Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Aristotle's Liberality

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I mentioned Aristotle’s ideas about taking the moderate position between two vices in my last post. Well one of the traits that he spends an exceptional amount of time on is Liberality. What he’s talking about here is our relationship with money and giving. This particular section was very interesting to me because I believe we live in an individualistic consumer culture and because all over the world (and just as often in our own backyards) we are confronted with staggering poverty and depressingly large gaps between the wealthy and the poor.At first I got quite frustrated because if he was writing about this very same issue over two thousand years ago and its clear we haven’t done much to resolve the matter, what does that mean about human evolution? We’re more civilized now? Ha!

All ranting aside, Aristotle has a pretty interesting view on the matter. He believes that wealth is simply a thing that can be used, a bit like a tool, and someone who makes the best use of their wealth is the most virtuous. And he outlines pretty clear rules about giving and receiving from the right people as well as not giving and not receiving from the wrong people.

Nor will he accept money from a wrong source; because such acceptance is inconsistent with indifference to money.

His main point centers on this idea of indifference. Money is a fine thing to have simply because it’s a tool. But too much pleasure in having money makes us lose our indifference to it and so we will experience pain when we have to give it away and therefore give less. And Aristotle’s view is that we should give.

But he will accept money from the right source, e.g. from his own property; not because it is a fine thing to do so, but because it is necessary so that he may have something to give.It is not easy for a liberal man to be rich, since he is neither acquisitive nor retentive of money, but is ready to part with it, and does not value it for itself, but only with a view to giving.

I love the notion of moderation coupled with responsibility here. He’s not saying that people should shed their homes and their clothes and go traipsing over the wilderness doing good deeds. He is reminding us that as social creatures we have a certain responsibility to take care of ourselves and make sure we have extra to give to people who haven’t reached the same level of virtue. This reminds me of Plato talking about how gains in intellectual and political wisdom come with a responsibility to go back and work with those who haven’t gotten there yet. I don’t think there is anything condescending in these ideas, not at all. What I find in both is real social compassion.

And he has a funny little insight into the perversity of human nature. He recognizes that there is a back door shortcut to this virtue. The difference between not taking and giving. It is wrong to take so of course we shouldn’t take from others for our benefit. Aristotle reminds us that this is a lot easier to do than giving, and probably what most law-abiding citizens concern themselves with. But it’s harder to give up what is our own and therefore more virtuous. And he rather darkly admits that illiberality (or stinginess) is more deeply rooted in human nature.

He also rightly points out that giving is all proportional. A poor person can give a small amount and come out more virtuous than a rich person giving a huge amount – it all depends on how much of our wealth we’re willing to part with.

In one of my scribbled notes for this section, I wrote a question about capitalism and whether Aristotle would consider it an inherently unethical activity. I suppose it would depend on how profits are used and re-distributed. I can say for sure that he was opposed to making money out of money – money lending with high rates of interest. To him, this wasn’t ethical because it removes the practical aspect out of money (money for exchange of goods and/or services) as well as encourages others to live beyond their means (prodigality).

All in all, Ethics was a great read. I may still have more to post but I’ll see what strikes me first. I’d love to get started on Politics right away but I’m up to my ears in a lot of other books at the moment, and really enjoying all of them. I mentioned Gargantua et Pantagruel last week and I am still cackling my way through it. I’ve also gotten halfway through Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and am rather engrossed in the story, even if it’s a difficult one to read. And I started Michel de Montaigne’s first volume of Essais, as if I didn’t have enough to read already!

Anne Bragance – Casus Belli

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Casus Belli – acts of war. A fitting title for a surprisingly dark novel about the psychological damage of conditional love. From the outside, the Douhet family seems normal. Good-looking intellectual father, capable and put-together mother, one lovely daughter and a charming son. But beneath the surface of this attractive family lies some very savage undercurrents.Claire Douhet, the mother, wields the weapons in this war. She is the only character given her own voice and through her self-righteous monologues with God, she reveals an unfeeling and envious interior life. Her daughter Virginie bears the brunt of Claire’s bitterness and she retaliates, first pathetically and after, destructively. The day her younger brother Christophe is born, five year-old Virginie adopts a limp she will keep for the rest of her life. She refuses her real name and selects Camille (a name with the same first letter as both of her parents and her younger brother), a request her mother refuses to honor. Stubbornly, Virginie keeps both, constructing a self-damaging alter-ego. And finally, when her brother is two or three months old, she throws him in the garbage can.

