The Baltimore Online Book Club: A Brief Review of "Purple Hibiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Purple Hibiscus
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Algonquin Books pf Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, N.C. 2012
307 pages

For this month’s edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club, we chose to read and discuss Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—a wise choice!  The book met with wide acclaim when it was first published in 2003—praise (of which some of us were unaware until after we read it) undoubtedly well deserved.  It is a page-turner which we highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

Adichie is a born story-teller.  If you want a novel replete with Melvillian asides or with Proustian profundities, look elsewhere; if you want to read a winsome, well-wrought novel, however, look no further than here.  The language is functional; it's like a train that neither chugs along noisily nor progresses in splendor, but takes you where she wants you to go, from one's home to another's, with many memorable scenes along the way. She knows well how to structure a story.  She might not be a master of characterization such as Philip Roth is, but many of the characters in the novel are quite memorable nevertheless.  This is a coming-of-age novel about a fifteen year-old girl growing up in a rich, tyrannical, patriarchal family in Enugu, Nigeria, where, probably not incidentally, Adichie was born as well.

The symbol of the purple hibiscus, a hybrid plant, is central to the novel—it represents a new kind of freedom for the main character, Kambili Achike, and her seventeen year old brother, Jaja.  The plant is described on page 16 as follows: "Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.”  Adichie treats this central symbol with admirable understatement; it is mentioned once again when Aunt Ifeoma, a humanities professor at the Nigerian University at Nsukka, informs Kambali that the purple hibiscus has been cultivated for the first time by the university’s botany department.  Adichie seems to be saying that freedom will come to Nigeria from the centers of learning; it is  much-needed liberation.  The author does not hide the widespread corruption in her country.  As one might have expected, the plant thrives in the family compound after the siblings obtain their hard-won independence.

I really enjoyed the Nigerian ambiance, which reminded me of time spent in India. So many superficial resemblances: before food processors came to India, the sounds of pestles grinding lentils in mortars could be heard everywhere, just as they were in Nigeria at the time the novel takes place.  Adichie refers to frequent power shortages—I remember waking up many times in the middle of the night during very hot weather after the electricity failed.  (This occurs infrequently in India now).  There was no televisions in the Nigerian households at the time of the novel,, just as in 1970s India.  Now, televised Bollywood movies and local-language versions of India Has Got Talent blares from living rooms everywhere—just as in this digital age with its remarkable innovations,  the good, alas! comes with the bad.

The novel occurs in Igbo country, the Igbo people are a significant ethnic group of Nigeria, consisting of about 20% of the population.  Adichie includes many Igbo-language phrases in the book, which she usually subsequently translated—an example: ”Nna m o! My Father!”—page 183.  Nigerian food is frequently mentioned as well, e.g.”Lunch was fufu and onugbu soup.”—page 11. (I asked my son, a good cook,who has a Nigerian friend, to make it for me—He has so far refused; he thinks I won’t like it.  Fufu, made of yam, he tells me,is  like bread, which you dip into the soup.  How could anyone not be interested in something called fufu? It sounds like a name of a chic Park Avenue poodle—why shouldn’t fufu taste as good as a primped doggy looks? Another aside: when Philip's friend visited, I played the Nigerian National Anthem at the piano, the music for which I found on the internet--an indication of how much the atmosphere of the novel has affected me).

Adichie by these means and others creates a riveting story with a distinctive Nigerian atmosphere; this she accomplishes with aplomb.  This vividly written novel makes you almost feel part of the family; things are very different here, she seems to relate, yet everything is the same nevertheless.  This local, yet very universal coming-of-age novel, is a delight.


This is the eleventh edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club. You are welcome to read past book reviews of the Baltimore Online Book Club by googling the title of the novel along with my full name, Thomas Dorsett.

