Tag: history

My Story of Civilization

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i.

A few days ago, I finished reading The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, the final entry in their 11-volume Story of Civilization series. It took me just shy of a quarter century to get through the books. Combined, they are the best history books I have ever read.

It was through Isaac Asimov’s autobiography that I first discovered Will Durant, sometime in 1995. In In Memory Yet Green, Asimov wrote about how in the summer of 1945 he was about to leave the house for a meeting with his draft board:

I was reading a copy of Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ, the third volume of his history of civilization and Gertrude was ironing some clothes. The radio stopped its regular programming for an emergency bulletin: The United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Asimov added a footnote to this passage about Durant’s series:

I read each volume as it came out. After I had read the first one and heard he was planning a multivolume history–five volumes was the original plan–I felt worried. I knew he was in his forties and I carefully noted in my diary that I hoped he would live long enough to complete the set. He did.

(I’ve had similar worries about Robert A. Caro, hoping he will live long enough to finish the final volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson.)

I read the books slightly out of order:

I was certain I’d read Our Oriental Heritage first, and was surprised to see it second on the list. I dug into some old diaries to affirm my memory, and sure enough, I was right–sort of. On May 4, 1999, I wrote:

Finished Fact and Fancy this morning and started right in on Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of his “Story of Civilization.” The book is 440,000 words long… it will take me about 21 days to finish the book…

So why is Life of Greece first on the list? It turns out, I never finished that initial attempt to read Our Oriental Heritage and I don’t count a book on my list if I don’t finish it. I didn’t finish it because shortly after I started it, I began taking flying lessons and I set most of my reading aside for a time to focus on flying airplanes.

As I read the last lines of Napoleon, I tried and failed to remember when and how I first obtained the books. Back to the diary I went, and found that I bought my first Durant books on April 10, 1999:

Late in the afternoon I drove over to the Iliad Bookshop where I bought 3 used volumes of Will Durant’s “Story of Civilization” series for just under $20. The volumes I got were The Life of Greece (Vol II); The Age of Faith (Vol IV); and The Renaissance (Vol VII)

When did I get Our Oriental Heritage? It had to have been before May 4, 1999. Some more digging and, much to my surprise, I found the following on April 19, 1999:

Grandpa called tonight–he said he had a surprise for me–and then proceeded to tell me he picked up Vols, I, III, and VI of Will Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” series for me at a used bookshop in Nyack.

Between May 4, 1999 and the day I finished the final volume of the series, 9,063 days elapsed, or 24 years, 9 months and 28 days. The series tops off around 13,000 pages, which puts it somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million words. That’s a lot of reading. In fact, it turns out there were years in which the total amount I read was less than 13,000 pages, as the chart below indicates (the red dashed line shows 13,000 pages).

I never read more than two of the volumes in a single year, reading one in 2000, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2019. I read two volumes in 2020, 2022 and 2024. Of the 11 volumes, I’ve read two of them twice: The Life of Greece and Caesar and Christ.

ii.

As Asimov mentioned, the Durants’ original plan was for five books. The scope increased with each successive volume until their tenth, Rousseau and Revolution, published in 1967, in which they concluded with the following envoi:

This is the concluding volume of that Story of Civilization to which we devoted ourselves in 1929, and which has been the daily chore and solace of our lives ever since[Ellipsis] We shall not sin at such length again; but if we manage to elude the Reaper for another year or two we hope to offer a summarizing essay on “The Lessons of History”.

True to their word, they did write The Lessons of History, published in 1968 (which I read in 2019, and of which I have a signed copy). Then Rousseau and Revolution won the Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, and I imagine that, coupled with what must have seemed like boredom to the globe-trotting Durants, decided them to head back to the typewriter for one more volume, The Age of Napoleon, published in 1975.

I can’t read a magnum opus like this without wanting to know more about the people who spent a lifetime working on such a project. This happened to me when I read Dumas Malone’s 6-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson; I followed it up with a biography of Dumas Malone, Long Journey with Mr. Jefferson by William C. Hyland, Jr. And when I finished everything that Robert A. Caro has written thus far, I followed it up with his book Working .

It was, therefore, natural for me to read Will & Ariel Durant’s A Dual Autobiography several years ago. Not only was it an interesting read, but it gave fascinating insights into how such a massive effort was made in times long before computing. Ariel Durant described some of the research process:

It took me some time to realize how important a role was played in a book by the organization of the material, and how the same contents less wisely arranged might have led to repetition, confusion, and failure. ==The mere organization (as distinct from gathering) of the material was the most back-breaking part of the total operation==. Will undertook the initial part. As he explained it to me, he divided the book into chapters, generally following geographical order (Near East, India, China, Japan), and within each region, mediating between chronological sequence and topical unity (economics, government, religion, language, literature, philosophy, etc.). Then he marked with a Roman numeral each of the approximately thirty thousand slips that had been gathered for Volume I, according to the chapter to which it belonged…

[Will Durant] prepared and typed, for each chapter in turn, an outline consisting of several hundred headings, consecutively numbered with Arabic numerals. Then he presented to the family and his other aides the slips that he had assigned to Chapter I, together with the chapter outline; and our task was to read each slip and to number it according to the heading under which we judged it belonged. We estimate an average chapter of Story used some fifteen hundred slips, or about thirty thousand per volume; our attic rooms are bulging with the boxes of used slips.

