A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Bettie Smith

Recommended by Rory Dowd

The tree is an ailanthus, a variety that is found all over Brooklyn, and is known for its resiliency. The narrator says “It grows in boarded up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly, survives without sun, water, and seemingly earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.” The metaphor for the poor immigrant family that struggles to make it in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is obvious, but powerful. It’s a metaphor for the children running around Brooklyn and for the struggles that are so difficult but so common in impoverished communities.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn feels disproportionately old at this point when the narrator describes Williamsburg, Brooklyn as something other than a haven for Hipsters and Hassidic Jews. It’s hard to imagine Williamsburg, Brooklyn to be anything like Bettie Smith’s version of it and harder still to see the connection between the way it feels today and the way it did in the early 20th century.

But the neighborhood and the streets themselves are irrelevant – it’s the poor immigrant community that is the persisting center of the story, as expressed by the refreshing and idealistic innocence of Francie, who guides us through this world. It’s the metaphor that the novel starts with that I love most though – the resilient tree that can crack through cement and survive without sun or water, the most basic nutrients and elements of growth and life. There is something wonderful in this metaphor and the way that the author weaves it into the personalities of various characters. The use of a single metaphor that shadows an entire novel or story is a great American literary trait – from the green light and eyeglasses of The Great Gatsby to the rain in Farewell to Arms – and Smith employs it so powerfully here. I had no idea this would be such a great novel and was even more surprised that it would feel like such an American novel. Great American novels are always my favorite and this is no exception.

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Night Fall by Demille

NightFall by DeMille

Recommended by: Don Marsh

All I knew about Night Fall going in was that it’s about the TWA plane crash of 1996 that was determined to be a mechanical malfunction so I decided to read the book on a few flights across the country to confront my flying fears. Turns out, however, my fear of plane explosions was nothing compared to the fears of the things Demille suggests.

The investigative mystery thriller is a genre I am not familiar with, but I have been told it is a wonderful medium that entertains while discussing grander issues, sometimes psychological or cultural, but in this case current events and national security. Demille’s book is fiction in every way, but it is rooted in conspiracy and theory that like all good conspiracy reflects the truth that the possibility for corruption and deceit is entirely plausible even if the theory is false. It doesn’t matter if TWA Flight 800 was destroyed by a missile or a mechanical failure, what matters is, the latter could just as easily be the truth and the truth could just as easily be disguised all these years.

Night Fall, it turns out, is an early September 11th novel, as Demille leads us from the events surrounding the aftermath of TWA 800 towards September, 2001. The Septemeber 11th novel is a developing genre consisting of a plurality of voices, from children describing the aftermath, to corporate executives watching from the 2nd tower, to immigrants in Hell’s Kitchen thrown into national crisis. Many September 11th novels focus on the tragedy of the day or the themes of moving forward but Demille forces us to look backwards. And his contribution to this genre is important because it reminds us that the day in question was not an abstract singular disaster but the worst in a string of horrific world events. Whether TWA 800 is a part of that string is beside the point – the point is that it easily could have been.

East of Eden

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Recommended by Ben Bartlett

I am ashamed to say that East of Eden is my first Steinbeck novel. My young and ignorant failed attempt at Of Mice and Men soured me for years, and lately, with rising unemployment numbers and Southern droughts I’ve resisted his depression era novels. East of Eden, however, is far more important than I could have imagined, and is another in the line of books that justify this project for me.

This Cain and Abel story embodies local and temporal themes while demonstrating immortal ones as well. The clashes between Cal and Aaron, embodying two varied but recognizable personalities from the same town, are as old as the Bible stories they reflect, and as enduring as the Montagues and Capulets.

This novel’s achievement is the sense of place it creates. The plot at times seems only an excuse for detailed passages on Salinas Valley and its inhabitants that Steinbeck weaves in and out the action. It is an enviable skill that Steinbeck possesses, so aware and confident of his location that it emanates through the text like a poetic travel book. I’ve driven through Salinas hundreds of times and while it doesn’t seem as interesting or complex as Steinbeck describes it – neither in culture nor landscape – the Salinas of East Eden is fascinating and intricate and full of complex beauty. But I don’t know the place very well, I only know there is nothing I could write to bring life to a specific place and there are very few people I have ever read who could. Read East of Eden to experience place in its grandest sense, just don’t wait as long as I did.

Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie

Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie

Recommended by Jay Mollica

Bob Dylan said that Bound For Glory had a similar but much stronger effect on him than Kerouac’s On the Road. Can anything more complimentary have ever been said about a book? So affected by Guthrie’s book, Dylan famously went to visit the ailing activist and folk singer suffering from Huntington’s Disease in a New Jersey hospital.

Guthrie embodies an America too often forgotten in historical narratives too often preoccupied with wars, presidents, and scandals. The traveling storytelling artist is not as strange as many would imagine, and in Bound for Glory, Woody Guthrie details his life and the lives of many others who also traveled through America, meeting people, singing songs, working when necessary, and promoting freedom. The ills of capitalism and the struggles for TRUE freedom are often taught and promoted in America’s ivory towers, but Guthrie (along with Wendell Berry today) reminds us that our most liberal and freedom-loving Americans often exist within the middle of the country and struggle every day to maintain human dignities in an industrial society.

“This guitar kills Fascists” Guthrie had written on his guitar. To him, songwriting and story telling was both an active testament of freedom and necessary to freedom. I can make no claim about this book’s worth compared to Kerouac’s, but I can say, that along with On the Road and Bob Dylan’s own Chronicles, this book forms a triumvirate of the stories of traveling artists who are at the core of our American culture and and a testament to America’s artistic worth.

Beautiful Boy by David Scheff

Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Meth Addiction by David Sheff

Recommended by: Brenda Coseo

Reading about addiction is a difficult to thing to endure, but like addiction itself, making your way through a book like Beautiful Boy is a reward seldom experienced. David Scheff’s son Nic is lying, stealing, and living on the streets to support his methamphetamine addiction at age 17. David must endure the trauma of watching his son dive into the spiral of addiction but his heroic struggle to escape it.

I want to say something like ‘this is not a book for those who are inexperienced with addiction and will be shocked by stories of drug use’ but perhaps those most inexperienced with addiction will be removed enough to appreciate the heroics and struggles of David Scheff and his son. If, however, one were to read this book with reference or memory to a personal experience with addiction (be it popsicles, aerospace museums or sandwiches), David Scheff seems to me like a true saint who provides intimate details of the successes and failures of his son barely surviving his addiction while connecting his condition to the national pandemic of meth addiction. However, I wonder if much of the poignancy and import of this book escapes those who are inexperienced with addiction (or perhaps parenting). David Scheff, a journalist by trade, perfectly re-creates his son’s struggle. He is knowledgeable enough to know the universal experience of the disease that is addiction, but aware also of the persistent importance of individual narratives of addiction, which he is willing to provide and in so doing contribute to the endless and very necessary storyline of addiction/recovery narratives.

Beautiful Boy is important for everyone because it warns against silence about drugs: silent parents not discussing drugs with children, silent teachers not educating students about drugs, and a silent society criminalizing and exiling into prisons those addicted to drugs. Beautiful Boy proclaims that the only necessary reward for the father for his struggle with his son’s addiction is his son’s recovery, his son’s return to himself, and in this proclamation the book forces us to explore the image of a society that would – like a father or mother – choose to care for and heal those stricken by meth addiction.

 

The Boat by Nam Le

The Boat by Nam Le

Recommended by Mike Valente

The Boat, a book of short stories published in 2008, is a participant in perhaps the greatest year of short story collections we have seen in a century. It is rare to find short story collections that amount to more than uneven attempts but still more uncommon to have a year with five or six collections that match brilliance of Hemingway, O’Connor or Chekov. What distinguishes The Boat and its fellow collections (Unaccustomed Earth, Better Angel, Diction, and Dangerous Laughter) is that they embody a consistent tone that subtly tells us these stories need to be told. This tone is a sign of confidence and assurance in Nam Le’s first collection and it’s coupled with his oddly familiar settings that build with urgency as our characters struggle with their own identities: cultural, ethnic, and professional.