1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
4. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
5. Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan
6. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Pierre or the Ambiguities by Herman Melville
8. Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
9. Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

10,The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

Our next meeting will take place on January 31,, 2018.  On that date, the seven members of our group will discuss ,"Diary of a Polar Bear," ("Etüden im Schnee") by Yoko Tawada, I will post my reviews, in English and in German, shorty thereafter. You are invited to read the book and to post your comments onto the comment section of the review.   I wish you pleasurable reading!

Trump, Trumpism, and the Three Poisons

We human beings need guides to assess behavior; some form of the Golden Rule is necessary if we are to lead moral lives.  This is how we should judge our actions as we move along the path of a humane life.  Masters of self-deception, we need criteria to assess whether we are really moving forward.  Are we following the Golden Rule or a leaden one covered with dross?  In Buddhism there are principles by which we can judge our negative behaviors as well as those that indicate that we are on the right path. Those that assess the degree of our backtracking are the three kleshas, or three poisons, greed, hate, and delusion.  They permeate and complicate the life of virtually everyone.

Do they ever complicate political life!  Buddhism demands that we begin with ourselves as we simultaneously strive to improve society.  This article, however, is not about individual introspection.

The old adage that political power corrupts has become a cliche because it is so true.  Another adage is just as true: citizens get the government they deserve.  Both of these maxims help us understand the current nadir of political life in America.  Powerful special interests have turned many current politicians into "mouth heroes"--they say things many voters want to hear, but their hearts lie elsewhere.  Corrupt politicians are one matter; a more important question, however, is why do representatives who only represent a minority get elected?  Good government demands educated citizens; the average political sophistication in America is quite low.  Education is undervalued and underfunded; entertainments keep us bemused;  That toxic combination didn't work out well for Rome, and it's not working out well for us.

Is the current level of greed, hate, and delusion in today's political arena unprecedented ?  It definitely feels that way.  It is the subject of this essay. 

Greed

Trump is the president of his base, not the president of the nation as a whole.  His base, however, is so ill-informed that they imagine that he is for the little guy while the Republicans, with his support, continue to make inequality worse.  

There is perhaps no better example of this than the so=called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; a reconciliation of both House and Senate versions will surely pass and be signed into law by Trump, most likely by the end of the year.  The new tax structure is without a doubt a net transfer from the poor and middle class to the wealthy, especially to the very wealthy.  The irresponsibility of this bill is staggering; since the mid-seventies wages have been stagnant, while the proportion of national income received by the top 1% has doubled form 10% to 20%.

A major blot on the Republican Party is that it only represents the rich.  The vast majority of Americans are considered "other"--in much the same way that nationalists deem foreigners to be categorically different from themselves.  This attitude has been clearly expressed by the Republican senator Chuck Grassley who recently said, in regard to the tax bill, that it is a good thing that the rich are given the breaks because they are responsible; the rest, if they get more money, will spend it on "booze, women and drugs."

This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the tax bill, but I will provide a brief list of how this inequality engine will chug along from poor neighborhoods to the secluded mansions of the rich.  Cutting the corporate tax, eliminating the federal inheritance tax, reducing the tax on pass-through income, etc. will benefit the wealthy and increase the burden on nearly everyone else; the elimination of the mandate for the Affordable Care Act will increase the number of those without health insurance by thirteen million, resulting in 42 million people without heath insurance--Criminal! Elimination of the income tax deductions of state and local taxes, which will hit blue states especially hard, will almost surely result in program cuts that benefit the poor.

What is perhaps most distressing is that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the proposed tax legislation will balloon the deficit by 1.3 trillion dollars by the end of the next decade.  Once the Republicans, (who now apparently now have no desire to lower the deficit), get their tax bill, they will metamorphose from deficit doves into deficit hawks.  Their aim is to "starve the beast" of government in order to cut popular and progressive programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.  

Greed, Greed, Greed!

I will end this section with an analogy.  I am a retired pediatrician. One day, a young man came into my office and presented with weight loss, increased hunger, and increased urination, all clinical signs of diabetes.  I performed a blood sugar level in the office; the diagnosis was confirmed.  I thereupon had him admitted to a hospital for diabetic education and to determine the proper insulin dosage, since he was now insulin-dependent.  He did well.

