'PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE': READING PIERRE HADOT

Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated by Michael Chase (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1998) ("The discipline of assent consists essentially in refusing to accept within oneself all representations which are other than objective or adequate." Id. at 101.).

Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson, & translated by Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1995) (From "Spiritual Exercises": "One conception was common to all the philosophical schools: people are unhappy because they are the slaves of passions. In other words, they are unhappy because they desire things they may not be able to obtain, since they are exterior, alien, and superfluous to them. It follows that happiness consists in independence, freedom, and autonomy. In other words, happiness is the return to the essential: that which is truly 'ourselves,' and which depends on us." Id. at 81, 102. One wonders how Americans would actually act in their daily lives were they to interpret "happiness" in this manner when reading and proclaiming the values in the Declaration of Independence about the 'pursuit of happiness.' "We spend our lives 'reading,' that is, carrying out exegeses, and sometimes even exegeses of exegeses. [] And yet we have forgotten how to read: how to pause, liberate ourselves from our worries, return into ourselves, and leave aside our search for subtlety and originality, in order to mediate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us. This, too, is a spiritual exercise, and one of the most difficult, As Goethe said" 'Ordinary people don't know how much time and effort it takes to learn how to read. I've spent eighty years at it, and I still can't say that I've reached my goal.'" Id. at 108-109 (citing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, trans, John Oxenford, 2 vols, 1850, 25 January, 1829).From "'Only the Present is our Happiness': The Value of the present Instant in Goethe and in Ancient Philosophy": "The fundamental attitude that the Stoic must maintain at each instant of his life is one of attention, vigilance, and continuous tension, concentrated upon each and every moment, in order not to miss anything which is contrary to reason." Id. at 217, 226. "In the present, say the Stoics, we have everything, and only the present is our happiness. There are two reasons why the present is sufficient for our happiness: in the first place, Stoic happiness--like Epicurean pleasure--is complete at every instant and does not increase over time. The second reason is that we already possess the whole of reality within the present instant, and even infinite duration could not give us more than what we have right now." Id. at 228. "Whoever practices the rt of living must also recognize that each instant is pregnant: heavy in meaning, it contains both the past and the future; not only of the individual, but also of the cosmos in which he is plunged." Id. at 232.).

Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision, translated by Michael Chase, with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1993, 1998) ("It is not life within the body which prevents us from being aware of our spiritual life; the former is, as such, unconscious. Rather, it is the concern we have for our bodies. This is the true fall of the soul. We allow ourselves to be absorbed by vain preoccupations and exaggerated worries..." Id. at 31.).

Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson (Cultural Memory in the Present), translated by Marc Djaballah (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 2009) ("It is all well and good to confess that one is a sinner, but it would be even better to think of the harm that one does to another through one's sin. In Le Canard enchaine of December 6, 2000 (yes, I do read Le Canard enchaine from time to time), the following remarks of Monseigneur Jacques David, bishop of Evreux, who had advised a pedophile priest to turn himself in, were reported: 'I had also advised colleagues [that is, other bishops] confronted by priests in difficulty to do the same thing.' This is all well and good but, Le Canard added, accurately, 'It is especially the kids who are in difficulty.' Here we are in fact in the presence of a rather ecclesiastical reaction. What counts about all, in the aim of the Church, is the priest in difficulty, and the Church he puts into difficulty. The victims are not considered first; it is not thought that the danger to which they are exposed should be put to an end immediately. One can imagine all the unhappy children who, in the past were, and still now are, victims of the conspiracy of silence that surrounded such actions. The Church is not, for that matter, the only one practicing hypocrisy. In analogous situations, the army or the police are not outdone; they also have esprit de corps. Reasons of state, reasons of the Church--there are always good reasons." Id. at 27. "Basically . . . in antiquity the philosopher is always regarded somewhat like Socrates himself; he is not 'in his place,' he is atopos. He cannot be put in a particular place, is a special class. He is unclassifiable. For quite different reasons there is a rupture of all these schools with the everyday, even among the skeptics, who approach everyday life with a total inner indifference, But at the same time, philosophy governs everyday life and sometime even gives detailed prescriptions. Thus the Stoics were reputed to have textbooks that might be called casuist textbooks--to use the seventeenth-century term--and that detailed proper conduct in all the situations of life. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aristotle's commentator, mocks the Stoics' asking themselves whether one has the right to cross one's leg during philosophy class, or whether one has the right to take the biggest portion of the meal when eating with one's father! In an article about Roman Stoicism, about the Gracchi brothers but also about Cicero's treatise On Duty, my wife has shown that the Stoics displayed two opposing attitudes during this casuist period. For example, one would ask oneself the following question: if one sells a house, does one have the right to hide the house's faults or must one disclose them? There were rather heretical Stoics who would say yes, one can hide the faults; but the orthodox Stoics would say no, one does not have the right to do that. Thee is also the case of the grain dealer whose boat full of wheat arrives in a port during a famine. Will he say that there are other loads coming behind him, which would have the consequence of a plunge in prices? All sorts of possible behaviors in everyday life were foreseen, but as you can see, the problem was always to determine the attitude that conformed to the philosophical ideal. Nothing is more opposed to the cult of profit, which progressively destroys humanity, than this Stoic morality that requires of everyone absolute loyalty, transparence, and disinterestedness." Id. at 100-101.).

Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, translated by Michael Chase (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2006) ("As we come to the close of this parenthesis, let us say: to write the history of thought is sometimes to write the history of a series of misinterpretations." Id. at 14. "It is interesting to note that for the Stoic philosophers, from the perspective of knowledge of the cosmos, the seriousness of research takes on a sacred value." Id. at 171.).

Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, translated by Michael Chase (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2002) ("Around the beginning of the Christian period, Neopythagoreanism takes up in a moral sense the mnemonic exercises practiced by the ancient Pythagoreans. We can see this in the Golden Verses: 'Do not let sleep fall upon your soft eyes / Before you have gone over each act of your day three times: / Where have I failed? What have I done? What duty have I omitted? / Begin here, and continue the examination. After this, / Find fault with what was badly done, and rejoice in what was good.' These lines from the Golden Verses were frequently cited or alluded to later on by writers advocating examination of the conscience--by Stoics such as Epictetus, independent philosophers such as Galen, and especially Neoplatonists such as Porphyry and Iamblichus when they describe the life of Pythagoeran communities as the ideal model for the philosophical life." Id. at 200 (citations omitted).).

END OF THE YEAR 2013 BOOK CLUB

Richard Aldous, Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship (New York: Norton, 2012).

Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2013).

Michael Anteby, Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "In an era when many organizations are focused in principles f responsibility, Harvard Business School has log tried to promote better business standards. Anteby's rich account reveals the surprising role of silence and ambiguity in HBS's process of codifying morals and business values. As Anteby describes, at HBS specifics are often left unspoken; for example, teaching notes given to faculty provide much guidance on how to teach but are largely silent on what to teach. Manufacturing Morals demonstrates how faculty and students are exposed to a system that operates on open-ended directives that requires significant decision-making on the part of those involved, with little overt guidance from the hierarchy. Anteby suggests that this model--which tolerates moral complexity--is perhaps one of the few that can adapt and endure over time.").

Vivek Bald, Bengali Harem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2013).

Julian Barnes, Levels of Life (New York; Knopf, 2013) (See Sarah Manguso, "Latitudes of Grief," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/22/2013).

Roberto Bolano, The Unknown University, translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy (New York: New Directions, Books 2007, 2013).

Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence (New York: Knopf, 2013).

Jeffrey Hopkins, Maps of the Profound: Jam-yang-shay-ba's Great Exposition of Buddhist and Non-Buddhist Views on the Nature of Realty (Ithaca, NY, & Boulder, Co: Snow Lion Publications 2003).