Yet still, like all first collections, The Boat contains the apologetic, self defense of the writer that can be dangerously wearisome. Here it is in the first story of the collection where a character extremely reminiscent in name and personality to the author struggles through writers workshops being criticized as ‘too ethnic.’ This is not a new technique (think D.F. Wallace’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way or Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock) but still it’s much preferred to long tedious apologetic introductions or random and misguided author intrusions that often exhaust the reader. Nam Le is in no way wearisome, however, simply because his own self-criticisms are distant from the rest of his collection and in reading the remainder of his stories you realize his insecurities must have washed away soon after writing about them. In name and history he is writing about himself, but the faults Nam Le has in the story do not translate or even remain recognizable in the other stories.

Le is an immigrant, and his stories highlight the struggle of migration, immersion, and nationality. He never, however, starts his stories with these themes, but seems to have, like his fellow 2008 authors, an urgency to just simply write and to show, allowing his personal experiences and themes to ooze out along the way. This is not the best collection of short stories of 2008 (Adrian’s A Better Angel takes that torch for me), but it is a wonderful contribution to a year where literature and culture seemed poised to discuss identity and courageous enough to display it.

Carl Panzram’s Autobiography

Panzram A Journal of Murder by Harold Schechter

Recommended by Jake Chevedden

Carl Panzram writes; “”In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry.”

That’s not all either. He robbed William Howard Taft’s home in 1920, and stole his gun, which he then used to murder four or five people. He tried to rob several Army Barracks and U.S. Naval ships. He beat the brains of 11-year-old boys and would rape sailors’ bodies before dumping them in the Hudson River.

He was sentenced to 25 years in prison for several of these murders, but was then sentenced to death for killing a fellow prisoner. His last words to his executioner: “hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could hang ten men while you’re fooling around.”

There is a form of sociology that believes that societies should be studied by evaluating their extremes, abnormalities and fringes. Are we microwave equipped, car driving, Soprano loving, Hamburger eating Americans? Or are we a homeless, drug addicted, AIDS infected, schizophrenic, murderous and anarchic people tending towards destruction? Carl Panzram’s autobiography doesn’t aim to be universal – its simply a confessional document, but it is a reminder that the extreme is never far away and the breadth of this killer’s travels and the extent of his crimes, from African boys to U.S. Presidents, is a nice reminder that the fringes of society are never far from the center.

Mating

Mating: A Novel by Norman Rush

Recommended by: Gunjan Koul

This novel, steeped in the tradition of a comedy of manners, seems easily comparable to a Jane Austen work. What it embodies, however, is the theme of exoticism that is put forward by our narrator and main character, the unnamed anthropology student in Africa. Her time in Botswana is one of learning the rules and norms of her inhabited place, but her academic background and insightful narration allude to the ills of an exotic understanding and we, following behind her, seem to struggle between criticism, laughter, and enjoyment from the landscape.

Today, Africa is a loaded word and continent, where Detective Agencies – a la the Alexander McCall Smith Series – and Anthropology students are in danger of seeming trite and foolish compared to the realities of the place. But, what both accomplish is to create a sense of place that is much more than sickness, poverty, and destruction. Mating is a very layered and deep novel that is at times more difficult than Ulysses and denser than Middlemarch and I would not recommend it to anyone who has not enjoyed both of those novels. In fact, it seems the sort of book that is written for people who love difficult books as it follows the Pynchonesque method of inserting cultural references within cultural references, a thicket of referentiality that can be wonderful for those who ‘get it’ and obnoxious to those who don’t. For me, though, its referential density redeems it and represents a renewal of this modernist form by setting the encyclopedic, intellectual, wonderfully insightful and guiding narrator in Africa instead of in English shire’s or familiar urban streets. The African setting is a labyrinth fit for the Joycean consciousness, and it reminds the reader that there is much more to literature than Dublin and London and New York City.

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley

Recommended by: Matt Lefebvre

Like Demons by Dostoevsky or Magic Mountain by Mann, Huxley’s characters in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan personify different philosophies or outlooks on life. In a sort of Socratic roundtable, the author, always a man of ideas is able to tease out through satire humans’ understanding of other humans. It’s difficult not to laugh at each other when we really sit down and describe our outlooks on life, and its impossible not to laugh at our many selves when they’re sitting on the page.

Like many of Huxley’s works, this novel is both eternal in theme and temporal in method and communication. Readers in 1939 would surely have recognized the absurd Capitalist, Stoyte, as a thinly-veiled reflection of William Randolph Hearst. Huxley, as in Brave New World, seems to want to create something that is targeted at his own time and location (1930s Los Angeles) while still creating a lasting allegory and satire. The effect is Greek in the persistent import of its dialogues and has echoes of Dante, who famously inserted his personal enemies into the worst realms of hell.