Let us suppose that his high sugar level was analogous to the high income inequality in the United States.  What if I hadn't sent him to the hospital and, instead, told his mother that from now on he would have to have candy and lollipops for breakfast, cotton candy for lunch, and cake and soda for dinner?  The patient, already ill, would have become much worse.  The Republican tax bill is cotton candy for the poor.  Let hard candies dissolve in unfortunate mouths while their eyes stare into a fine restaurant where the rich feast on Peking Duck--According to the Grassleys and the Hatches of the world, this is how it should be.

Greed, Greed, Greed!

2. Hate

Trump is an explicit racist, many Republicans are implicit racists; no doubt about that.  I will provide only a few examples of Trump's racism, there are far too many to include here.

In 2015, before he was elected, Trump tweeted the following racist tweet.

This was Trump's Willie Horton moment.  It is wildly inaccurate as well.  For instance, whites killed by blacks account for 15% of murdered whites, not 81%.  The chart makes no correction for class and education level. It almost sinks to the level of anti-Semitic diatribes during the Nazi era. Disgusting.

Another example: before he was elected, Trump published a full-page ad in the Daily News, claiming that the five people of color, (four blacks and one Hispanic), accused of a brutal attack on a jogger in Central Park in 1989 should be "made to suffer."  He referred to them as criminal misfits.  When it was later proven that the men, boys at the time of the attack, were coerced by the police into making false confession and that DNA evidence indicated that they were innocent, Trump still insisted that they were guilty and should not have been released from prison. 

Since he's been elected, there have been numerous examples of racism as well.  For instance, his hesitation to condemn the racist march on Charlottesville and his assertion that there were "good and bad on both sides."  Other examples include his severe condemnation of black athletes who have knelt during the National Anthem in protest of police brutality, and his false assertion that immigrants are "pouring across the border" and increasing the crime rate, etc, etc.

A recent especially egregious example of his racism is his tweeting of vicious anti-Muslim videos.

Trump's base is overwhelmingly white.  Why ?



Delusion

Trump, a malignant narcissist, cannot accept criticism, only praise.  If facts don't gratify him, they are not facts but "fake news."  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote; oh, no she didn't--it only appears that way, since five million illegal aliens voted for her.  The largest crowds at a inauguration occurred when Trump assumed office; never mind proof to the contrary.  Now he has been telling others in private that Obama was born in Kenya after all, and that the voice on the Access Hollywood tape might not have been his.  His lies and delusions have increased to the extent that many believe he is mentally ill.  I never doubted that, and do believe that the stress of office and the looming corruption investigation are making his instabilities worse.  (The fact hat a stiff opposition is troubling the waters in which Trump sees his great reflection is obviously bothering him--Fatter and sadder and madder, Narcissus is suffering--and, since he is still our president, so are we).

The assertion by a member of his own party that the White House has become "an adult day care center" is truly unprecented.

Conclusion

The Three Poisons of Buddhism have been poisoning us all.  It has seeped down into the groundwaters of democracy.  Will true patriotism be able to filter out much of the poisons and return them to acceptable levels?

This isn't Putin's Russia; ours is till a system of checks and balances. I am therefore cautiously optimistic that the pendulum will soon swing in a more progressive direction. I recall a line from Schiller's William Tell, regarding a prison being built, in which political prisoners are to be confined: "What hands build, hands can take down."  Trump's little hands have been smudging our democracy since they assumed power; if the working class, black and white, join hands, the mess could be cleaned up in no time.

If not now, when?

The Acquittal of José Ines Zarate: Good News?

1.