Of those “slips” that Ariel Durant describes, she has said the following:

Usually we read about five hundred volumes for each of our books. I don’t mean to say that we read these books aloud to each other, but we do read them at approximately the same time, discuss them, and make notes. The hundreds of cards in this file are some of the notes relating to Volume 10.

And that is only a part. We have a thousand notes in the typewritten form in galley sheets. Every note we take from our readings includes the name of the book, the author, and the page from which it was taken. The scissored slips are placed exactly where they belong in the detailed outline of our chapter.

This seems a remarkably similar precursor to Ryan Holiday’s notecard system, which just goes to show that history is constantly repeating itself, one of the many lessons that is made clear by the Story of Civilization.

The Durants began researching the books in 1929 and they finally finished in 1975–a forty-six year span of enormous work. That they were able to do this project at all is due to another book Will Durant wrote before The Story of Civilization. He wrote The Story of Philosophy in the 1920s and it was bestseller that helped put him and Simon & Schuster on the map, and allowed the Durants the financial freedom to pursue their research for Story around the world.

iii.

Any history of the scope that the Durants present will be marred with errors and omissions. Like any diligent, self-aware researchers, the Durants acknowledgedf these imperfections. In writing about prehistoric India in Our Oriental Heritage, he said:

Recent researches have marred this comforting picture–as future researches will change the perspective of these pages.

About half of Our Oriental Heritage was dedicated to the history of Indian, Japanese, and Chinese civilizations. I wished for more. I read somewhere that the Durants had planned editions on North and South American native civilizations as well, but the existing scope exceeded the time that life and energy provided them. In my imagination, I wonder at the volumes they might have produced on Aztec or Mayan civilization, or the native cultures and civilizations that predated European arrival into the new world. These Durant-authored volumes are left to my imagination.

They wrote about what most interested them and it was a fortunate coincidence that many of their interested and mine overlapped. I forgive their errors and omissions as the result of an enormous amount of work and research performed not my an army but by two mortal adults and a handful of helpers. I have to feel this way. In my own work, I recognize the scope of the work I do (writing code, managing projects) inevitably leaves gaps, bugs, and room for improvement.

iv.

What makes these books the best histories I’ve ever read? I think it is a combination of three things: scope, continuity, and the writing.

From the beginning, Durant attempted to write an “integral” history. As he wrote in the preface to the first volume:

I have long felt that our usual method of writing history in separate longitudinal sections–economic history, political history, religious history, the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, the history of music, the history of art–does injustice to the unity of human life; that history should be written collaterally as well as lineally, synthetically as well as analytically; and that the ideal historiography would seek to portray in each period the total complex of a nation’s culture, institutions, adventures and ways.

Fortune prepared me for this method. I attended a humanities magnet high school in Los Angeles in which our core classes were constructed in a similarly integral way, with courses on philosophy, literature, social institutions, and art history, tied together against a similar backdrop in time. The scope of Durants volumes is vast and varied and because of it, I learned more about subjects that I never imagined I’d be interested in, and yet found them all fascinating. Despite the length of the volumes, there wasn’t a dull moment. And the integral method made clear the contemporaneousness of the history, science, art, music, religion, philosophy. Each discipline feeds each other in an intricate web that isn’t always obvious in longitudinal sections.

The volumes also provided continuity in a way that I had not previously experienced reading or studying history. It is a continuity that creeps up on your as you make your way through the pages. We begin with the shadowy prehistoric times without individuals, but rather individual remains of anonymous ancestors in the days before civilization and by the end of the 11th volume, we are dealing with detailed biographies of historic figures (Napoleon, Tallyrand, Thomas Jefferson) who are not many generations removed from ourselves. And yet, after the first 100 introductory pages of the first volume, there was never a sudden jump, never a rapid leap forward in time. Things moved smoothly from past-to-present. That continuity provided a unique insight into human history for me. It was as if I watched as people in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur tapped their successive generation shoulder, and that generation tapped the next and soon we were in Egypt, and Babylonia, and so on down to Louis XVI and Samuel Johnson. This continuity gave me a perspective of history that I hadn’t had before, and I’m not sure such a perspective is possible without the scope the Durants achieved in these volumes. There is a kinship that forms with those dead thousands of years, as when an ancient Sumerian tablet reads, “the city, where the tumult of man is.”

Continuity highlights repetition. Consider Edmund Burke writing on democracy in the ancient world, and in the modern:

Democracy in Athens and Rome brought no cure for the evils of government, for it soon became dictatorship through the ability of demagogues to win admiration from gullible majorities.

