology had stepped into the down-at-the-heels shoes of Soviet Communism. And when the brute hostility of American and British conservatives (Charles Krauthammer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Paul Johnson) joined forces with the appeasement politics of sections of the Western left, and both sides began to offer sympathetic analyses of the assault, his outrage grew. In the eyes of the right, I was a cultural "traitor" and, in Christopher's words, an "uppity wog," and in the opinion of the left, the People could never be wrong, and the cause of the Oppressed People, a category into which the Islamist opponents of my novel fell, was doubly justified. Voices as diverse as the Pope, the archbishop of New York, the British chief rabbi, John Berger, Jimmy Carter, and Germaine Greer "understood the insult" and failed to be outraged, and Christopher went to war.

Unfortunately, Rushdie then gets something equally important wrong. He represents Hitch's stance on the Iraq war as an aberration, uncharacteristic of him and inducing him to join forces with the Bush administration. Later he came back to the left through his atheist campaigning.

Mick Hartley nails this for the failure of understanding it is:

Hitchens' support for the overthrow of Saddam wasn't a temporary regrettable enthusiasm based on a misplaced alliance with the neo-cons: it was an essential part of his political beliefs. An anti-totalitarian left should have had no problem supporting the removal of a despicable tyranny, unrivalled in modern times for its brutality and already guilty of genocide against its own people - never mind the war against Iran and the invasion of Kuwait. This wasn't some imperialist adventure: this was the liberation of an enslaved people. God knows it wasn't well planned, and there were mistakes aplenty, but to oppose it simply because of a knee-jerk assumption that the US must always be on the wrong side - as most of the left did - was not a position that Hitchens was ever going to be comfortable with. His support for Bush and Blair and the overthrow of the Baathist regime was entirely consistent with the anti-totalitarianism which formed the foundation of his political beliefs.

That is spot on. What makes Salman Rushdie's mistake here all the more odd is that he must surely be aware that Hitchens was not alone on the left in his support for the war in Iraq. This was an international phenomenon, a division within the left (as well as outside it) throughout the West - and however he, personally, may judge the wisdom or unwisdom of it.

Should human beings exist?

In the course of an argument about religion and rationality, Julian Baggini suggests that humanists who believe in no god will have difficulty in persuading themselves that the existence of humankind itself is of value. He writes:

Of course secular humanists believe that it is good that human beings exist. But catch one on a bad day and she'll probably admit the world is a pretty screwed up place and it isn't obvious that it would have been better if our particular cosmic accident hadn't happened...

... Humanism is faced with the bind that its existence depends on maintaining a tension between finding what is good and worth celebrating in the human and having the intellectual integrity to see our species warts and all, which means being open to the possibility that we are not as great as we'd like to think we are. No self-respecting humanist can fail to have "doubt over humanity", and although that need not occlude all the light, it is a dark cloud we have to live under.

My first thought here is that any question about the value or otherwise of the existence of our species presupposes a human context and so must generate an answer in favour of our existing. What, otherwise, could 'better' mean in the question, 'Is it better that human beings exist or not?' But this initial thought doesn't seem to be right. One can meaningfully respond to a question about a world without any human beings and as to whether it's a good or a bad one. For example, imagine a world with only non-human, sentient beings all of which suffer intense pain the whole time, and without any compensating pleasures or achievements. That would be a variant of hell. It would be better if it didn't exist.

So we can meaningfully ask, 'Might it be better if human beings had never existed?', comparing the world as it has been with one from which humans have been abstracted. My second thought, then, is: how can we possibly answer this question in the affirmative if we think, as the vast majority of human beings do think most of the time, that human life is worth living and that however bad things may seem or actually be, it's nearly always worth trying to make them better, rather than ending things? This is what we mostly feel as individuals, but it also implies something hopeful about the wider human context which we, as individuals, inhabit.

Could we be deluded, though? Despite what most humans think as individuals, might it be the case that the balance between suffering, injustice etc, on the one hand, and positive experiences, on the other, is so far tipped towards the former that it would be better for us not to exist? I don't see how this imbalance could hold without our cancelling every possible future in advance, since the calculation about the relative weight of each 'side' has to be made across all human time. (Thanks: E.)

Dickens's year

I don't know how long before he died he wrote it, but there's a splendid piece by Christopher Hitchens at Vanity Fair - 'Charles Dickens's Inner Child'. Hitch explains the concept embodied in the title of the article, as one source of Dickens's achievement; advises against feelings of guilt over 'being not quite sure which character is from which book'; and illustrates Dickens's capacity for making amends for some of his mistakes. (Via.)