On November 30th, 2017, a San Francisco jury acquitted José Ines Zarate of the charges of first degree, second degree and involuntary manslaughter in the death of Kate Steinle on July 1, 2015. The death of Ms. Steinle was judged to be an accident. The verdict has received widespread condemnation--I haven't read an account so far that agrees with, much less celebrates the verdict, so I felt it was incumbent on me to write one.  I consider it a triumph of the American justice system; despite ongoing damage to our democracy from Trump and his enablers, twelve jurors, despite the vicious anti-immigration sentiment in the society in which they live, were able to cast their prejudices aside and judge the matter impartially.  It could be that they came to the wrong decision, that is possible; that they examined their consciences and came to the best conclusion of which they were capable, however, seems very likely indeed.  What more can we expect from a jury?  That they apparently were not swayed by public opinion, which in this case was in favor of conviction, is worthy of much praise.

First let me make clear that though I think the verdict most likely to have been just, my sympathies lie with Kate Steinle and her family.  Her death was an enormous loss to them and to those that knew here.  I can understand their sorrow and anger with the verdict. I often think how I would feel if a member of my family had been killed under similar circumstances.  I certainly can picture myself reacting the same way Ms. Steinle's family has.  That doesn't mean I would be right.  After a period of raging grief, I hope I would realize, however, that justice is best served by jurors who take their mandate to adjudicate impartially with the utmost seriousness.  

The jury decided that it was an accident.  An accident means that José Ines Zarate is as responsible for the death of Ms. Steinle as a rock would be, if, propelled by natural forces, had fallen on her head and killed her.

For those unfamiliar with the case, I provide a brief summary: On July 1, 2105, Kate Steinle was walking on a San Francisco pier when she was hit by a bullet and died in the arms of her father.  Zarate had been sitting on a bench when he noticed something under the boardwalk, wrapped in a shirt.  He recovered it; it proved to be a loaded weapon which had been stolen from the police several hours earlier.  The gun went off accidentally; the bullet ricocheted off the boardwalk  before fatally striking Ms. Steinle. Zarate apparently did not aim the gun at anybody. I can't vouch that all this is true, however, but it is quite possibly true; in any case, the jury was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the tragic death had been an accident

The death of Ms. Steinle resulted in a vicious anti-immigrant backlash.  The conservative media circus brought out all its lions, tigers, and bears to denounce Mr. Zarate as a viscous killer. They used this case to demonize immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants, and have met with much success.  

Zarete was indeed an "undocumented alien," and had been deported five times; he should not have been in the United States.  The unjust accusation, however, that sanctuary cities--ones that refuse to cooperate with summary roundups of undocumented immigrants--were harboring criminals became a rallying cry to foment ant-immigration sentiment in the United States.  Mr. Zarate is perhaps the source of Trump's wild accusations about Mexico during the campaign: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime.  They're rapists.  And some, I assume, are good people."  Among other inaccuracies in this inflammatory statement, Mexican immigrants commit crimes at half the rate of those born in the U.S.

Fake news!

I must confess that I also believed Zarate was a monster.  I still support the existence of sanctuary cities, due to the monstrous behavior of ICE, agents of which continue, unconscionably, in my opinion, to split up families, members of which had been living together in our country for decades.

My point is this: if something like this case had occurred in the rural South in the 1950s--or even now, for that matter--do you think that a poor black man accused of committing a similar crime would have been acquitted?

2.

You don't have to go back far in time to find occasions in which justice was egregiously unserved.  In 1989, four black teenagers and one Hispanic teenager were convicted in the so-called "wilding" Central Park jogger case.  All were juveniles at the time, and were coerced into false confessions.  The jogger had been brutally beaten and raped.  DNA evidence, however, exonerated all five boys. They were convicted on the basis of their coerced confessions alone.  They languished in jail for thirteen years until the real criminal was found, who had acted alone.  In 2014, the men were awarded 41 million dollars in damages.

On May 1, 1989, Donald Trump took out the following full-page ad in the Daily News

In this ad, Trump wrote, as reported in the Wikapedia "Central Park Jogger Case" article:

Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts.  I do not think so.  I want to hate these muggers and murderers.  They should be forced to suffer...Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will...How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits?  Criminals must be told that CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS.