Finally, there is the writing, the voice, the erudite guide that carries you through thousands of years of human triumph and misery. Durant has an elegant, old-world style in which his premises come at the end of a paragraph rather than the beginning, often with witty charm, as when he writes of the toilers of Babylonia:

Part of the country was still wild and dangerous; snakes wandered in the thick grass, and the kings of Babylonia and Assyria made it their royal sport to hunt in hand-to-hand conflict the lions that prowled in the woods, posed placidly for the artists, but fled timidly at the nearer approach of men. Civilization is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle. [Emphasis mine.]

That voice sets the tone of the entire series. The Durants come across as true companions, and I think Durant knew this. In the last words of the penultimate volume in the series, Durant wrote:

We thank the reader who has been with us these many years for part or all of the long journey. We have ever been mindful of his presence. Now we take our leave and bid him farewell.

I was overcome by a strange set of emotions upon finishing the final volume. Here I’d walked with Roman emperors and Japanese peasants. I’d seen battles fought in the desert, and averted by the random passing of the moon across the face of the sun. I’d spent hours with the greatest thinkers, artists, creators, and inventors. I’d lived thousands of lifetimes in the pages of these books, and now they were all over. It was a bittersweet conclusion. I was reminded of a verse (quoted in Rousseau and Revolution) by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. In the margins, I jotted: “An apt epitaph to the Durants’ adventure.”

Lo, I have reached my goal! The stirring thought
Thrills through my spirit. Thine all powerful arm,
My Lord, my God, alone hath guided me
By more than one dark grave, ere I might reach
That distant goal! Thou, Lord, hast healed me still,
Hast shed fresh courage o’re my sinking heart,
Which held with death its near companionship;
And if I gazed on terrors, their dark shapes
Soon disappeared, for thou protectedst me!
Swiftly they vanished.–Savior, I have sung
Thy covenant of Mercy. I have trod
My fearful path! My hope has been in Thee!

In the end, the Durants’ volumes reinforced a truth my mother told me when I was five or six years old: books can take you anywhere.

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Adventures in Europe 2023, Day 4: Decline and Fall

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Whispering in the dark

Information overload manifests itself like a demon in the dark. On lazy days that I spend reading for most of the day, I fall asleep at night to the whispers of passages that I read earlier in the day. These whispers are vague and formless and closely resemble a fever dream. They are difficult to shed. Rising for a cup of water doesn’t always dispel them. Usually, I have to let the voices run their course. This is what I experience on the third night of our trip: whispers of street names and subways stations, of Capuchin monks and Renaissance artists. Some of the whispers are unintelligible gibberish, others are unintelligible because they are in Italian. But at some point, the whispers fade and fade and only the darkness remains and when I open my eyes, I see the first light of day out the windows.

Gibbon and the decline and fall of Rome

For some reason, when I think of Rome, I think more often of the Republic and the Empire, not Renaissance Rome. Today, we are defying entropy. We are visiting Rome in reverse, beginning with the Renaissance (Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basilica) followed by a jump back in time to the Colosseum. I wonder what Gibbon would have made of this reversal. In the concluding pages of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon offers four causes of Rome’s decline:

  1. The injuries of time and nature
  2. The hostile attacks of the barbarians and Christians
  3. The use and abuse of materials
  4. The domestic quarrels of the Romans.

And what of its rebirth in the Renaissance? On this, Gibbon is, so far as I know, silent. Today, we see both the Rome of ancient days and the Rome of the Renaissance.

Naming names

Breakfast is all about learning people’s names. I meet Greg and Ila1, who have traveled from Australia. I meet Peter and Val, who have come from South Africa. I scribble these names into my Field Notes notebook. I do this whenever I meet someone new as a way to remember their name. And yet, as Peter later would prove, just because I write down a name doesn’t mean I will remember it. When he asks me if I remember his name, I admit that I don’t, and it even takes me several seconds of flipping through pages of my notebook before I locate it. So much for writing things down.

The fried eggs are missing when I go to put some on my plate. The pan is there, but it is empty. I find other food to eat, but keep checking the pan. Only after I am completely sated does the pan magically refill with fried eggs, but I am now too full to eat them.

Patience is a virtue?

I have read about the Sistine Chapel countless times. It is as much a part of my awareness as Shakespeare, and like Shakespeare, I can no longer recall a time when I didn’t know about it. We learned of it in high school art history classes, but I was aware of it somehow, even before that. Will Durant writes extensively about the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the fifth volume of his Story of Civilization, The Renaissance. Durant writes of Michelangelo,

To the technical difficulties [Pope] Julius added himself by his impatience to have the great work completed and displayed. Picture the old Pope mounting the frail frame, drawn up to the platform by the artist, expressing admiration, always asking, “When will it be finished?” The reply was a lesson in integrity: “When I shall have done all that I believe required to satisfy art.” To which Julius retorted angrily: “Do you want me to hurl you from this scaffold?”

And I am told that patience is a virtue.

