Paradise Lost 5: Fallen Angels, Pagan Gods

We all know what happened to Satan, but what of all the other fallen angels? It had long been understood (I don't know, ever since the earliest commentators and theologians) that they became the pagan gods that were in competition with the God of the Old Testament. I don't suppose anyone will read Milton's account of how these vile beings corrupted the "greatest part of mankind" because it's pretty long (about 160 lines) but if you do you are in for a rare treat: a remarkable and so far as I know (knowing no Hebrew) successful attempt to capture in English blank verse the tone or sound of scorn and contempt in the voices of the ancient Hebrew prophets. I think it's all wonderful. Pure poetry.

. . . . of thir Names in heav'nly Records now

Be no memorial blotted out and ras'd

By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life.

Nor had they yet among the Sons of Eve

Got them new Names, till wandring ore the Earth, [ 365 ]

Through Gods high sufferance for the tryal of man,

By falsities and lyes the greatest part

Of Mankind they corrupted to forsake

God thir Creator, and th' invisible

Glory of him that made them, to transform [ 370 ]

Oft to the Image of a Brute, adorn'd

With gay Religions full of Pomp and Gold,

And Devils to adore for Deities:

Then were they known to men by various Names,

And various Idols through the Heathen World. [ 375 ]

Say, Muse, thir Names then known, who first, who last,

Rous'd from the slumber, on that fiery Couch,

At thir great Emperors call, as next in worth

Came singly where he stood on the bare strand,

While the promiscuous croud stood yet aloof? [ 380 ]

The chief were those who from the Pit of Hell

Roaming to seek thir prey on earth, durst fix

Thir Seats long after next the Seat of God,

Thir Altars by his Altar, Gods ador'd

Among the Nations round, and durst abide [ 385 ]

Jehovah thundring out of Sion, thron'd

Between the Cherubim; yea, often plac'd

Within his Sanctuary it self thir Shrines,

Abominations; and with cursed things

His holy Rites, and solemn Feasts profan'd, [ 390 ]

And with thir darkness durst affront his light.

First Moloch, horrid King besmear'd with blood

Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,

Though for the noyse of Drums and Timbrels loud

Thir childrens cries unheard, that past through fire [ 395 ]

To his grim Idol. Him the Ammonite

Worshipt in Rabba and her watry Plain,

In Argob and in Basan, to the stream

Of utmost Arnon. Nor content with such

Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart [ 400 ]

Of Solomon he led by fraud to build

His Temple right against the Temple of God

On that opprobrious Hill, and made his Grove

The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence

And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell. [ 405 ]

Next Chemos, th' obscene dread of Moabs Sons,

From Aroar to Nebo, and the wild

Of Southmost Abarim; in Hesebon

And Horonaim, Seons Realm, beyond

The flowry Dale of Sibma clad with Vines, [ 410 ]

And Eleale to th' Asphaltick Pool.

Peor his other Name, when he entic'd

Israel in Sittim on thir march from Nile

To do him wanton rites, which cost them woe.

Yet thence his lustful Orgies he enlarg'd [ 415 ]

Even to that Hill of scandal, by the Grove

Of Moloch homicide, lust hard by hate;

Till good Josiah drove them thence to Hell.

With these came they, who from the bordring flood

Of old Euphrates to the Brook that parts [ 420 ]

Egypt from Syrian ground, had general Names

Of Baalim and Ashtaroth, those male,

These Feminine. For Spirits when they please

Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft

And uncompounded is thir Essence pure, [ 425 ]

Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb,

Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,

Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose

Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure,

Can execute thir aerie purposes, [ 430 ]

And works of love or enmity fulfill.