This book, and the later novel, Island, seems to me much better introductions to Huxley than Brave New World, his most widely read book. The futuristic societal system and disutopic genre of the latter can often detract from the philosophy. Teasing out thoughts and theories from characters that reflect people on popular magazine covers is far more joyful and accessible than the other-worldliness of Brave New World. Perhaps not, but it is hard to dispute the rich, layered reality that Huxley creates in After Many a Summer…, a Socratic dialogue (or polyphony) among the many cultural voices of last century that we can easily insert ourselves into and talk amongst the characters.

Welcome to Your Brain

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Behavior by Sandra Aamodt

Recommended by: Mike Valente

Welcome to Your Brain is a wonderful overview of the workings of your brain along with many tips on the most difficult of life’s problems that begin with the brain. It dispels myths about the brain – alcohol, in-itself, does not kill brain cells – and serves to differentiate between various drugs’ effects on the brain – consistent use of LSD has no lasting effect, while a little cocaine can be debilitating. More than hard facts or interesting anecdotes, this book is a wonderful guide on how to think about your brain and thus how to think about choices you make in life.

Because of the impermanence and evolving nature of science and medicine I am more skeptical of scientific claims than any other, but this book resists ultimate claims and favors process and function. These two neurologist are willing to admit that they don’t know why cocaine hurts the brain so much or why red wine is so beneficial, all they can say is that observation is difficult to refute. The most exciting part of this book isn’t the explanation of the extraordinary effects of drugs or the helpful tips regarding jet lag and forgetfulness, but the illumination of the typical and everyday functioning of the brain in sleep, eating, sensation, and emotions. I like knowing that spicy food uses the same brain receptor that heat does, and that’s why we call spicy food ‘hot.’ There is something liberating in understating that smell has evolved as a form of memory and protection in your brain.

Still though, there is something unnerving about learning too much about the brain. I resist the chapters on emotions and love because I like the mystery. I like not knowing why I’m predestined to fall in love at an early age or why I am more prone to be amazed and elated so easily. Mystery is the fun part, and the knowledge seems less enjoyable. I know this is just like refusing to sail to the horizon because you want the world to be flat, but in 1492, I definitely would not have been stupid enough to try to sail around a flat world, and that’s probably because I inherited many genes that make my brain more prone to anxiety, caution, and survival.

Wendell Berry and the Pleasures of Eating

The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry

Recommended by Wade Peerman

‘Eating is an agricultural act’ is Wendell Berry’s claim in his essay, ‘The Pleasures of Eating,’ collected here alongside his finest non-fiction works. Food, Berry tells us, is now the product of industry and “as in any other industry . . . the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price.” We have become supremely good at producing massive amounts of food at the cost of diversity and health, and every time we put ourselves at the end of the industrial food chain we choose to allow the world to be a place of feedlots, processed food, hormones, anti-biotics, pesticides, pollution, cancer, obesity, etc. To understand eating as an agricultural acts is to actively determine ‘how the world is used’ rather than being merely a passive consumer who does not participate in the process. Berry offers seven ways to become a part of the complexity of food and agriculture: participate in food production as much as you can, even if only with basil on the window sill; prepare your own food; learn the origins of the food you buy; deal directly with local farmers; learn as much as you can, in self-defense, about industrial food productions; learn what makes the best farming and gardening; and learn about the history and nature of the food species you eat.

The Art of Living by Alexander Nehamas

The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault by Alexander Nehamas

Alexander Nehamas’ The Art of Living was recommended to me by Stephen Black, my professor of Ancient Philosophy and Late Antiquity in college. A fundamental change in my education occurred in Professor Black’s Ancient Philosophy course. While ten of the twelve students were timid, silent & barely alive, my friend Turbo and I dominated the course, demanding answers, insights, and knowledge from the shrewd and dialectic and always-willing Professor Black. Patient as Socrates, he never tired of my persistent inquiries, and in doing so he fostered the part of my personality that constructs itself continually through the investigation and production of philosophical views.