Durant captures the genius and virtuosity of Michelangelo in a concluding paragraph:

Julius died four months after the completion of the Sistine ceiling. Michelangelo was then nearing his thirty-eighth birthday. He had placed himself at the head of all Italian sculptors by his David and Pietà; by this ceiling he had equaled or surpassed Raphael in painting; there seemed no other world left for him to conquer. Surely even he hardly dreamed that he had over half a century yet to live, that his most famous painting, his most mature sculpture, were yet to be done. He mourned the passing of the great Pope, and wondered whether Leo would have as sure an instinct as Julius for the noble in art. He retired to his lodgings and bided his time.

Perhaps more than anything else, it was reading that passage years ago that made me want to see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel myself. Like Michelangelo, I retired to my lodging; like Michelangelo, I bided my time. Patience, after all, is a virtue. And so I follow the crowd left from the great hallway and find myself in the Sistine Chapel, with guards admonishing me to move toward the the center of the room.

It is a shame, really. The long walk to the Sistine Chapel is quite remarkable, but one is only aware of what awaits at the end. The rest is, as they say, preface, and patience be damned, I rush past paintings and maps (maps!) and Byzantine ceilings to arrive in the Pope’s chapel with hundreds of other visitors.

The long walk to the Sistine Chapel

You have to understand the conditions: a crowded room where people are respectfully trying to keep their voices at bay. Underneath is a panacea of whispers in every language imaginable. It is as if the air in the room is alive with this rush of hushed voices, an eerie reminder of the whispers in the dark last night. I am overwhelmed and I find it hard to focus. I am attempting, mentally, to edit the scene, photoshopping out the other visitors, mixing down the rustling passage of people, and the whispers. I am trying first to recreate the scene Durant describes, with the scaffolding climbing the walls and the old Pope up there with the master, admiring the beauty, and wondering, like any customer of a contractor, when the job will be done.

And then, with a more forceful effort, I remove the Pope and Michelangelo and the scaffolding and the guards and the people and the noise and slowly admire the art. Panel after panel telling the story of Genesis. I look at the faces, which were not Michelangelo’s specialty. It is the forms of the figures, the use of every inch of space to tell the story, the color that brings the scenes to life. For what seems like a brief time, I am the only person in the room, except perhaps the ghost of Michelangelo, who leans in a corner, rubbing his fingernails on his shirt, a knowing smile on his face.

Emerging from this space is like coming out of some deep dream and the sunlight seems too bright, the outdoors unfocused through the tears in my eyes.

The bridge of Khazad-dûm

St. Peter’s Basilica is so large inside that its scale plays tricks on the eyes. Letters that appear toward the top of the space are 6 feet tall, but look tiny from the floor.

Those letters way up there are 6 feet tall!

It is so large, in fact, that despite the crowds, it doesn’t seem crowded. As I do in most of the European churches that I’ve entered, I marvel at the artistry and skill that led to such magnificence. Could St. Peter’s be built today with modern technology? Somehow, I think the answer is no. Some vital ingredient is missing, creativity has atrophied with repeated sequels and sequels of sequels. I think of our church back home, and its modern lines. It is a doctor’s office waiting room in comparison to where I stand now.

St. Peter’s is to big, it makes the crowds seem small.

The golden arched ceilings and giant columns that support the ceiling remind me of the images Tolkien gives us of the dwarf kingdom of Khazad-dûm. Everyone has their phones pointed upward and for good reason: here there be majesty. Here is the Renaissance personified. Here is what is possible when creativity, innovation, know-how, skill, and artistry blend to form something greater than the parts.

Here, where dead Popes sleep, it seems to me that at night, they awaken to admire their final resting place.

Interlude

All of this has happened between breakfast and lunch. Our local specialist, Christina, has guided us through the halls of the Vatican, through the Sistine Chapel, through St. Peter’s, filling us with information and color about the things we are seeing, and it has all been crammed into the few hours between eggs and bacon, and pizza. This is the downside to a whirlwind tour of Europe and as we sit in a small nearby restaurant with Ken and Pat eating lunch, I think about the yearlong tour of Europe that Theodore Roosevelt took as a child, where there was time to breath, time to contemplate the wonder you’d just seen before moving onto the next wonder. This whirlwind is is like feeding a rich diet to a starving person.

We eat, we shop. I buy some postcards and stamps and mail the postcards from the Vatican so that their stamps will be canceled by Vatican ink. We wander a bit, walking through a long tunnel beneath the street to escape the heat. Soon, we will trade the crowds of the Vatican for the even greater crowds of the Colosseum.