Leszek Kolakowki, Is God Happy?: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).

D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012).

John Man, Ninja: 1,000 years of the Shadow Warrior (New York: William Morrow, 2012, 2113).

Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center (New York: Doubleday, 2012).

Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2012).

Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (New York: Crown, 2012).

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume One: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1978, 1998).

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume Two: The Age Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1978, 1998).

William T. Vollmann, Thee Book of Dolores (Brooklyn, NY: Powerhouse  Books, 2013).

SUGGESTED FICTION

Tan Twan Eng, The Gift of Rain (New York: Weinstein Books, 2008).

William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck: A Novel (Penguin Books, 1966, 1997).

Denis Johnson, Angel: A Novel  (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002) ("[H]e looked at his lawyer for the first time. It was the same lawyer Bill Houston had always been saddled with--about five-six, round glasses and mustache, western string tie, a public defender looking twelve or thirteen and clutching a plastic briefcase with probably nothing inside of it. Bill Houston sat down across the table from him and said, 'I can't get up no confidence in you.' 'If you could afford fancy counsel, you wouldn't be here, the lawyer said. 'I'm assuming that.'..." Id. at 139.).

Charlie Lovett, The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession (New York: Viking, 2013).

David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress, with an Afterword by David Foster Wallace (Champaign, Il: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988, 2012) ("In spite of frequently underlining sentences in books that had not been assigned, I did well in college, actually." Id. at 43.).

Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, with a New Foreword by Cindy Sheehan (New York: Citadel Press, 1939, 2007) ("He wondered how he could have come through it alive. You heard about somebody scratching his thumb and the next thing you knew he was dead. The mountain climber fell off the front stoop and fractured his skull and died by Thursday. Your best friend went to the hospital to have his appendix taken out and four or five days later you were standing beside his grave. A little germ like influenza carried off five maybe ten million people in a single winter. Then how could a guy lose his arms and legs and ears and eyes and nose and mouth and still be alive! How did you make sense out of it?" Id. at 84-85. "Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can't talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn't know what death is. He isn't able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn't know anything about dying. If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die. But all the little guys who are too busy to fight should be left alone. And all the guys who say death before dishonor is pure bull the important thing is life before death they should be left alone too. Because the guys who say life isn't worth living without some principle so important you're willing to die for it they are all nuts...." Id. at 179-180.).

EASTERN THOUGHT INFLUENCE ON WESTERN THOUGHT

Hilda Gutierrez Baldoquin, ed., Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism (Berkeley, CA; Parallax Press, 2004) (Thich Nahat Hanh: "If you like to eat oranges, go ahead and eat oranges, but don't say that oranges are the best fruit. Besides oranges there are other fruits that are very good. You have the capacity to enjoy mangos, jackfruit, kiwis, and cherries. If in your whole life you only eat oranges, that would be a pity. If your whole life you can only be an American, and wherever you go you have to have a Hilton Hotel, it's a pity. You have to be free from this prison so you can live with others and  explore other ways, other arts, cultures, and traditions. That is civilization. Civilization is an open mind. Civilization is a view that is open, an attitude that is free. Civilization is opening your two arms to embrace all races, all people, and all species." Id. at 70. Michele Benzamin-Miko: "My mother was Japanese and her roots religion was Shinto an Buddhist, later to be Catholic. Her family was made up of farmers on her mother's side and Samurai on her father's side. My father was born and raised in America of mixed parentage, Czechoslovakian and German Catholic on his mother's side, and on his father's side Moroccan Sephardic Jew and Egyptian, and English Jewish. He is Catholic." Id. at 81. "Biracial marriage is complex and brave. Racism was my playground battlefield as a child...." Id. at 81. "As I walk the path of the warrior, love and tolerance are my great teachers. I call myself a warrior because I am a woman who comes from a long line of female warriors and I am discovering my strengths on a path traditionally walked by men. I feel my role as a woman in Buddhism is to pay homage to, honor, and love deeply my own mother, grandmother, and the ancestral mothers and sisters within the Buddhist tradition. This earth is fertile ground for a woman warrior to walk upon." "To be able to love unconditionally is freedom. My loving myself and others, beginning each day with gratitude, and committing not to harm myself or others, I can let go of the clinging and craving that is at the root of may suffering. Each day, I can face the future without fear." Id. at 83.).