This advocacy for Trial by Prejudice is a very anti-American stance, since the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution requires that "the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury..." (Italics mine).

Trump states that he will always hate the Central Park five, which has been borne out by his subsequent behavior.  Even after it had been proven that the men were innocent, Trump refused to believe it.  In 2016, he stated, "They admitted they were guilty  The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty.  The fact that the case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.  And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same."

This example of Trump's predilection for trial by prejudice reveals such a deep-seated and obvious racism that no further comment is needed.

Has Trump changed?  If Trump wrote the text of the letter, he has changed indeed. His mental state has deteriorated; his vocabulary is markedly diminished; he often rambles and wanders without making much sense. But he is still basically the same hateful person.  What follows is Trump's tweet after the Zarate verdict: 

The Kate Steinle killer came back and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court.  His exoneration is a complete travesty of justice  BUILD THE WALL

Never mind that President Obama deported more illegal residents than any other president so far, including Trump; never mind that Zarate had never been accused of having committed a violent crime; never mind that Zarate has been judged to be innocent, and therefore not a killer.

The triumph of this case, as I see it, is the fact that, despite Trump's continued attempts to erode American values, his attitudes obviously didn't affect the jury in San Francisco.  They were not composed of little Trumps, but of little Lincolns. This is, of course, what juries are supposed to do.  But with Trump as president the bar for good news is very low indeed.  Nevertheless, it is still good news.  

In 1989, trial by prejudice won. In 2017, trial by jury, despite enormous societal prejudice, was victorious.  Perhaps, despite Trump and those who think like him, things are getting better in some respects.  Despite the political mess we are in, there is, perhaps, reason to hope.  Will there be light at the end of Trump Tunnel? I hope so.

Baltimore Online Book Club: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
Penguin Books
London, 2003
509 pages

The selection for the November 2017 edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club was The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, a book I had selected.  Largely unfamiliar with his works, I was aware, however, that he has the reputation of being not only the foremost poet and writer in Portuguese of the last century, but one of the greatest of all twentieth-century writers as well.  I was somewhat skeptical of his exalted status, but not for long.

The Book of Disquiet, which is not a novel at all, or, at least, not like any other novel, contains the reflections on life of a young man named Bernardo Soares, a man who is virtually a nonentity to the outside world, but, though nobody knows it, an exceptionally talented writer whose subject is the meaning and meaninglessness of life.  The book is composed of over four hundred numbered passages. Each is a page or two long and independent; the best way to read them is in a desultory fashion, a dozen or so at a time. They were undoubtedly written in a non-systematic fashion, one or two at a time, perhaps.  The content is very philosophical and often very poetic as well; they should be read slowly, with much time spent thinking over what one has just read.

The purported author of the book is one of Pessoa's heteronyms, authors whom Pessoa invented and imbued with personalities and writing styles of their own.  During his writing career, the prolific Pessoa invented over seventy heteronyms, a remarkable achievement.  However, Bernardo Soares is what he called a semi-heteronym, thus indicating that this author and the author who created him shared many similarities.

It has been pointed out that the name of Gregor Samsa, the anti-hero of The Metamorphosis, and the name of its author are quite similar: Samsa and Kafka; each name containing two a's, each name containing two repeated consonants with the second one preceded by a different consonant. This obviously indicates that Samsa is a heteronym of sorts for Kafka, a character very close to his heart. The similarities of the names Bernardo Soares and Fernando Pessoa are equally striking, not only by the fact that the number of letters of their first and last names are the same.  In addition, as previously stated, Pessoa referred to Soares as a semi-heteronym,  a quite autobiographical creation.

The discovery of this unfinished manuscript, which was found in a trunk after the author's death in 1935, reminds one of the discovery of the scores of unpublished musical scores found in a closet after Schubert's death.  The two men who found them were so delighted that they danced for joy. The discovery of Pessoa's masterwork deserved a similar dance, although it probably didn't receive one.