Lost and found

In the Sistine Chapel we are reborn with the Renaissance. In the Colosseum, we die with Rome. I can think of no better symbol of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire than the Colosseum itself. It embodies each of Gibbon’s four causes of decline:

  1. The injuries of time and nature are obvious in its structure. Half of it has fallen apart. You can see age and decay all over what remains. It stands only because of modern reinforcements. When once, it was felt that those reinforcements could be removed, the structure began to crumble all over again and the modern support was quickly restored.
  2. The hostile attacks of the barbarians and Christians–many of whom fought to the death in gladiatorial games held in this very place for the entertainment of the people; entertainment that distracts the populace from the civilization that is crumbling around them.
  3. The use and abuse of material: how much stone was required to build the Colosseum?
  4. The domestic quarrels of the the Romans. I think that battles that took place within the walls of the Colosseum were representative of the battles taking place within Roman society–and at some point, the walls of the Colosseum were not strong enough to contain them and those battles spilled over into the streets.

Lara tells us that of the three tours she has run this summer, ours is the only one to gain entry into the Colosseum. And so we line up for our journey into the past, entering this ancient place by passing through metal detectors and winding our way through lines. It was said that the Colosseum could be filled in 20 minutes and emptied in the same amount of time, but we have apparently lost that bit of technology in the fall of the Roman Empire as well.

The stairs that climb up into the Colosseum are steeper than modern staircases. As we climb, the crowds was pass through made it seems as though a major event is taking place within the Colosseum. The only thing missing are hucksters selling their wares. We learn that the Colosseum is named for the Colossus of Nero, a large statue, and that in its heyday, it was used for about 300 years. I think about Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, which was built in 1914, and has thus been in use for about 109 years, or a third of the time the Colosseum was in use.

A minor incident takes place while we are at the Colosseum, and it is something that I imagine must have occurred countless times in the 300 years of its service. 3 people from our tour group decide to head back downstairs instead of walking around the upper reaches of the Colosseum. Christina gives them instructions for where to go, but when we finally arrive back downstairs, these people are nowhere to be found. A search party is formed while we make our way back to the bus. Eventually, we learn that they have taken a cab back to the hotel.

Pool and dinner

There is an optional tour in the evening that goes to the Trevi Fountain, among other places. It is one of only two options tours that we opt not to take, having visited the fountain ourselves yesterday. The crowds and the rush of the day has worn me out. When we arrive back at the hotel, the kids go for a swim, while I have a drink and relax just outside the pool area. We decide to have dinner at the hotel restaurant, and I have a veal escalop dish that very good. I can’t remember the last time I had veal, but I enjoy this meal immensely.

Tomorrow, we are leaving Rome for Florence, via Siena, and I am looking forward to getting out of the big city and seeing parts of Italy that I have never visited before. Rome has worn me out. I feel the decline and fall, not of Rome exactly, but of my own body and mind, utterly worn out from the day.

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  1. I spelled Ila’s name wrong when I first heard it, so it appears misspelled in my notebook, but I have corrected it here. ↩

Thoughts on Travels With George by Nathaniel Philbrick

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One subset of travel books that I enjoy are those that mix travel with some theme of discovery. John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley is the model from which many of these books have taken their example, and Nathaniel Philbrick is quick to admit that Steinbeck served as a model for his entry in this sub-genre, Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy. I like books like these because they mix history with travelogue in a way that often makes a stark comparison between then and now.

Books in this sub-genre are often attempts at taking the temperature of the general public on some topic. In his wonderful book The Longest Road, Philip Caputo was asking the question: what held the country together? In their book Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America (my favorite book of 2020) James and Deborah Fallows travel the country by air in a single-engine plane learning how, despite problems, people are finding solutions.

Nathaniel Philbrick sets out to follow the route George Washington took just before and after his inauguration, when he visited each of the new states to get a sense of the country for which he had just fought for independence, and for which he has just been elected President. This captured my interest in colonial history, in presidential history, and in travel, and I enjoyed the book. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author and it was a delight.

Up to this point, I’d only read one full biography of George Washington, Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life. What Philbrick was doing in Travels with George was not writing a biography, but following Washington’s path through the states, and along with way, separating myth from history, and coming face-to-face with the paradox that Washington, in addition to being the first president of a republican democracy founded on the principle that all men are created equal, was also a slave owner.

Where Philbrick delves into separating the myth from the history was among my favorite parts of the book. How many places claim the label “Washington slept here”? Through careful study of source material, Philbrick was able to identify several such claims as impossible. Washington was clearly somewhere else at the time. I was also moved by Washington’s affection for his soldiers, even years afterward. Still, an important thread throughout the book is the struggle to understand Washington the slave-holder versus Washington the defender of liberty.

Philbrick makes much of his journey with his wife, and their dog, meeting interesting people along the way, and occasionally getting snarled in traffic; the routes they take avoid the interstates since those roads didn’t exist when Washington made his grand tour.

This was an enjoyable read that gave additional insight into parts of Washington’s life I hadn’t been acquainted with. But perhaps the most valuable thing I took from the book was Philbrick himself. I enjoyed his writing, his style, and his narration. He’s another writer, like Philip Caputo and James and Deborah Fallows that I can look forward to reading more from. Already, I’m eager to delve into his history of Nantucket Island, Away Offshore, as well as his book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Sometimes, nothing is more valuable than finding a reliable writer you enjoy reading.

