every day you see one more card

Sorry for the quotation from a Tom Petty song, always an indicator of trouble to come on several intellectual and aesthetic levels of offense. I am repeating things I have said before, but as always I have taken several years to figure out what I was talking about without knowing I was talking about it.


I don’t know why it took me this many years to figure out, finally, the sociology behind the myth of monastic wisdom (which like all myths may be true in a deeper sense than a prosaic appeal to the purported facts would be).

Reading reviews of the new book on The House of Wisdom (the caliph’s library in Baghdad) and thinking of Philip Jenkins’ account of that same library in The Lost History of Christianity probably prodded me into re-visioning the situation in what I hope is the right way.

Without Syrian monks, no House of Wisdom (but without the caliph, only scattered monastic translators of Greek mathematical and scientific texts): so the symbiosis suggests some sociological truth that makes it worthwhile to offend the opponents of this kind of wretched excess in the use of repeated initial letters. (I recently read some pedant’s definition of “alliteration” that reminds us that most of us use the word wrongly.)

You will recall that the old Connections TV series took the contribution of the Syrian Orthodox translators for granted in explaining why some technological innovation or other depended on a few desert-dwelling transmitters of nearly-lost knowledge.

Anyway, the point is that of course, monasteries anywhere in the world have been refuges for all sorts of threatened intellectuals: not just players of word games like poets, but mathematicians, proto-physicists, proto-psychologists, and of course theologians of all sorts and stripes.

We tend to think that this can’t be true because the occultists have made such a hash of myths of the Masters of Wisdom, and because the societies around the monasteries show no signs of benefiting from any practical information retained therein. But obviously the strands of global science (the human sciences included) extended as far as the trade routes reached (even if the strands got a little tenuous out towards the third and fourth segments of the journey). Just as obviously, there have been considerable stretches of history in which would be dangerous just to be out on the streets, much less pursuing a trade unlikely to earn much income; there would be too many folks out there with cuirasses, broadaxes, or whatever other weapon of one-at-a-time mass destruction could be wielded by a tribute-seeking or merely pissed-off member of the forces of hegemony.

So there is absolutely no reason why a multidisciplinary investigation should not have been carried out in the remote mountain fastnesses of whatever religion was being chased into the mountains at the time. This is not rendered impossible by the fact that, as Jenkins observes and others have confirmed, a constantly harassed mountain community is much more likely to retain less theory-based information with each surviving generation until at last the elders of the community have no idea what is in their sacred books.

But anybody who grew up reading A Canticle for Leibowitz knew that much already. So I don’t know why I have bought into the false alternatives of the simple truth or the obvious nonsense of claims regarding the existence of places of secret wisdom. Intellectuals from what would become the various academic disciplines wouldn’t have rejected the religion of choice, or only pretended to believe in it: they would have developed their respective investigations within the context of that religion, or within the context of addressing the claims of contending religions. The sociology of knowledge tells us as much.

The handful of utopian academies that various fantasists have imagined are actually more likely to have developed than not, given how few places there were to which disparate types of intellectual explorers would have been on the run. They just didn’t accomplish the utopian goals that the fantasists would wish they did. (Or perhaps they did. How would we know? The goals would have depended on contingent factors for their implementation, as I believe a good many fantasy writers have noted.)

Again, Frances Yates’ hypotheses, however scorned they are these days, make elegant sense in this context: Just as the Rosicrucian ludibrium was a late invention in the midst of immense wars destined to devastate a continent, there were probably other contingent inventions by similarly minded intellectuals all through human history from the moment that intellectuals could stop telling their stories by torchlight beneath cave paintings and communicate their ideas in abstract linguistic symbols. The remains are as confusing as they are because we can’t see what it was they were responding to, or defending against. Nor do we know where the lovely fragments were originally meant to stand in the system: at least, this is so if we think of the secret societies in which (unless the elders were bullshitting the anthropologists, always a possibility) the older initiates are told to forget all the nonsense they were taught in the early degrees designed for children. (This claim, presented unsupported by still-secret evidence, is just the kind of nonsense that an elder would feed an anthropologist to throw him or her off the trail…but let us not get off on the errors inherent in fieldwork….)

This is why I’ve always liked Doris Lessing’s impossibly clumsy sci-fi novels: they try to create a fictional universe in which all of these disparate phenomena would make sense.

I just had never quite been able to imagine how much sense, in plain old commonplace sociological terms not related to wildly extravagant speculations. Lessing probably had such thoughts in the back of her mind, given her irritatingly consistent tendency to find the extraordinary quite commonplace and not really very interesting. A few mornings ago, I was thinking of her deeply downputting reaction to receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature: “Well, well, well, now they have chosen me, and now we shall have to have speeches made and flowers will be given and it will all be very nice.” (Or words to that effect, I quote from memory.) But Lessing has been over it for a good thirty or forty years, a source of despair for those of us for whom the world is still a source of occasions for would-be excellence in word-making.

what does it all mean. this is not a question, but an exclamation

I wish I could remember who wrote that closing line of a poem, because I have always thought it was wrong on several counts.

The meaning of life depends on what you mean by “meaning.” The meaning of life depends on what you live as “life.” The meaning of life depends on what “of” is a part of, not to mention the troublesome "the."

And although I haven’t read all of his books and hence base my fanhood on partial evidence, I am a huge fan of select parts of Terry Eagleton’s thought. Eagleton is one of those partisans of a politically progressive vision who also understands Christian theology—and deeply enough to be an equal-opportunity doubter—and understands (and really, really does not like) the brands of self-proclaimed postmodernist theory that dominated academic departments in the humanities from circa 1985 to circa 2005. (This dislike of a too-facile nihilism has to do with his wish for the construction of an ethics that acknowledges the possibility that words can be adequated to available reality, however much that “reality” is both constructed and/or ultimately unknowable.)

So I am delighted that Eagleton has written The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, part of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series.

Short though it is, I’ve only begun to read it, but I see that Eagleton presents exquisitely succinct introductions into whether the question even makes sense, why nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers have taken opposite positions on the topic, and what the various ways of asking the question might be and why (most mysterious of all) a member of the human species even thinks of asking the question.

In other words, as a Very Short Introduction ought to do, it refreshes the memory of those who already know about these things and stirs the curiosity of those who don’t yet know about them.

This is so even in his foreword in which he takes pride in being the only meaning-of-life book ever to have avoided telling the story of Bertrand Russell and the taxi driver. Anyone who doesn’t know it will, I suspect, find it in thousands of reiterations in a single web search, though as with the smell of turpentine pervading through the universe, it may require a bit longer to confirm the locus classicus of the anecdote. (Since Lord Russell is not the originator of the story, how many people have claimed that they were the ones to whom the cabbie told his tale? Please report.)

His Endlessness

amazon.com shipped Endless Things, the paperback, two days ago. I suppose this means it has hit the shelves of the bookstores as well.