In his brief introduction to The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa wrote the following about Soares/Pessoa:

Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything.  He had spent his childhood alone.  He never joined any group.  He never pursued a course of study.  He never belonged to a crowd.  The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon--perhaps, in fact, it's true for all lives--of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended toward inertia and withdrawal.

This doesn't fully capture Pessoa's personality, but as a semi-heteronym, it comes close.

The reflections are profound, and also quite introverted; it is not surprising that an author with a rich inner life and a very circumscribed outer life, with no close friends or even acquaintances, would write literature of a somewhat depressing nature.  Pessoa states that the parents of his semi-heteronym died young, thus setting the tone for the lonely life that followed.

Thomas Mann said of Nietszche, who was also lonely and isolated,  that one could learn a lot from him, but no one should aspire to follow in his footsteps. This, I think, applies to Pessoa/Soares as well.


 2.

The Book of Disquiet is sui generis; there is nothing of which I am familiar that is quite like it. An adequate commentary of this work would take volumes; I am not fit for this task, which would far exceed the limits of an online book review, even if I were inclined to attempt it.  I will therefore limit myself to commenting on three excerpts, one indicating Pessoa's poetic gifts, the second an example of his commentary on life in general, and the last a reflection on personal responsibility.  

The first passage comes from entry 86:

I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.

The passage is as beautiful and precise as it is sad.  The book if full of indications that Pessoa was not only a great writer of prose, but of poetry as well.  The translation by Richard Zenith is very good; I suspect that the original of this passage is even better.  The passage has effective imagery and a lovely cadence; that we 'float on the surface of everything' is not only well said, but an undeniable aspect of life.   (I hope that the reader's ship, like mine and unlike Soares's,  has more than one passenger, which makes the journey into the unknown a good deal more tolerable).

The second excerpt is from entry 66:

We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known.  If we call death a sleep, it's because it seems like sleep on the outside; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems like something different from life.  With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make believe they're happy.

The poetry cannot be separated from the prose, both blend together here and create a prose poem.  This is a rather dark view of life; if enjoyment of relationships and of music provide refreshment in an oasis in an otherwise merciless desert, as I believe they do, pass the fake cake, for it is indeed delicious. I must confess that at other times this passage makes perfect sense to me.

The quote expresses the human predicament beautifully, albeit grimly.  We think we are necessary beings, and death, of course, will inevitably demonstrate to our survivors that we are not.  Yes, we cultivate roses on quicksand, as it were; the quicksand drags us down slowly in intervals of days and months, even of years, for a while, but those intervals add up; all too soon we sink and disappear forever.  Our own non-existence is something part of us imagines, yet which another part of us refuses to accept.  The whistler in the graveyard hums a tune about death becoming a new life, but the whistling of the autumn wind soon drowns him out. Euphemisms like "new life" don't always work.  One is reminded of the last lines of a poem by Emily Dickinson, the subject of which is the witnessing of the agonizing death of a loved one: And we replaced the hair/And held the head erect/And then an awful leisure was/Belief to regulate--.

Pessoa/Soares was incapable of such regulation.  His ability to look at the sun without glasses is very brave and very moving.  It has been a profound experience for me to move in that world; after a while, though, I must hold my wife's hand and move on to The Marriage of Figaro.

3.

The third excerpt, from passage 133, is not only important philosophically, but is of great practical importance as well.

The way I see it, plagues, storms and wars are products of the same blind force, sometimes operating through unconscious microbes, sometimes through unconscious waters and thunderbolts, and sometimes through unconscious men.  For me, the difference between an earthquake and a massacre is like the difference between murdering with a knife and murdering with a dagger. The monster immanent in things, for his  own good or his own evil, which are apparently indifferent to him. is equally served by the shifting of a rock on a hilltop, or by the stirring of greed in a heart. The rock falls and kills a man; greed or envy prompts an arm, and the arm kills a man.  Such is the world--a dunghill of instinctive forces that nevertheless shines in the sun with pale flashes of light and dark gold.