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A Revolutionary Cemetery

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Across the street from our house in Warwick, Rhode Island, beyond the backyard of our neighbors, an old cemetery was perched atop a small hill. The cemetery was surrounded by a low stone wall. A rusty iron gate opened into the cemetery on one side of the wall, but I never remember using the gate. We always just hopped the wall. The cemetery itself was strange and a little scary to the ten-year old I was at the time. I never dreamed of visiting it at night. Gravestones were scattered about, almost at random. Bramble and thorny vines seemed to overgrow the center of the cemetery so that only the outskirts were bare. Trees loomed over the entire space, which couldn’t have been more than half an acre.

The name of the cemetery was Carpenter-Wightman Cemetery. I didn’t learn that until decades alter. Walking around the cemetery was strange. The ground had a hollow thud to it as we stepped through it. Many of the graves were so weatherworn that it was impossible to read the inscriptions on them. But there were several graves that stood out. They weren’t larger than the other, or brighter. They all had a dull, aged look, but these specific gravestones had rusted bronze emblems buried into the earth before them. They were, I eventually learned, markers signifying that the person buried there was a veteran of the American Revolution.

I thought about this cemetery a lot as I read Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming, the first of a three-volume history of the American Revolution. I’ve read many histories of the Revolution, and Atkinson’s was vivid, especially where the battles were concerned. I find that he really tries to put you in the midst of the fighting to see what it was like rather than to glorify it. War is gruesome, and it was the description of one battle after another, that had my thoughts returning to the cemetery on the hill. For instance, Atkinson writes,

Sparks ignited the powder, first tearing off the rammer’s arm, then detonating with such violence that six men “were blown all to pieces by imprudence,” a passing mariner named Christopher Prince reported. “Their legs, arms, and bodies were all separated, so much so that we put them all on two handbarrows and carried them up to the Bowling Green, and dug a hoel and put their remains in it and covered them over.”

As a kid, walking through the cemetery, I didn’t think much about the history of it. Today, I get something of a shiver to think that I was standing in front of the graves of men, some of whom were fighting for the American cause, others simply because that’s what they thought they should do.

Aside from the battles, it was interesting to read so many descriptions from the diaries of people living in that period. Atkinson located so many diaries from the period that it seemed that everyone kept a diary. A single diary, of course, can give a skewed view of any situation, but in aggregate, I think they help to form a good picture.

Once again, history demonstrates that behaviors we think are new and strange, behaviors we sometimes don’t understand, are not new at all. They are just new to us. One example came early in the book, when discussing smallpox in Boston:

A report in late March noted that thirty-eight smallpox patients were quarantined on a hospital scow in the Charles River, “some distance from the wharf.” Freeholders voted to continue a recent ban on inoculations; many now feared that it posed a greater risk of epidemic than natural infection.

How many people in that little cemetery, I wondered, were planted there because of smallpox?

One amusing line came from King George III, who supposedly,

once asserted that seven hours of sleep sufficed for a man, eight for a woman, and nine for a fool.

My favorite parts of the book, however, were not the pitched battled, but rather the descriptions of the people involved, be they ordinary citizens, just trying to make a living, or the extraordinary people whose names we know today. This book wasn’t among my favorite books on the Revolution, but every book serves a purpose. This one put me in mind of that cemetery from my youth. It also suggested further investigation of two other people I’ve often been curious about: King George III, and Henry Knox, the bookbinder-general.

In November, a massive 800-page biography of King George III is coming out, titled The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts. It’s on my to-buy list. I also picked up Henry Knox’s Noble Train: The Story of a Boston Bookseller’s Heroic Expedition that Saved the American Revolution by William Hazelgrove. This is the great thing about the butterfly effect of reading. Even books that don’t completely wow me can still lead me in new and interesting directions.

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Visualizing History and Science

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Yesterday, I walked across the Beringia with a branch of Ancestral Native Americans, ancestors to the First Peoples. Later, I boated with them down the western coast of North American, several thousand years earlier. In both cases, I took note of what I saw around me, even though none of that was described in the article I happened to be reading in the May issue of Scientific American. I marveled that this was all happened 15,000 years before what history books typically describe as history. I watched as some of the people stopped to form settlements while others continued south. I watched their struggles a they emerged from colder climates into more mild ones. I couldn’t understand what they said, but I saw an occasional smile, heard and occasional laugh, or a shout of anger.

I can only speak for myself, but this is what happens inside my head when I read. Whether it is a novel, a book on the history of computing, or a science article on genetic and archaeological discoveries about how the Americas were populated, they somehow come alive in my mind. Reading an Isaac Asimov essay on, say, an electron, I am swept into its orbit, where the electron itself appears as a big world. Reading an article on supernovae, I don’t see the words, but instead, I’m hovering somewhere on the outskirts of the unfortunate star, impervious to harm, but able to witness the blast, and see the shock waves forming.