J. J. Clarke, Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient (London & New York: Routledge, 1994) ("[A] global understanding is a necessary condition for self-understanding, for just as it is the mark of a mature person to be open to, and able to integrate, new and strange experiences, so too is a mature community one that is able to assimilate a variety of perspectives." Id. at 51. "[I]t is hardly surprising that the West has shown a great interest in the theory and practice of yoga. As Jung saw it, yoga represented first and foremost a discipline of self-discovery and self-development, a path of spiritual growth which involves the disciplining of the instinctual forces of the psyche and a penetration into the unconscious mind. As such it offers a necessary counter-balance to the extraverted tendencies of the West, a way of exploring and activating regions of the psyche which, in the West, have been ignored or even suppressed. Jung emphasized this point in drawing attention to what he saw as a sharp antithesis between the psychological attitudes of the East and the West. While the West tends to think of the spiritual world as involving an upward movement, as appropriately symbolised om the heaven-aspiring steeples of Gothic churches, the Indian, on the other hand, thinks in terms of downward movement, of self-immersion or sinking in meditation, as symbolized by the location of altars beneath ground level....What the European needs most urgently is to achieve a greater balance between these two movements, not by negating the upward tendency, but by developing the capacity to move downwards, to explore the unconscious, and thereby to rediscover our lost psychological roots  For all the great Western achievements in controlling nature, we have by some peculiar irony lost contact with it--in particular, with that aspect of nature which lies within the collective unconscious." Id at 109. "Herbert Guenther asserts that 'the point of meditation is not to develop trance-like states; rather it is to sharpen perceptions, to see things as they are'." Id. at 172.).

J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 1997) ("None of this is to deny that orientalism may in some instances have proved to be a haven for the world-weary and the life-denying. It may also have offered to some a way of retreat from all things modern, from ideas such as those embodied in science, democracy, and progress. But it is important to counterbalance this with the recognition that orientalism endeavours have from the eighteenth century onwards often been directed towards goals which overlap with and support in certain respects the Enlightenment/modernist project, goals such as the eradication of narrow feudal attitudes and barriers, and the critique of indigenous religious and cultural traditions, and at the same time have defined and propagated the virtues of compassion, tolerance, non-violence, and humility. Orientalism has certainly opened the way for many who wish to tread the path to personal growth and spiritual fulfilment, a path which often conflicts with the extraverted demands and values of the modern world. But this is only a part of the picture which is extraordinarily rich and varied, and which has stimulate the mind and conscience of the West in so many different and fruitful ways." Id. at 204-205.).

J. J. Clarke, The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 2000) ("Daoism in particular and the Orient in general have often taken on the counter-hegemonic role of critic and even subverter of Western beliefs and values. By virtue of its very cultural remoteness and difference, the traditional East has often been seen to stand as an especially sharp contrast with indigenous Western traditions, in particular those that we have come to call 'modern', and as such it has constituted a mirror in which the West has been able to scrutinise itself in a revealing and critical light. Its role as external commentator, reminding us of the historical contingency of our own world-views, philosophical assumptions and social practices, is one which...has a long history on orientalist discourse." Id. at 7. "Perhaps because of its perceived contrast with traditional European modes of thinking, the yin/yang theory has proved very attractive to Western minds and has been pressed into various kinds of polemical service. Most notoriously, the theory has been seen as offering some kind of solution to the gender imbalance believed to be endemic in the West, the Daoist cultivation of certain feminine qualities being seen to counterbalance the West's excessive masculinity." Id. at 72-73. "The admonition to live in accordance with the ways of nature certainly has great appeal in an age when we have not only cocooned ourselves in all kinds of prosthetic contrivances, but where these very contrivances, so promising of happiness and liberation, have begun to be a cause of harm and subjugation to their makers. Arguably, one of the great myths of modernity is that we can and should use all means in our power to control nature for the sake of human welfare, but we are now beginning to question whether the benefits of this new power outweigh the disadvantages." Id. at 85-86.).