For those the Race of Israel oft forsook

Thir living strength, and unfrequented left

His righteous Altar, bowing lowly down

To bestial Gods; for which thir heads as low [ 435 ]

Bow'd down in Battel, sunk before the Spear

Of despicable foes. With these in troop

Came Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians call'd

Astarte, Queen of Heav'n, with crescent Horns;

To whose bright Image nightly by the Moon [ 440 ]

Sidonian Virgins paid thir Vows and Songs,

In Sion also not unsung, where stood

Her Temple on th' offensive Mountain, built

By that uxorious King, whose heart though large,

Beguil'd by fair Idolatresses, fell [ 445 ]

To Idols foul. Thammuz came next behind,

Whose annual wound in Lebanon allur'd

The Syrian Damsels to lament his fate

In amorous dittyes all a Summers day,

While smooth Adonis from his native Rock [ 450 ]

Ran purple to the Sea, suppos'd with blood

Of Thammuz yearly wounded: the Love-tale

Infected Sions daughters with like heat,

Whose wanton passions in the sacred Porch

Ezekiel saw, when by the Vision led [ 455 ]

His eye survay'd the dark Idolatries

Of alienated Judah. Next came one

Who mourn'd in earnest, when the Captive Ark

Maim'd his brute Image, head and hands lopt off

In his own Temple, on the grunsel edge, [ 460 ]

Where he fell flat, and sham'd his Worshipers:

Dagon his Name, Sea Monster, upward Man

And downward Fish: yet had his Temple high

Rear'd in Azotus, dreaded through the Coast

Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon [ 465 ]

And Accaron and Gaza's frontier bounds.

Him follow'd Rimmon, whose delightful Seat

Was fair Damascus, on the fertil Banks

Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams.

He also against the house of God was bold: [ 470 ]

A Leper once he lost and gain'd a King,

Ahaz his sottish Conquerour, whom he drew

Gods Altar to disparage and displace

For one of Syrian mode, whereon to burn

His odious off'rings, and adore the Gods [ 475 ]

Whom he had vanquisht. After these appear'd

A crew who under Names of old Renown,

Osiris, Isis, Orus and their Train

With monstrous shapes and sorceries abus'd

Fanatic Egypt and her Priests, to seek [ 480 ]

Thir wandring Gods disguis'd in brutish forms

Rather then human. Nor did Israel scape

Th' infection when thir borrow'd Gold compos'd

The Calf in Oreb: and the Rebel King

Doubl'd that sin in Bethel and in Dan, [ 485 ]

Lik'ning his Maker to the Grazed Ox,

Jehovah, who in one Night when he pass'd

From Egypt marching, equal'd with one stroke

Both her first born and all her bleating Gods.

Belial came last, then whom a Spirit more lewd [ 490 ]

Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love

Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood

Or Altar smoak'd; yet who more oft then hee

In Temples and at Altars, when the Priest

Turns Atheist, as did Ely's Sons, who fill'd [ 495 ]

With lust and violence the house of God.

In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns

And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse

Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs,

And injury and outrage: And when Night [ 500 ]

Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons

Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

Witness the Streets of Sodom, and that night

In Gibeah, when the hospitable door

Expos'd a Matron to avoid worse rape. [ 505 ]

These were the prime in order and in might;

The rest were long to tell, though far renown'd,

Th' Ionian Gods, of Javans Issue held

Gods, yet confest later then Heav'n and Earth

Thir boasted Parents; Titan Heav'ns first born [ 510 ]

With his enormous brood, and birthright seis'd

By younger Saturn, he from mightier Jove

His own and Rhea's Son like measure found;

So Jove usurping reign'd: these first in Creet

And Ida known, thence on the Snowy top [ 515 ]

Of cold Olympus rul'd the middle Air

Thir highest Heav'n; or on the Delphian Cliff,

Or in Dodona, and through all the bounds

Of Doric Land; or who with Saturn old

Fled over Adria to th' Hesperian Fields, [ 520 ]

And ore the Celtic roam'd the utmost Isles.

All these and more came flocking; but with looks

Down cast and damp . . . .