Thinking about those people crossing the land bridge into North America, I imagined them seeing deer flitting about. In my mind, their reaction wasn’t much different than the reaction I had this morning when several deer crossed my path on my morning walk. I paused to observe them, I watched their movements, curious about their behavior.

Maybe this is what is meant when someone is said to be a visual thinker. It is just how my mind has always worked. Science isn’t a bunch of equations and theories in my mind. It is a narrative, a story that unfolds as I read, and one that I see as clearly as I see the stories that unfold from novels, or history, or virtually any other type of reading I do.

When I think about evolution and genetics, it is less about the theories, though I think I understand them quite well, but more about the practice. There is Darwin, hip-deep in muck, collecting samples. There is Mendel, bent over his garden, gnarled hands touching every budding pea plant.

In science articles, timescales often become incomprehensible. How it is possible to imagine 15,000 years, or 14 billion years, when I haven’t even lived half a century? My mind plays little tricks to convey these distances, but I doubt any of them really get the message across in a comprehensible way.

There is so much history and science to read that it seems impossible to come close to scratching the surface on most of it. Perhaps one of the most profound and delightful reveries I have when considering these vast histories is that they are just a spec in the potential histories out in the universe. If other intelligent life exists somewhere else, just think of the histories they carry with them, multiplied over and over again. Are there common threads? Is Romeo and Juliette a uniquely human story? Is the struggle for rational thought a battle fought again and again, in those rare and delectable places, as Throeau once wrote, “in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance”?

Independence Day

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For the last 19 years, the first thing I think about on July 4 is not the birth of the country, it is death. In one of the most remarkable coincidences in the history of the country, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, which happened to be July 4, 1826–the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That was 194 years ago today.

When the first fireworks began cracking last night, my thoughts rolled back to the scene that David McCullough portrayed in his biography of John Adam:

At Quincy the roar of cannon grew louder as the hours passed, and in midafternoon a thunderstorm struck–“The artillery of Heavan,” as would be said–to be followed by a gentle rain… Adams lay peacefully, his mind clear, by all signs. Then late in the afternoon, according to several who were present in the room, he stirred and whispered clearly enough to be understood, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

That scene was powerful enough in my mind to spin a story around it, one in which a time traveler brings Jefferson and Adams together in their final hours to witness the bicentennial celebration from Liberty Island in 1976. The editor to whom I submitted the story liked it, but said there was something wrong with it and he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. I mentioned this to my friend, Michael Burstein, who asked me to send him the story, confidently stating he would figure out what the problem was. He got back to me shortly there after, sheepishly proclaiming that while there was definitely something wrong with the story, he too, couldn’t figure out what it was. I eventually trunked the story, but I think about it every Independence Day.

I have the vaguest memories of the bicentennial celebration in 1976. I was living in New Jersey at the time, four years old, and fascinated, so far I can remember, with the fireworks. A year later that fascination had turned to fear. I don’t remember being afraid of the fireworks, but the reporter and photographer that captured me in this photo which appeared on July 7, 1977 remembered on my behalf:

At some point, I lost my enthusiasm for big fireworks celebration on the Fourth of July. They always seemed crowded, parking was difficult, the weather was often less than conducive to the event, and it was generally more trouble than it was worth. The notable exception to this was our annual summer treks to Maine, where the small coastal town we visited hosted a delightful New England Independence Day celebration. It started early on the town square with a costume parade, hot dogs, cotton candy and lemonade. Later in the afternoon, the town band performed all kinds of patriotic tunes. Finally, when darkness settled, everyone in the small town gathered at the town dock for a fireworks display while another band entertained the crowds and the small ice cream shop kept us cool. I enjoy those celebrations immensely, not the least because I could walk everywhere and not worry about finding a parking space.

Two years ago, on a family road trip, we had a perfect view of the fireworks celebration in Nashville, Tennessee from our hotel room. This was perfect since earlier in the day it had hit nearly 110 degrees in Nashville. I didn’t mind that experience either.

I never got the fireworks bug as a kid. I know quite a few kids my age right now who still have the bug and can’t wait to light off firecrackers, fountains, ground-spinners and sparklers. I prefer to imagine the celebrations in Quincy, Massachusetts 194 years ago, with cannons accompanied by nature’s own fireworks, thunder and lightning. Indeed, I sometimes think that the perfect Independence Day celebration would be a loud, flashing thunderstorm passing through just as night falls over the town, a humbling reminder that despite all of our independence and freedom, we are still at the mercy of the whims of nature.

May 28, 585 B.C.

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Since it is May 28 and I happened to remember on the day, for a change, I thought it worth mentioning to both history and astronomy buffs, that at May 28, 585 B.C., the Battle of Halys took place. This battle is significant for two reasons.

First, the battle stopped abruptly when  solar eclipse darkened the battlefield. This was taken as an omen that the gods wanted the fighting to cease.

Second, because the dates of solar eclipses can be predicted, it is the earliest historical event to which the date is known to such precision.

Actually, the battle is significant to me for a third reason, which involves the story that I have been working on for the last few months, in which the history of the battle and the eclipse that abruptly ended it, both play a small, but significant role.