C. G. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932 by C G. Jung (Bollingen XCIX), edited by Sonu Shamsasani (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1996).

Nancy Wilson Ross, The World of Zen: An East-West Anthology, compiled, edited, and with an introduction by Nancy Wilson Ross (New York: Vintage Books, 1960).

SUGGESTED FICTION, MOSTLY

Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog: A Novel (New York & Boston: A Reagan Arthur Book/Little, Brown, 2011) ("Tracey cut the toast into triangles and arranged them on the plate. If it had just been for her she would have slapped a doorstep onto a piece of kitchen roll and been done with it. It was different having someone to do things for. Made you more careful. 'Mindful,' a Buddhist would have said. She only knew that because a long time ago she had dated a Buddhist for a few weeks. He was a wimpy bloke form Wrexham who ran a secondhand bookshop. She was hoping for enlightenment, ended up with glandular fever. Put her off spirituality for life." Id. at 117.).

Hilary Reyl, Lessons in French: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

Susan Choi, My Education: a Novel ((New York: Viking, 2013).

Kate Christensen, The Astral: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2011).

Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites (New York: Doubleday, 2013).

Kate Christensen, The Epicure's Lament: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2004) ("'I wish I had become an artist. I didn't have the courage; I took the road most traveled. Law school? Any half-intelligent monkey can be a lawyer.'" Id. at 61.).

Kate Christensen, The Great Man: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2007) ("The unmarried old owner, Homer Meehan, the last surviving descendant of the family who'd bought it when it was built in the 1870s, had become too crippled to live alone and so was headed for an old-age home and was selling his family house. He left behind odd touches, like the Chinese-cardboard cartoon faces in the lav, ballpoint pen-scrawled maunderings upstairs on the wall of the smaller of the two bedrooms (her favorite: 'It's useless to give up and useless to persevere, so take the path of least resistance with your eyes and mouth shut'), and photos of wild animals mating or about to mate, cut from National Geographics and pasted in a free-form collage on the wall of the tiny boot room leading out to the backyard. Teddy had left all this handiwork untouched, partly out of her heartbroken reluctance to start over in a new place, partly out of an appreciation for weirdo eccentrics." Id. at 27-28.).

Kate Christensen, In the Drink: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 1999).

Kate Christensen, Trouble: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2009).

Kathryn Davis, Duplex: A Novel  (Minneapolis, Mn: Graywolf Press, 2013).

Kathryn Davis, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1993) ("After the Great War, civilized people played bridge. Or more precisely, indoors they played bridge. Outdoors they played tennis. After the Great War civilized people thought they could substitute manners for morality. So it happened that by the time the monster had arisen, slavering, from its pit, it was too late; the habit had been formed. By that time, didn't everyone know that it was bad manners to interfere." Id. at 303-304.).

Kathryn Davis, Hell: A Novel (Boston: Back Bay Books/ Little, Brown, 1998, 2003).

Kathryn Davis, Labrador: A Novel (Boston & New York: A Mariner Book/Houghton Mifflin, 1988).

Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place: A Novel (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2006) ("It was hard being married to a romantic." Id. at 11. "Richard removed his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose; then he put them back on and returned his attention to what what he'd written. The problem isn't animals, the problem is people, he read. Of course animals routinely ate other animals, it was in their nature. A wolf ate a lamb and thought nothing of it. When a wolf ate a lamb, it wasn't treating the lamb like something it wasn't. For a wolf to dwell with a lamb was merely the opposite side of the same coin: the key difference being that the wolf's appetite hadn't been activated. Whereas human beings since the dawn of time had continually used all of the resources at their disposal to treat other human beings like something they weren't, that is, not human. Human beings turned their young into walking bombs and sent them forth to destroy places of human habitation. Human beings wrapped other human beings in pitch and set them alight and mounted them like torches in gardens; they sewed them in the skins of wild animals and set hunting dogs in them. They scraped them with pincers, they tore out their eyes, they cut off parts of their bodies and roasted them. They gassed them, they starved them, they turned their bones to radium. There was no other side to that coin." Id. at 239 (paragraph breaks omitted).").

Kathryn Davis, Versailles: A Novel (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) ("Of course death is never a coordinate, not for humans at least. Which is why it's wrong to say that a life gets cut short." Id. at 69.).

Kathryn Davis, The Walking Tour: A Novel (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) ("'Business has to break the law to grow,' he told her, grazing. 'If it doesn't it'll die'" Id. at 17.).

Sarah Dunant, Blood and Beauty: The Borgias: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2013) (See  Liesl Schillinger, "Poison, Incest, Intrigue," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/7/2013.).

Jenni Fagan, The Panopticon: A Novel (New York: Hogarth, 2012) ("'You know what they don't tell you in this life, Anais, it's this, those...' She points at a wall of penis paintings. 'The phallus, the prick, the cock, whatever you want to call it, it's not the most powerful thing in the world.'... 'No. Like they think it is, they build skyscrapers and mosques and big weapons in the shape of penises, to make you think that it is.' 'Why?' 'Gender wars. Absolute domination, over that they fear. What men fear is a cunt, so they try and make the cock scarier. It's why they cut off girls' clitorises, and use rape as a war tactic. It's why the sentencing for rape is so offensively pathetic.' ... 'Men are scary, sometimes, Pat.' ''Aye, but it's all up here.' She taps her head. 'They want us to think rape's the worst thing that can happen.' 'It's not?' 'Look--I've been raped six ways from Sunday, and it wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was not as bad as losing my firstborn, it was not as bad as watching my mother die from cancer. I mean it was bad. I am not saying it wasn't bad; it was horrific, it made me stab one guy and I won't even tell you what I did to another. The point is: society's conditioned us, men and women, to live in fear.'" Id. at 198-199." Also, see Tom Shone, "Surveillance State," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/21/2013).

Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Canary: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 1991).

Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn't See and Other Stories (Easthampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2000). 
                 
Karen Joy Fowler, Wit's End: A Novel (New York: A Marian Wood Book/ C. P. Putnam's Sons, 2008).
 
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying: A Novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973).

Anouk Markovits, I Am Forbidden: A Novel (London & New York: Hogarth, 2012).

Alice McDermott, Someone: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) (See Leah Hager Cohen, "The Drift of Years," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/8/2013.).

Gabrielle Roy, The Road Past Altamont, translated from the French by Joyce Marshall (Lincoln, NE: The Bison Press/U. of Nebraska Press, 1966, 1993) ("I always thought that the human heart is a little like the ocean, subject to tides, that joy rises in it in a steady flow, singing of waves, good fortune, and bliss; but afterward, when the high sea withdraws, it leaves an utter desolation on our sight. So it was with me that day." Id. at 102.).

Cathleen Schiene, Fin & Lady: A Novel (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) (See Christopher Benfey, "It Takes the Village," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/28/2013.).