Paradise Lost 4: Milton and Galileo

Satan is the father of lies, and here is a famous one which is often quoted but rarely attributed to him: "Farewel happy fields where Joy for ever dwells," he says, as he and his followers are trying to pull themselves together after their long fall, "Hail horrors, hail/ Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell/ Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings/ A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time./ The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a hell of Heav'n." Try telling that to someone who's being eaten by a bear or stung by thousands of bees. But we already know that Hell has no location in space and time, that it is not a place at the center of earth but a condition: "bottomless perdition."


Earth, however, has a definite place at the center of the universe which is where it should be as the 'theatre' where the divine comedy of sin and salvation is to be acted out. And indeed everything that Milton says about the cosmology of this universe would lead you to assume that the earth is at the center and that the sun, moon and planets revolve about it. The trouble is, he had met Galileo, seen his telescope, and he knew that Copernicus had got it right—as did most educated people in the 17th century. What to do. How do you justify the ways of God to man if this world is only one of many possible worlds and no where near the center of the universe if it even has one? Well, you go ahead and use the traditional cosmology as the framework for your poem while making a small gesture of acknowledgement to the man who invented modern astronomy and was the first to show how the motion of objects in uniform acceleration can be mathematically described.


As Satan is climbing out of the sea of "burning sulphur unconsumed", the "oblivious pool" where all his associates and copartners still lie "astonished," "groveling and prostrate," he turns his back on which is tied his "ponderous shield" of "ethereal temper, massy, large and round," so that we may see it:


                                        the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan artist views
At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty globe.


That Tuscan artist with his optic glass can only be Galileo, the only contemporary (approximate: he died in 1642), non-mythical human being that Milton ever refers to in this huge poem.



                          

Paradise Lost 3: Milton and Blake

Blake said (see the previous post) that Milton, being a true poet, was of the devil's party without knowing it; this is a brilliant insight even it if it is wrong in one respect, as I believe it is: Milton knew what he was doing when he made Satan's poetry more dramatic, more interesting, more human than God's. We are all sinners; had we been in Satan's position, we too would have rebelled; in Eve's and Adam's position, we too would have "fallen." Now, reading this poem, we admire the speed and energy of the poem, which may be Satanic, and ask impertinent questions about divine entrapment. God, of course can explain all that and does, in extraordinarily lucid and acute philosophical-theological detail, but you have to be a Believer to follow the poetry of his explanation and accept it as poetry. And that's the point: this is a poem that only Believers can read and be properly moved by, in its entirety, as a poem. The same is true, I suppose, of Dante's Divine Comedy: we can appreciate the Inferno and, to some extent, the Purgatorio, because we can understand even if we cannot quite accept the theological definition of 'sin' as an offense against a God that few educated readers of these poems now believe in. I, of course, am one of the multitude of sinners who are now constitutionally incapable of properly appreciating either Paradise Lost or the Paradisio.


I don't think one has to believe in the Greek gods in order to read the Iliad or Odyssey . . .

Paradise Lost 2: Satan or God?

Hell has many pains, but Heaven has no pleasures: that, greatly simplified, is what's wrong with this poem. The poetry of Satan and Hell is dramatic and interesting, the poetry of God in Heaven is self-righteous and boring. See for yourself. Here is Satan, picking himself up off the mat in bk 1:

                        What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That Glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deifie his power
Who from the terrour of this Arm so late
Doubted his empire, that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; since by Fate the strength of Gods
And this Empyreal substance cannot fail,
Since through experience of this great event
In Arms not worse, in foresight much advanc't,
We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal Warr
Irreconcilable, to our grand Foe
Who now triumphs, and in th'excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav'n.