This widely unacknowledged truth, once understood, upends the way we judge others, and provides a condign indictment of the U.S. criminal justice system.

It was not known at the time, but "the way I see it," with which the paragraph begins, has proven by science to be the "way that it is."  Objectively speaking, there is no such thing as free will. Functional MRIs of the brain, (fMRIs), have proven that the brain has already unconsciously decided what is intended before one consciously decides what to do.  There is, objectively speaking, no such thing as free will.  It makes no more sense to punish a person for murder as it does to punish a rock for having crushed a neighbor. 

Years ago I wrote an essay called "The Folly of Our Times," the premise of which is that each age has one or swveral blind spots, which future generations will resolve, e.g. slavery at the time of the Founding Fathers.  The way we judge and punish others is undoubtedly one of the blind spots of the current age.

Free will is a paradox, just as it is a paradox that we are material beings, but are nevertheless convinced that we are more than material beings in order to function in life.  Believing that one is more than matter leads to the necessity of making choices. This is a wonderful trick of evolution, but a trick nevertheless: objectively speaking, there is no such thing as free will.

The paradox is that we must take responsibility for our own actions while refusing to judge fellow human beings, no matter how heinous the act.  Truth is, we don't even understand our own actions, much less those of another.  We judge others for doing something which is morally offensive to us.  However, we can never get inside the offender's brain or realize how that brain has been affected by environmental factors.  This is beautifully illustrated by Jesus's dictum that we should "judge not lest we be judged." We must judge the person's behavior, however, (but not the person), if society is to function. We have the moral obligation to remove a dangerous person from society, that is, to incarcerate him or her, but not to judge, that is, punish him or her. 

The function of the criminal justice system is therefore to protect society and not to punish.  (The non-punishment must also fit the non-crime: long sentences for non-violent crimes, common in the U.S., are morally reprehensible).

Our justice system is built upon the assumption that if one is an adult, one must be found guilty of a crime, no matter the circumstances of the so-called criminal.  The disquieting truth from The Book of Disquiet is that it makes just as much sense to punish a volcano when it explodes and "murders" those at its base than it is to punish a pyromaniac.

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world; currently 2.3 million people, 90% if whom are male, languish in jails.  How many of these are necessary?  Once one understand the quote from the book, the answer is obvious: far too many are not.
Judging others and not merely others' behavior is so ingrained in our culture that I don't expect Pessoa's statement to be understood anytime soon. Many European countries, however, having long since banned capital punishment, having much lower rates of incarceration, and whose jails are more in accord with protecting society rather than in punishing people, are much closer to a non-judgmental system than we are. The quote should be required reading for all judges, professional and non-professional judges alike.  

I present my comments here as an illustration of the heuristic nature of the book; we cannot help but put the book down from time to time, and think about what we have just read.  This is indeed a winsome aspect of this non-novel novel.

I admire the ending of the passage as well.  Once the ego is removed from the picture, reality "shines in the sun with pale flashes of light and dark gold."  Awe does the spirit good, no doubt about that.

The Book of Disquiet is replete with beautifully written, thought-provoking passages. The wheat is indeed mixed in with some chaff; the book demands a high degree of aesthetics and discernment on the part of the reader, which invites discussion and makes it even more interesting.  It is a masterwork; I know nothing quite like it in all literature. 



This is the tenth edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club. You are welcome to read past book reviews of the Baltimore Online Book Club by googling the title of the novel along with my full name, Thomas Dorsett.

1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
4. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
5. Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan
6. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Pierre or the Ambiguities by Herman Melville
8. Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
9. Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed


Our next meeting will take place on December 13, 2017.  On that date, the seven members of our group will discuss "Purple Hibiscus: by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; I will post my review shorty thereafter. You are invited to read the book and to post your comments onto the comment section of the review.   I wish you pleasurable reading!