The style of Professor Black’s teaching I have learned since (and fully realized now in reading The Art of Living), was, in my opinion, the result of the influence of Socrates on Professor Black and in turn his enactment of Socrates’ method. In opposition to this engaged, dialectical spirit of Socrates, much of philosophy is experienced by students and practiced by ‘professionals’ as purely theoretical, as a self contained, static system of concepts, and thus easily ignored or abandoned as soon as the class ends, the book is finished, or the paper is completed. Philosophy conceived and practiced in this detached and purely theoretical way often removes the self from the system of thought.

Ideas from Dominic Thomas’s Black France

Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, And Transnationalism by Dominic Thomas

My sister, Markay, recommended Black France by her professor, Dominic Thomas. It’s an academic book discussing race and identity in the post-colonial French world using the literature of those whose lives embody the great destructive paradox of colonialism, that is, whose lives are split between contrary national/ethnic identities or haunted by the loss of their national or ethnic identity in the post-colonial world. Whether one lives in formerly French Africa or is of African heritage currently living in France, the end of colonialism abruptly destroyed the identities of those citizens involved. It destroyed both their cultural and political identities and while we are used to hearing about the destruction of political identity with French immigration issues and the politically compromised aid to Africa, Black France explores primarily cultural identity issues.

Revolution

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder

In my entire life I have read six books from start to finish in one sitting. In the cases of The Great Gatsby or Pale Fire, I read them straight through because I had enjoyed the work previously and had a desire to experience the books as wholes, without interruption, as Poe suggests we experience short-stories. In the cases of Infinite Jest and Anna Karenina, I embarked on a narcissistic challenge just to see if I could, in fact, consume such massive amounts in one sitting.

But my two greatest experiences of reading something in one sitting are Omnivores’ Dilemma and now, Mountains Beyond Mountains, the latter written by Tracy Kidder and recommended to me by my sister Markay. I started Mountains Beyond Mountains one evening at 11 pm and finished sometime before dawn. The need to read this book (as well as Omnivore’s Dilemma) straight through without interruption was not due to planning or experimentation but because it seemed unwise not to. Within the first few pages, I knew I would have to read each of these books straight through, because they were, at least to me, revolutionary.

Aldo Leopold, I’m Sorry

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

One can’t help feeling a little sorry for Aldo Leopold, the author of A Sand County Almanac. For him the world is too modernized and is “so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them or even to turn off the tap.” His message is still relevant, as we live in a world where we build and take what we want without questioning how or why we do it, but his tone is quaint and since he is writing this in the 1940’s he is both supremely ahead of his time in regards to environmental ethics and extremely outdated when it comes to the specifics of his complaint. His complaints about ecological irresponsibility would be less outdated if only they extended beyond the overuse of bath water and the deregulation of lumber plants.

That Quail, Robert

That Quail, Robert by Margaret A. Stanger

That Quail, Robert was recommend to me by my Grandma Betty. When I was a child and would visit my Grandparents every summer, my Grandfather would often feed the quail in the yard. I can recall the line of birds running down the hill bobbing their heads, anxious to eat, and the way they disappeared in much the same way into the underbrush of the hillside. My grandfather would tell me how devotedly quail care for their young, always willing to sacrifice themselves by leading a hungry fox away from their chicks.

This book is about a quail raised by a human couple and their neighbors and the four years that this quail lives with these people. The quail is assumed to have been a male, so they named him Robert. When Robert lays an egg, they decide to keep the name. Robert was remarkably gregarious around humans and developed a routine based upon her human roommate’s lives that involved waking at particular hours, eating breakfast, socializing and meeting visitors. Not only does Robert adapt to the human surroundings, she seems to thrive in them, fascinated by telephones, responsive to voices, and even comfortably house broken.

The scene when Robert lays her first egg is particularly wonderful. The three-day event caused much anxiety among her human companions as her mood was distinctly altered in the process. She was quieter at the breakfast table in the morning and didn’t greet guests as she normally would. As soon as she laid the egg, however, everything went back to normal as the family finally understood the issue at hand and Robert was relieved to have finished the process. Other anxious events include the accidental eating of a diamond, fluid in the eyes, and a reoccurring lump on her beak, all of which are delicately attended to by her human friends.