And here is God, in bk 3, talking to his son and watching from afar the movements of Satan:

Onely begotten Son, seest thou what rage
Transports our adversarie, whom no bounds
Prescrib'd, no barrs of Hell, nor all the chains
Heapt on him there, nor yet the main Abyss
Wide interrupt can hold; so bent he seems
On desperat revenge, that shall rebound
Upon his own rebellious head. And now
Through all restraint broke loose he wings his way
Not farr off Heav'n, in the Precincts of light,
Directly towards the new created World
And Man there plac't, with purpose to assay
If him by force he can destroy, or worse,
By some false guile pervert; and shall pervert
For man will heark'n to his glozing lyes
And easily transgress the sole Command,
Sole pledge of his obedience: so will fall
Hee and his faithless Progenie: whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of mee
All he could have; I made him just and right
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

It was courageous of Milton to lay so bare, and so baldly present, the central paradox or contradiction of free-will and predestination in his Calvinist theology.

Paradise Lost was written over a period of about ten years and published in 1667. In 1793, William Blake remarked casually, in a foot-note to The Marriage of Heaven And Hell that "the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet  and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Milton criticism and scholarship in the 20th century can be described as a series of attempts to prove that Blake didn't know what he was talking about. Blake's one-liner still stands out, for me, as a brilliant insight.

Paradise Lost 1

The first thing one is likely to notice about this poem is the speed and energy of Milton's verse.  In two long sentences, one of 16 lines and another of 10 lines,  Milton tells us what he's going to talk about—the "fruit" of that tree whose "taste" brought not only death into this world but the entire history of human life from its origin to the moment when Jesus ends it upon his return; and, since he is about to do something that no other writer has ever done before, i.e. write a poem about how we got where we are which not only explains how we got where are, but justifies the ways of the god who took such violent exception to what might seem to be a trivial thing, a taste merely of some arbitrarily forbidden fruit of some arbitrarily chosen tree, he needs and asks for divine assistance. That, roughly, is the substance of Milton's first paragraph.

The second paragraph, begins by evading the question that I have, impertinently perhaps, but relevantly, inserted into my paraphrase of Milton's opening invocation. The question that Milton wants to ask is not why God set up his trap in the first place but why did we—or rather our "Grand Parents"—fall into it? "Who first seduc'd them to that foul revolt?" demands the poet, sternly. ("Foul revolt"? That seems a bit strong. All Eve wanted to do was have a taste.) That short question requires a long answer  which will go on for another 48 lines until finally the "infernal serpent" who started it all is named: Satan. In those 48 lines, we are shown God's first act of creation: not light, but darkness—darkness visible, Hell. That, it seems, is what the "vast abyss" is "pregnant" with (lines 21-2). Well, it makes makes sense: if Satan is to be punished for his ambition by being

Hurld headlong flaming from th'Ethereal Skie
With hideous ruine and combustion down
To bottomless perdition . . .

there has to be some sort of place (for 3D space does not yet exist in "the vast abyss") for him to be hurled into, and time has only just begun to tick) . Bottomless perdition is not a place but a condition. In the following lines space and time are being energetically created while hell is being industriously excavated out of. . . nothingness: hideous ruin and combustion follow him all the way 'down' and await him 'there.'

Nine times the space that measures Day and Night
To mortal men, he with his horrid crew
Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe
Confounded though immortal: But his doom
Reverv'd him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
That witness'd huge affliction and dismay
Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:
At once as far as Angels kenn he views
The dismal situation waste and wild,
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
No light but rather darkness visible
Serv'd only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd:
Such place Eternal Justice had prepar'd
For those rebellious, here their Prison ordain'd
In utter darkness, and thir portion set
As far remov'd from God and light of Heav'n
As from the Center thrice to the utmost Pole.

What does Satan—as yet unnamed—'see'? Huge affliction and dismay, sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades. Hell is a work in progress, created out of . . . language itself?

Whatever you may think about all this as poetry, I hope you will join me in admiring the energy of Milton's verse. Where does that energy come from? It comes from the coiled tensions of Milton's syntax, from questions that elicit answers, from verbs with surprising subjects and objects, from clauses that seem at first disconnected from verbs only to connect in ways you could not have predicted. It is like the energy of a spring coming uncoiled—or a serpent.