Apropos: it's very early in the year on this, the fifth, day of January, yet there are apparently already people fed up with the Dickens extravaganza (so, at any rate, says Dovegrey). Here's my word of advice to them: you can just ignore it, not watch or listen to or read anything you don't want to, while letting others, who may want to enjoy it, enjoy it. I'm one of them, and have decided to start the year appropriately by reading Claire Tomalin's new biography. So far - about half way along - so grand. I'm loving it.

[Related recent posts: 1 and 2.]

Future in the present

It's time John Gray got over the idea that the only way to believe in progress is as an inexorable march towards some more or less untroubled condition in which all human strife has been pacified. He's at it again here, writing about 'a myth of progress in which humanity is converging on a universal set of institutions and values', and in which 'an end to conflict' is presupposed. Even 'believers in gradual progress... assume that fundamental conflicts will wither away'; human beings 'tend to look forward to a future state of fulfilment in which all turmoil has ceased'. Gray, for his part, would prefer it if we all focused on the present instead. For 'when we look to the future to give meaning to our lives, we lose the meaning we can make for ourselves here and now'.

I could argue against this by saying that one can 'believe' in progress in a different way: that is, simply by thinking it might be possible to make changes for the better, improving the world as we know it now, but without imagining that all conflicts can be brought to an end or all serious human problems solved. However, as Gray is evidently resistant to this notion, perhaps I'll just leave it at this: even if we were to listen to him and fasten our attention on the present, take meaning from the here and now, human beings seem to have an impulse to do things better - better next time than last time, avoiding that mistake, introducing this modification, and so on. They also, many of them, want good things for their children, sometimes better things than they had themselves or perceived they had. For these kinds of reason, living in the present already contains something of thinking about the future; the present can't entirely shut the future out.

That quiz - answers and results

Here they come, first the answers to, then the winners of, the 2011 Boxing Day literary quiz.

1. Disgraced on a black hill.

J.M. Coetzee and Bruce Chatwin

2. Love in a changed climate.

Nancy Mitford and Hilary Mantel

3. Mr Harding's route home.

Anthony Trollope and Rose Tremain

4. Trilogy about a tiger in the wrong city.

Paul Auster and Margery Allingham

5. The great Penelope.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Penelope Fitzgerald

6. An affinity for praxis.

Sarah Waters and Fay Weldon

7. A wide seafront in the West - quiet there.

Jean Rhys and Erich Maria Remarque

8. Top room for Bertha.

John Braine and Charlotte Brontë

9. The patient with green eyes.

Michael Ondaatje and Edna O'Brien

10. An Edwardian jungle.

Vita Sackville-West and Upton Sinclair

11. They're committed to their privileges.

Roddy Doyle and Jonathan Dee

12. Harry Hole, meet Mohun Biswas.

Jo Nesbø and V.S. Naipaul

13. Gunther at noon.

Philip Kerr and Arthur Koestler

14. A spare room in Knutsford.

Helen Garner and Elizabeth Gaskell

15. Foucault invisible.

Umberto Eco and Ralph Ellison

16. A prayer for her world mile record when journeying to the river, see!

John Irving and Eva Ibbotson

17. Biggles came running.

W.E. Johns and James Jones

18. The slaves of hunger.

Patrick Hamilton and Knut Hamsun

19. The war between the Babbitts.

Alison Lurie and Sinclair Lewis

20. It's looking dark for Europa right now.

Philip Pullman and Tim Parks

21. At the seaside she's twice the writer he is.

John Banville and Iris Murdoch

22. He was shot on a beach; and he was attacked there with a kind of chisel.

Nevil Shute and Ian McEwan

23. That they may face the rising empire.

John McGahern and J.G. Ballard

24. The road back from apocalypse brought on by tobacco.

Cormac McCarthy and Erskine Caldwell

25. A funny residential building but a bleak one.

Edith Wharton and Charles Dickens

The winners, with a tied score of 44 out of 50, are: Lynne Hatwell; and Team Linda. Well done and book tokens to them. Thanks to everyone who had a go.

Don't stop the music (updated)

From a piece in today's Times about the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra - the target of disruption by pro-Palestinian protesters last September in London - this excerpt (£):

Any player from the Israel Philharmonic is proud to tell you about their orchestra's courage in adversity. This is the band that played on during the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the Lebanon War in 1982. During the Gulf War in 1991, as Scud missiles launched by Saddam Hussein rained down over Israel, the IPO's chief conductor Zubin Mehta (now conductor for life) gave a memorable concert in which the audience members donned gas marks rather than abandon the concert.

The impact of September's Prom at the Royal Albert Hall, however, when anti-Israel protesters disrupted the IPO's concert four times with satirical songs and shouted slogans - and, for the first time in the history of the Proms, the BBC took the concert off the air - may prove harder to erase. If Avi Shoshani, the secretary-general of the orchestra, is to be taken at face value, that Prom might turn out to be the IPO's final appearance in Britain.