Margaret Stanger, Robert’s neighbor, wonderfully tells her story. Sanger adopts a matter-of-fact reporting style to tell this extraordinary story, and we watch with the rest of the Cape Code community as the events in Robert’s life unfold. Their worry from the moment they find the cracked egg is our worry. Their joy in Robert’s daily routine of breakfast on the kitchen table is our joy, and the sadness at the eventual end is our sadness.

What is it that is so wonderful about the story of Robert? I think a story like this is so wonderful because we are able to experience in a few hours of reading the entirety of a life. It is a delightful life, a life that brought nothing but joy to others, and we are able to witness the whole of this amazing life from birth to death. The story is charming in its compactness, and reminiscent of myth stories in its simple portrayal of an ideal and saintly life, a life without a blur or blemish. The fact that it’s about a quail makes little difference.

Tesla the Artist

Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney

The opening scene of Margaret Cheney’s Book, Tesla: Man Out of Time, describes Tesla leading his close friend, Mark Twain, and a few other acquaintances into his New York City laboratory at midnight for an overwhelming display of massive electric sparks that neither Twain nor the others had seen before, or even believed possible. Through midnight performances such as this, Tesla was able to fascinate and eventually join New York’s upper class. With his sense of fashion, his good looks, rumors of his revolutionary inventions and his penchant for poetic and visionary conversation, he attracted a great deal of attention among the women and capitalists of the Gilded Age.

Some Ideas on the Narration of The Fifth Business

Note: While I read and enjoyed all three novels in The Deptford Trilogy, I’ve chosen to review the first novel, The Fifth Business.

The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies

The reserved and yet quietly insightful first person male narrator features prominently in 20th Century literature. The best example to students of American literature might be The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway. On the surface, Nick appears as merely an intrigued voyeur setting out to tell us of a summer spent carousing with his fascinating and rich next-door neighbor Jay Gatsby. In reality, however, the brilliance of The Great Gatsby has little to do with Mr. Gatsby or its depiction of events that typified the ‘jazz age;’ rather, the brilliance of the book lies in Carraway’s seeming seduction by Gatsby, his discovery of his joint fascination and disgust with the glamorous life of the upper-class. The brilliance of the book lies in the way Carraway gives supposedly removed narration of Gatsby’s extraordinary life style and lavish parties while quietly revealing his opinions to us throughout, and ultimately violating his own rules of life and of storytelling. A European example with similar technique is Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The narrator, Hans Castorp, repeatedly tells us that he intends to tell us about the life of his cousin and other patients at a Tuberculosis sanitarium until deep into the book when years have passed, his cousin is dead and the patients seemed to have faded away, Castorp has somehow, beneath our eyes, shifted the focus to himself, and the book to autobiography.

The Fifth Business, by Robertson Davis, offers another variation on this classic Western Male narrator. This book was recommended to me by Barbara Heaton, an artist from Chicago.

Schiller’s The Aesthetic Education

On the Aesthetic Education of Man by Friedrich von Schiller

A generic summary of the argument in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man would be: in order for a person to become a moral and rational being she must pass through an aesthetic education in which she harmonizes with herself and thus becomes Free to exercise her rational will univocally. The passage often quoted as a summation of Schiller’s major theme in this work is: “It is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom.”

This passage, since I first encountered it, has been one of the few essential thoughts I carry with me through life. My superficial knowledge of Schiller, through only this famous quote and the above general argument, has had a disproportionate effect on me. When Conor Heaton, a friend from Chicago, recommended Schiller’s Letters to me, I was thrilled for the opportunity to read the entirety of the work and to test my own personalized version of the idea against Schiller’s initial conception.

True Happiness is Uncaused

The Way to Love by Anthony De Mello

In Anthony De Mello’s book, The Way to Love, the word ‘love’ is used to describe a state of being, a natural state, free from attachments, burdens or judgment. The word ‘happiness’ is often substituted for the word ‘love,’ which, for De Mello, is meant to signify ‘happiness’ in the sense of ‘The Good,’ or virtue, as an active state, as opposed to a passive experience.

This book was recommended to me by one of my favorite musicians, Anne Heaton. It is a tiny book, small enough to fit in a front pocket, and I read it mostly on cold early mornings waiting for the bus or on cold nights waiting outside a bar or restaurant for friends to arrive. It is a wonderful book that I hesitated at initially, but as I continued to read and to re-read, I was slowly persuaded.