Where is Milton in all this? How does he know these things, which do not derive from any biblical text? Is he making it up? Yes, obviously, but he can't say so. "Sing heavenly muse," he says, asking for the same sources of inspiration that were available to Moses ("That Shepherd who first taught the chosen Seed in the beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth rose out of Chaos . . .") But that was God, was it not? There were already too many nuts running around claiming to know the will of God, which is quite expressly not Milton's object: Milton is a secular poet with a philosophical purpose; not, like Calvin, to tell us how we ought to live, but to explain the nature and origin of sin; and do it in a dramatic and fundamentally secular poem about the human condition. And the first thing he has to, if he is to get this poem moving, is to authenticate his source which is not Moses or the book of Genesis but something that only a 17th century puritan could have come up with: a puritan Spirit, whom the poet addresses formally as "Thou," who prefers "Before all Temples th'upright heart and pure." You have to admire the way Milton deftly transforms the heavenly muse of line 6 into something like the inner light. He will address that same spirit as Urania, later, at the beginning of Book 7:

Standing on Earth, not rapt above the Pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchang'd
To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil dayes,
On evil dayes though fall'n, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and dangers compast round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East: still govern thou my Song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.

Flaubert's Wastelands: Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education

Having recently reread Flaubert's A Sentimental Education (1869) I want to say that this is the most important, most modern, most intelligent political novel of the 19th century.  


The title, which is ironic, may put you off; I didn't understand it for a long time. 


Our word 'sentimental' suggests nothing so much as a moral and emotional fog, and I assume that the French word works the same way. A sentimental novel or poem plays to only the most obvious and conventional feelings and ideas.


The 'hero' of this novel is a fool and a weakling who inhabits a moral and emotional fog and never learns anything. No one learns anything. This is not a book about self-education in difficult times like, say, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).


This is a novel without a center, or a direction, or a hero, or a point of view; you can think of it as an answer to Victor Hugo's epic, Les Miserables (1862) with it virtually superhuman hero, Jean Valjean "There are no hero, no villain, to arouse us, no clowns to entertain us, no scenes to wring our hearts. Yet the effect is deeply moving. It is the tragedy of nobody in particular but of the poor human race itself reduced to such ineptitude, such cowardice, such commonness, such weak irresolution—arriving, with so many fine notions in its head, so many noble words on its lips, at a failure which is all the more miserable because those who have failed in their roles have even forgotten what roles they were cast for." (Edmund Wilson)


Since Frederick Moreau, the 'hero' of this novel is merely a wealthier, luckier and better educated Emma Bovary,
let us continue the discussion of Madame Bovary begun in my previous 'essays' (3-23-09 and 3-29-09)—or, I should say, my shameless pillaging of Erich Auerbach's essay about that book (in Mimesis) which keys off the following lines:


But it was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls, the damp floor-tiles; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other exhalations as it were of disgust. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble a few hazel-nuts, or else, leaning on her elbow, would amuse herself making marks on the oilcloth with the point of her table-knife.


Auerbach's commentary runs as follows: "Nothing particular happens in the scene, nothing particular has happened just before it. It is a random moment from the regularly recurring hours at which the husband and wife eat together. They are not quarrelling, there is no sort of tangible conflict. Emma is in complete despair, but her despair is not occasioned by any definite catastrophe; there is nothing purely concrete that she has lost or for which she has wished. Certainly she has many wishes, but they are entirely vague—elegance, love, a varied life; there must always have been such unconcrete despair, but no one ever thought of taking it seriously in literary works before; such formless tragedy, if it may be called tragedy, which is set in motion by the general situation itself, was first made conceivable as literature by romanticism; probably Flaubert was the first to have represented it in people of slight intellectual culture and fairly low social station; certainly he is the first who directly captures the chronic character this psychological situation. Nothing happens, but that nothing has become a heavy, oppressive, threatening something. How he accomplishes this we have already seen; he organizes into compact and unequivocal discourse the confused impressions of discomfort which arise in Emma at the sight of this room, the meal, her husband. Elsewhere too he seldom narrates events which carry the action quickly forward; in a series of pure pictures—pictures transforming the nothingness of listless and uniform days into an oppressive condition of repugnance, boredom, false hopes, paralyzing disappointments, and piteous fears—a gray and random human destiny moves toward its end.