"I don't think I really want to return the UK," Shoshani says, as we sit in the IPO's temporary home in the Port area of Tel Aviv and listen to the orchestra rehearsing for the night's 75th anniversary gala concert. "Why should I put my musicians in such an unpleasant situation? We want to make people happy - that's what music is all about - and if people behave in such an uncivilised way why should we be a part of that?

"I have nothing against demonstration," he continues. "But there is a way of doing it. The fact that you live in a democratic society that allows you [to] demonstrate doesn't mean you have the right to abuse people."

I have a certain amount of sympathy for what Shoshani says. Who wants to play music in front of a bunch of louts? Who wants to go where they're not wanted? By declining to play in venues where they're likely to be treated abusively, the Israel Philharmonic could be seen as turning the tables on the cultural boycotters. You don't want us playing there? We've got news for you: we have no desire to play in your presence.

On the other hand, if the orchestra no longer visits Britain, this will be claimed by the boycott movement as a cheap victory. Moreover, media reports of the disrupted performance suggest that the great majority of the audience wanted to hear the Israeli musicians playing and felt no indulgence towards the noisy protesters. It's surely better in these circumstances to continue visiting, while trying to obtain assurances that the organizers will be better prepared in future against those planning disruption. Avi Shoshani is also quoted as saying, 'Well, you only need ten to twenty people who are shouting at you and you get the feeling everybody is against you'. It's an understandable sentiment, but it's perhaps better to overcome it if in fact it's misplaced.

Update at 5.25 pm: But see, now, the clarification here:

The secretary general of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Avi Shoshani, has categorically denied that the IPO will not return to play in Britain, in the wake of the row over September's disrupted Proms concerts.

A report in today's Times suggested that the IPO was unlikely to play again in Britain. But Mr Shoshani insisted: "I did not say I did not want to come back to the UK. I did say that I did not want to put my musicians in such a situation again, where they were being abused and threatened..."

Shoshani goes on to explain, for the benefit of those who need an explanation, what the difference is between protesting against the visit of an Israeli orchestra and behaving like a bunch of thugs.

Wheatcraft

When there's a controversial political issue dividing people, which involves several moral principles, different assessments of the facts of a given situation and of the various probabilities attached to different possible courses of action, one way of thinking about how to come to a decision is that you make the best estimate you can after weighing up all the considerations in play and arrive at a judgement one way or another. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, however, has a better approach, suggested to him by something of Fintan O'Toole's. Wheatcroft's preferred alternative approach is based on the premise that there are unknown knowns. What are these? They are 'things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to "unknow."' He applies this theory to the war in Iraq:

Those of us who opposed the war may be asked to this day whether we knew what weaponry Iraq possessed, to which the answer is that of course we didn't. Nor, as it transpired, did President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld or Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

But that was the wrong question. It should have been not "what weaponry does Saddam Hussein possess?" but "Is Saddam Hussein's weaponry, whatever it may be, the real reason for the war, or is it a pretext confected after a decision for war had already been taken?" The answer to that was obvious and could have been known to all, but too many people chose to unknow it [my emphasis - NG].

Then there was another unknown known: the likely consequences of an invasion...
.....
... All the calamities that followed the invasion were not only foreseeable, they were foreseen. And yet for Mr. Blair, as well as Washington, they were unknown knowns.

You see, all you have to do instead of trying to arrive at the best judgement you can in such situations is make sure not to unknow what is known by knowing others - those people whom I shall henceforth refer to as knowies. Since it is plain that those who disagree with the knowies aren't capable of making correct judgements by themselves, one must infer that the proper thing for them to do, according to Geoffrey Wheatcroft, is to follow the judgements of the knowies and set aside their own. Because the knowies know what is already-known, the rest of us ought to defer to them. Let us call this the New Vanguard Theory of Political Judgement.

But a little niggle in the corner of my mind prevents me from writing Q.E.D. beneath it. This niggle takes the form of the following question: can the knowies be relied upon to know the already-known in all cases? If not, how do we not-knowies know when to follow the knowies and when not to? Take the example of the very prominent knowie Simon Jenkins, his credentials on opposing the Iraq war as shiny as the light of the sun bouncing off a freshly cleaned window pane. Yet when it came to Nato's intervention in Libya, Jenkins seems to have got pretty much everything wrong, despite all his knowiness. Should we have followed other knowies than him when it came to Libya, and if so how are we to know which ones? How are we to know the already-known about which knowies sometimes err and which knowies never do?

Shucks, looks like we may be thrown back on the old business of having to make up our own minds. Looks like the New Vanguard Theory of Political Judgement may be flawed.