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I am continuing my occasional reputation as the Tyrone Slothrop of New York Times feature stories, having mentally composed, prior to opening the newspaper, a post that is illustrated ideally by the story about Beirut in today’s issue of that estimable publication.
Actually, my imagined post started with reflections about 1968 et seq. and how it felt to be, two years later, under fire briefly and under military-enforced curfew slightly more extensively in the Isla Vista university suburb of Santa Barbara, at the time of the burning of the Bank of America a couple of blocks from my apartment.
This was by way of reflecting on the more organized adventures of my friends in that time period, who sent me letters from Amsterdam or wherever while I was trying to focus on Joseph Campbell and books like E. R. Goodenough’s Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. My meditations on the Zwischenzeit [Heidegger's "time-between" the departure of one god and the arrival of another] and similar topics were constantly interrupted by things like the occupation of the Student Center, or, eventually, the burning of the bank.
This recollection in turn led naturally to thoughts of all those who in every age would have preferred to be thinking about something else besides physical survival in times of what Eliade called the terror of history.
I wondered, for years, what it was that Fellowes Kraft could possibly have found in Prague in the midst of the 1968 Prague Spring before the terrible autumn that followed, which was on one level a replay of the defeat of the Winter King at the Battle of White Mountain. (I believe I have written before of how my Isla Vista neighbors, on the first night of the National Guard occupation, hung out a handmade sign reading “Welcome to Prague,” thus proving that it wasn’t a bit like Prague.)
Now I know what Kraft found. Or at least I know what the novel tells me, which is all there is to know.
As I also wrote in an earlier post, I myself was headed for Prague on a couple of significant occasions following the Velvet Revolution but never got there. Once again, I have read the same (and more) books on the history of the city. But John Crowley plainly arrived there at a time when I never even dreamed of going, in a year in which I was still on the verge of getting my first passport.
However, that is a digression from the imagined post, which would have gone on to reflect on the strange lives of Mandaeans and Yezidis in today’s Iraq (or, increasingly, in exile). I would imagine that when one wakes up knowing that there are a fair number of people who want to kill you, you do not automatically reflect on how this fact comports with your pessimistic metaphysics regarding the material world. However, as I have written previously, Gnostics and quasi-gnostics living in the circumstances of uncertainty that spawned Gnosticism originally, and in even worse circumstances, do not have the issues of theodicy that others have. To the question “Why does God permit evil?” such people respond with a variation on Bob Dylan’s line “Honey, how come you have to ask?”
That has little enough to do with the hostess at the mostly empty Beirut restaurant cheerfully asking “Do you have reservations?” after the diners had run a gaunntlet of soldiers patrolling the streets. That is more a matter of maintaining the rituals of daily life come hell or high water or little things like a renewed civil war.
********
Also in today’s e-mails I find two separate Atlanta events related to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. That means (I hadn’t thought of it) that next summer there will be lots of memorials to the uprisings of 1968, and they will occur right in the middle of the 2008 American presidential campaign. Anyone want to lay bets on which party, if either, will benefit from reminders of that year of social upheaval?
Actually, my imagined post started with reflections about 1968 et seq. and how it felt to be, two years later, under fire briefly and under military-enforced curfew slightly more extensively in the Isla Vista university suburb of Santa Barbara, at the time of the burning of the Bank of America a couple of blocks from my apartment.
This was by way of reflecting on the more organized adventures of my friends in that time period, who sent me letters from Amsterdam or wherever while I was trying to focus on Joseph Campbell and books like E. R. Goodenough’s Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. My meditations on the Zwischenzeit [Heidegger's "time-between" the departure of one god and the arrival of another] and similar topics were constantly interrupted by things like the occupation of the Student Center, or, eventually, the burning of the bank.
This recollection in turn led naturally to thoughts of all those who in every age would have preferred to be thinking about something else besides physical survival in times of what Eliade called the terror of history.
I wondered, for years, what it was that Fellowes Kraft could possibly have found in Prague in the midst of the 1968 Prague Spring before the terrible autumn that followed, which was on one level a replay of the defeat of the Winter King at the Battle of White Mountain. (I believe I have written before of how my Isla Vista neighbors, on the first night of the National Guard occupation, hung out a handmade sign reading “Welcome to Prague,” thus proving that it wasn’t a bit like Prague.)
Now I know what Kraft found. Or at least I know what the novel tells me, which is all there is to know.
As I also wrote in an earlier post, I myself was headed for Prague on a couple of significant occasions following the Velvet Revolution but never got there. Once again, I have read the same (and more) books on the history of the city. But John Crowley plainly arrived there at a time when I never even dreamed of going, in a year in which I was still on the verge of getting my first passport.
However, that is a digression from the imagined post, which would have gone on to reflect on the strange lives of Mandaeans and Yezidis in today’s Iraq (or, increasingly, in exile). I would imagine that when one wakes up knowing that there are a fair number of people who want to kill you, you do not automatically reflect on how this fact comports with your pessimistic metaphysics regarding the material world. However, as I have written previously, Gnostics and quasi-gnostics living in the circumstances of uncertainty that spawned Gnosticism originally, and in even worse circumstances, do not have the issues of theodicy that others have. To the question “Why does God permit evil?” such people respond with a variation on Bob Dylan’s line “Honey, how come you have to ask?”
That has little enough to do with the hostess at the mostly empty Beirut restaurant cheerfully asking “Do you have reservations?” after the diners had run a gaunntlet of soldiers patrolling the streets. That is more a matter of maintaining the rituals of daily life come hell or high water or little things like a renewed civil war.
********
Also in today’s e-mails I find two separate Atlanta events related to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. That means (I hadn’t thought of it) that next summer there will be lots of memorials to the uprisings of 1968, and they will occur right in the middle of the 2008 American presidential campaign. Anyone want to lay bets on which party, if either, will benefit from reminders of that year of social upheaval?