"The interpretation of the situation is contained in its description. The two are sitting at table together; the husband divines nothing of his wife's inner state; they have so little communion that things never even come to a quarrel. Each of them is so immersed in his own world—she in despair and vague wish-dreams, he in his stupid philistine self-complacency—that they are entirely alone; they have nothing in common, and yet they have nothing of their own, for the sake of which it would be worthwhile to be lonely. For, privately, each of them has a silly, false world, which cannot be reconciled with the reality of his situation, and so they both miss the possibilities life offers them. What is true of these two, applies to almost all the other characters in the novel; each of the many mediocre people who act in it has his own world of mediocrity and stupidity, a world of illusions, habits, instincts and slogans; each is alone, none can understand another, or help another to insight. Though men come together for business and pleasure, their coming together has no note of united activity; it becomes one-sided, ridiculous, painful, and it is charged with misunderstanding, vanity, futility, falsehood, and hatred. What the world would really be, the world of intelligence, Flaubert never tells us; in his book, the world  consists of pure stupidity which completely misses reality, so that the latter should not properly be discoverable in it at all; yet is there; it is in the writer's language, which unmasks stupidity by pure statement; language, then, has criteria for stupidity and thus also has a part in that reality of the intelligence which otherwise never appears in the book.


"Emma Bovary, too, is completely submerged in that false reality, of human stupidity, as is the 'hero' of Flaubert's other realistic novel, Frederick Moreau, in A Sentimental Education."


In his aimlessness, emptiness and futility, Frederick is a the perfect observer of the 'events' of 1848-51; he is himself indeed an apt metaphor for that vast panorama of emptiness and futility. No one knows what's going on, or who's fighting whom, or why; different people pop up fighting first on one side then on the other; all are convulsed with ferocity and hatred; atrocities are committed easily and casually; the social contract, if there ever was one, is ripped apart and stamped on by ignorant armies or mobs of the left and right. Intelligence is nowhere to be found—nowhere but in the limpid, beautiful clarity of Flaubert's prose. (If you think Flaubert is merely a biassed bourgeois, try making sense out of any non-Marxist account of those years which merely served to bring forth another, weaker, less intelligent Napoleon to power.)


Here, for example, is a (partial) description of the faded glory of Fonainebleau, where Frederick and his mistress, Rosanette, have gone to get away from the meaningless noise and violence of Paris: "Early next morning they visited the palace. Going in through the gate they had a view of the whole façade with its five pavilions, their steeply pitched roofs and the sweep of the horseshoe staircase at the far end of the courtyard. Seen from a distance the lichen on the cobble-stones blended with the tawny bricks and the whole palace, rust-colored like an old suit of armor, had something coldly regal about it, a sort of melancholy military grandeur." (Though Frederick could not have said this, he—unlike Rosanette—is able to feel that melancholy grandeur.)


For several days, Frederick and Rosanette enjoy a sort of honeymoon, an idyllic journey through a totally beautiful and virtually deserted countryside, until Frederick hears that a friend of his has been wounded in the fighting. Abandoning Rosanette (this is typical) he hurries guiltily back to Paris. Here, among other sights of destruction is what he sees: 


"In this district the aftermath of the uprising was awesome. The street surfaces had been churned up from end to end; on the wrecked barricades were the remains of buses, gas-pipes and cart-wheels; the scattered black puddles were presumably blood. Where the plaster of the houses, riddled with projectiles, had flaked off, you could see their framework underneath; shutters dangled down like limp rags, held on by a nail. Where staircases had collapsed, the doors opened on to empty space and you could see into bedrooms with their wallpaper hanging in shreds. Sometimes quite fragile objects had survived; Frederick caught glimpses of a clock, a parrot's perch, some engravings." 