This act remains between Virginie and the mother as a sort of unexploded bomb. Claire does not reprimand her daughter. Instead she refuses to acknowledge what has happened, wrapping the moment up in a form of suffocating horror that alters Virginie’s self-perception forever. Virginie, too young to understand what she has done, is never given the opportunity to apologize and this stunted guilt sets up house in her psyche. Bragance commits a lovely passage to this idea of withheld forgiveness.

Dans les rivières, là-bas, au fond du monde, dans les mines profondes, des hommes cherchent l’or. Ils cherchent sous un soleil qui tue, le corps éreinté, courbé, poisseux d’une sueur chaude qui leur brûle les yeux, des années durant ils cherchent comme des diables fourbus, comme des demi-dieux impécunieux, ils s’acharnent à cette quête. Mais comment trouver l’or où il se trouve?

Dans sa maison, ici, bordée à droite comme à gauche de fusains bien taillés, précédée d’une pelouse bien tondue, Virginie cherche le pardon. S’il le faut, elle y passera sa vie, elle s’acharnera elle aussi, elle se l’est promise. Comme les chercheurs d’or de là-bas, si loin. Mais comment trouver le pardon quand l’offensée s’obstine à nier l’offense ? Comment obtenir le pardon quand la victime, trop innocente, ignore qu’il y a eu crime.

Pourtant, il faut de l’or pour survivre, l’or d’un regard, d’un geste, d’une parole, il faut le pardon, absolument.

[In the far away rivers at the end of the world, in the deepest mines, men hunt for treasure. They hunt beneath a killing sun, with wasted and bent bodies, dripping with a sticky sweat that stings their eyes. For years and years, they hunt like worn out devils, penniless demi-gods, relentless in their quest. But how to find this hidden treasure?

From within her house, just here, with its border of well-trimmed hedges and its perfectly mowed lawn, Virginie is hunting for forgiveness. If necessary, she will keep looking for the rest of her life, she’ll never give up, she’s promised herself. Like those very treasure seekers so far away. But how to find forgiveness when the injured party keeps denying the injury? How to be forgiven when the still too innocent victim doesn’t even know there was a crime?

Yet one needs treasure to survive, the treasure of a look, a gesture, a word, one needs forgiveness, for certain.]

The years pass, all tainted by the destructive ghost of this event. Virginie, unloved and so unable to love, marries, divorces, marries again, divorces again. She refuses to have children, denying herself a certain pleasure in the sheer desire to thwart her mother. Christophe marries but his mother can’t stand the woman he’s selected as she is too similar to his sister. It’s very ugly, the way Claire’s jealousy deforms what should be the most natural of relationships. Like Virginie’s body remains misshapen, so does the Douhet family dynamic. Made all the more tragic by the complicit silence of the father and the nearly blind cheerfulness of Christophe.

Casus Belli is not all doom and gloom, there are moments of redemption within the story even if they come too late to avoid the final disastrous event. This slim little book is literally exploding with thorny questions and uncomfortable propositions – not all of which get answered or fully addressed before its conclusion. A small disappointment in an otherwise rewarding read.

Cormac McCarthy – The Road

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Where do I even begin? With the writing…The prose in The Road has a rhythm, a cadence, a measured finality. A weight. Sentences, like the fictional world they describe, are stripped away to their rawest state. There are no wasted adjectives, no superfluous descriptions. Which is good, because any overzealous sketching of the horrors that McCarthy has imagined would only serve to vulgarize them. There is an incredible amount of restraint in this prose, and a resulting tension running below the surface of each sentence and every paragraph. And then just at the right time, the restraint eases off and the lines abandon themselves to a nearly reckless emotion.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

What will I remember? The images, the impressions…

The universe of The Road is not a comfortable place to get lost in – monochromatic, scentless, dirty, scarred. The overall impression is one of darkness, both physical and psychic. Humanity has been stripped of its unifying bonds, nature tortured to death, beauty become irrelevant.

Yet this barren landscape serves to underscore the pure beauty of the relationship between the father and his son. They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.

What are my questions? With the conflict…

The real conflict in the novel is not played out between the father-son team against the roving cannibals or even against time, although these two challenges are what give the story its forward propulsion, the real conflict lies between the father and the son as they negotiate their disparate visions of existence. Fear, benevolence, compassion, sapience, rage – how much of each is needed for survival? What is “good” behavior and why is it still important in this new world? What does the future mean to each of them?

A thoroughly disturbing but courageous piece of fiction.