Astrologers are constantly claiming the stars shape the fortunes of humanity. I think the battle of Halys is a perfect example of this, although I am certain it is not what the astrologers mean when discussing the dawning of the age of aquarius.

Leap day

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Today is my ninth leap day (1972 was a leap year, but I was born after February 29 so I don’t count that one. Leap day always makes me think of the history of leap day, which in turn gets me thinking about the intricacies of calendars and of keeping time in general. Man, the hoops we’ve jumped through to keep the calendar in line with the seasons!

Thoughts on Our Oriental Heritage

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I often wonder why I find history and science so fascinating. With science, it’s what Richard Feynman called “the pleasure of finding things out”. We learn how the universe around us evolved and how it all works. With history, I suppose, it’s similar, except instead of learning how the universe works, we learn how people work–or rather, why we are the way we are. Durant’s inaugural book in the Story of Civilization looks tries to tell this story by combing through 4,000 years of the history of mankind, with a specific look at the birth, evolution and eventual death of the oldest civilizations.

Reading the book, I noticed patterns. There are those people in history who stand out, whose names we remember for thousands of years, good or bad. Amenhotep. Ashurbanipal. Alexander. Darius. Buddha. Confucius. And there are the millions of everyday people. We get specific details about Alexander and generalizations about the masses. But even from those generalization, we have some inkling of how people lived. What fascinates me is how little has changed in human nature. The problems that men struggled with 4,000 years ago are the same problems we struggle with today. The everyday concerns and stressors are still there. Putting food on the table. Supporting our families. The moral codes ignored equally well today as they were thousands of years ago, whenever it is convenient to do so. The question becomes, what does it mean to be civilized? Reading history, one begins to wonder. We think of ourselves as more civilized today than at any time in the past, but there were periods of time when the standards seemed higher.

I find fascinating reading about people with stoic qualities. I don’t know why this is. I was impressed by those Buddhists who gave away all of their possessions and sought peace and tranquility in the wilderness. I was impressed by those generals and warriors who treated their enemies with a dignity and respect almost unheard of today. I was impressed by the quality and quantity of literature and art developed by these ancient civilizations. Art was as important to civilization 4,000 years ago as food and trade. Today, it seems to take a backseat to just about everything else.

When I got to the end of the book, I found myself wishing there was more, and glad to recall that 10 more volumes existed for me to pour over. Will Durant has an impressive writing style, a keen insight, a witty sense of humor, and an almost bitter sense of irony, especially when comparing mistakes of the distant past to similar mistakes being made all over again today. The first book in the series was incredible, I’ve never before read a history book quite like it. I felt as though I learned more history in 40 days than I learned in 12 years of grade school and 4 years of college. I highly recommend it to anyone who is fascinated by history.

Japan

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I left China behind this morning at around 5:30 AM and at once started on the last part of Our Oriental Heritage, Japan. Keeping in mind that this particular book was published in 1935 (and therefore written some years before), I found this passage particularly interesting:

The third act is modern Japan, opened up in 1853 by an American fleet, forced by conditions within and without into trade and industry, seeking foreign materials and markets, fighting wars of irrepressible expansion, imitating the imperialistic ardor and methods of the West, and threatening both the ascendancy of the white race and the peace of the world. By every historical precedent the next act will be war.
pp. 829, emphasis mine.

What impresses me about the passage is the ability of the author to see so clearly where things were heading. Maybe everyone in 1930 could see war with Japan on the horizon, but I don’t think so. We tend to be too inwardly focus to see the signs until right before it is upon us. It takes a historian, one with the vast context of all of history laid out before him, to see and identify the patterns and cast off a warning that we should learn from history lest we repeat our mistakes again and again.

The Japanese have studied our civilization carefully, in order to absorb its values and surpass it. Perhaps we should be wise to study their civilization as patiently as they have studied ours, so that when the crisis comes that must issue either in war or understanding, we may be capable of understanding.

Why is the quest for knowledge good?

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Reading the chapter on Confucius, I came across the most remarkable passage, attributed to the sage. It is a passage that from the ground up, instructs a nation to be a nation of highest virtue. What it all seems to come down to, according to Confucius, is knowledge. Why is the question for knowledge so vitally important? Because

The ancients who wished to illustrate the highest virtue throughout the empire first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their own states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, the first cultivated their own selves. Wishing to cultivate their own selves, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their own selves were cultivated. Their own selves being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole empire was made tranquil and happy.

Is this a recipe for success if I’ve ever heard one? Imagine how, for instance, this applies to us today. Would anyone consider our current state of affairs tranquil and happy? So we look to our leaders and ask are we being rightly governed? And so forth and so on down the line until we get to the investigation of things. Are we learning enough? Are we exploring enough? Not just our world but our history, our culture and our selves? There is a natural order to the progression of investigation up and up through our selves, our family, our government to tranquility and happiness. I think Confucius was on to something here.