Only Flaubert can hold both these images in his mind, of a distant, ceremonious, almost mythical past at Fontainbleau, and the houses of Paris in 1848, arbitrarily and unceremoniously gutted, their pathetic innards exposed by the random gunfire of ignorant armies. Look hard at these images, appreciate them for what they are but don't try to connect them. There is no connection between the pre-modern civilization that built that "coldly regal" Fontainebleau and the class hatreds that were tearing France and Paris to pieces in 1848—and had been ever since Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1814.


The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, and Flaubert's novel is an answer to that as well as Les Miserables. Victor Hugo thought liberal humanism was destined to win out; Karl Marx thought something more radical would triumph; both thought history had a built-in or providential direction: history  knows where it is going. Now we know—and at what a price!—that that is not true. History does not run on rails. Flaubert figured that out at a time when just about everybody thought the opposite.


You mustn't think, however, that this is primarily a book about politics or history. It is about the futility and emptiness of a life like Frederick Moreau's, a kind of upper-middle class everyman, that is devoid of purpose, or principle or faith or belief. All Frederick cares about is his own pleasures. Even his love for Madame Arnoux, one of the two decent people in this novel, does nothing to change his character or modify his habitual self-regard or his endless talent for self-deception. The novel ends, flatly, with Frederick and his old friend, Deslauriers, now middle-aged, neither of whom has learned anything, looking back on their empty, futile lives. "Ah, that was our best time," says Frederick. "Could be? Yes, that was our best time," says the other. This is one of the saddest books I have ever read.

Science And The Modern World: The Trouble With Physics (2)

In his brilliant review of the state of play in modern physics, The Trouble With Physics,  Lee Smolin lists  five great problems that remain unsolved: "(1) How to combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature; (2) Resolve the problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics; (3) Determine whether or not the various particles and forces can be unified in a theory that explains them all as manifestations of a single, fundamental entity; (4) Explain how the values of the free constants in the standard model of particle physics are chosen in nature; (5) Explain dark matter and dark energy."  In other words, come up with a complete theory of nature. Think about that, as I am trying to do. Nature includes everything, does it not? We and everything we do are part of nature; it follows that art, politics, poetry, science, history is part of nature. But of course Dr. Smolin doesn't mean that; he is using the term 'nature' loosely, which is what you have to do when you are writing for people who don't know the difference between mass and weight. Nevertheless, this idea of a complete theory of nature rankles. History is strewn with the wreckage of philosophical systems that claimed to say or do it all, memory traumatized by multitudinous atrocities committed not so very long ago in the name of a higher good—as promised by some grand philosophical or religious system of belief. And even if we restrict ourselves to the pieces of nature that the natural sciences observe, how many truly complete theories are there? For that matter, how do we know when a theory or a science is complete? Even mathematics, the supreme fiction, is doomed (by Kurt Gödel's proof, 1931) to eternal incompleteness; why should physics be any different?


Let's define science as the dehumanization of knowledge by mathematics. God, or Nature, it turns out is the supreme mathematician. Science, so defined, will always be vulnerable to the whims of the many to whom mathematics and therefore physics is an impenetrable mystery. Remember the legislator who asked if the Super Collider, to be built in Texas, would bring us any closer to God. Answer: No, not God, but the Higgs Boson. So of course the great machine was never completed.

People have to believe in something, or someone, larger than themselves that they can turn to in their pain or fear or despair. Until recently, such beliefs have been religious. During much of the 20th century, people put their faith in various political religions, with horrific consequences. Now what? Neither Nature nor science, its interpreter, suffices. Nature with its deserts of vast, meaningless eternity is what we fear.

Climate-change is now the great unknown. What will happen to constitutional democracy and the rule of law as sea-levels and temperatures rise? If the past is prologue, something or somebody will be blamed and scape-goated. And who or what will that be? Do I really need to tell you? It's the bearers of bad news who are usually punished.