May Swenson, Collected Poems, edited by Langdon Hammer (New York: Library of America, 2013) (From 'Poet's Choice': "Because of the dead grass we were fed in school--some of it was fine, but nevertheless dry from storage in the educational barn--when I began to write I was impatient with any form that smacked of the past. I hated symmetry, I hated the expected." Id. at 676, 676. I like those phrases, "dead grass," "dry from storage," and "educational barn." So much of it reminds me of the state of education in America, though the rise of 'corporate educators' is bringing about change, but not not improvement.).

BUILDING OR DESTROYING ESCAPE ROUTES FROM DEPRIVATION

Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("The Great Escape of this book is the story of mankind's escaping from deprivation and early death, of how people have managed their lives better, and led the way for others to follow." Id. at ix. "This book is about the endless dance between progress and inequality, about how progress creates inequality, and how inequality can sometimes be helpful--showing others the way, or providing incentives for catching up--and sometime unhelpful--when those who have escaped protect their positions by destroying the escape routes behind them. This is a story that has been told many time, but I want to tell it in a new way. [] Many books tell the story of wealth, and many others are about inequality. There are also many books that tell the story of health, and of how health and wealth go hand in hand, with inequalities in health mirroring inequalities in wealth. Here I tell both stories at once, taking the chance that professional demographers and historians will allow an economist to trespass into their lands, But the story of human wellbeing, of what makes life worth living, is not well served by looking at only one part of what is important. The great escape  does not respect the boundaries of academic disciplines." Id. at xiii-xiv. In thinking about the law, in preparing to teach my law classes, I often wonder whether the core legal issue or battle is between those who advocate rules, regulations, laws, and interpretation of such, that would built the escape routes and those that would destroy the escape routes for others. Often times Americans seem so much to possess a 'I've-got-mine,-you-get yours" character. We call it individualism, when in fact it is simply selfishness and greed.).

ASPECTS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Richard Breitman & Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2013) ("Unlike other authors, we examine FDR's decision-making as president from the perspective of his life experiences and full political career." "Roosevelt's handling of the crisis of European Jewry may offer the best opportunity to understand the political dynamics of American responses to persecution and genocide in foreign lands. FDR was a man of faith. He recognized both moral issues across the globe and the practical concerns of governing a great nation. He served in office more than four years longer than any other president and was the only leader to confront both an economic depression and a major war on his watch. Not just Americans, but suffering peoples across the world looked to FDR for inspiration and relief from their hardships. How he responded, and why, reveal much about the strengths and limitations of the American presidency." "The story of FDR and the Jews is ultimately a tragic one that transcends the achievements and failures of any one leader. Even if FDR had been more willing to override domestic opposition and twist arms abroad, he could not have stopped the Nazis' mass murder of some six million Jews. For Hitler and his followers, the annihilation of Jews was not a diversion from the war effort, but integral to its purpose. For America and Britain, the rescue of Jews, even if piratical, was ultimately subordinate to the overriding priorities of total war and unconditional surrender of the enemy. 'Action expresses priorities,' Mahatma Gandhi said while engaged in a freedom struggle of his own." Id. at 6-7. Also, see David Oshinsky, "... Congress Disposes," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/7/2013.).

Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) ("Hundreds of thousands of German women went to the Nazi East--that is, to Poland and the western territories of what was for many years the USSR, including today's Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia--and were indeed integral parts of Hitler's machinery of destruction." "One of these women was Erna Petri. [] Among the records were the interrogations and courtroom proceedings in a case against Erna and her husband, Horst Petri, who were both convicted of shooting Jews on their private estate in Nazi-occupied Poland. In credible detail Erna Petri described the half-naked Jewish boys who whimpered as she drew her pistol. When pressed by the interrogator as to how she, a mother, could murder these children, Petri referred to the anti-Semitism of the regime and her own desire to prove herself to the men. Her misdeeds were not those of a social renegade. To me, she looked like the embodiment of the Nazi regime." Id. at 3-4.).

Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over WorldWar II, 1939-1941 (New York: Random House, 2013) (See Jacob Heilbrunn, "War Torn," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/28/2013.).