Two by Two in England: BookMarks Update #80 March, 2025

Another March and another month in England. Escaping New England at the end of the winter has become an annual ritual for us, and this year we returned to our flat in London's Kensington neighborhood for a month of theater, music, museums, galleries, and food. We were also able to fulfill a long-time dream and visit St. Ives and Land's End, the furthest western point in England. Everywhere we went, we found wonderful bookstores, from Hatchard's on Piccadilly established in 1797, to London's chains of Foyles, Daunt, and Waterstones, to the small shops in the villages of St. Ives and Cragford in the Dartmoor National Park---all beautifully curated, warm, and welcoming.

Whie in England, I have read books by British authors. I didn't get to Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Woolf, McEwan, Amis, and a host of other classic and modern Brits, but I did manage to read the following:

Not by design but by chance, as the month drew to a close, I noticed that nearly all of these books lent themselves to a pairing around their central themes. For example, Robert Sapolsky's book was a modern, non-fiction, philosophical and scientific look at the issue of free will and determinism while Sophocles' play dealt with the same issue. Similarly, King Lear is all about aging and raging, and Diana Athill's book addresses the same challenges.

So, I've tried to organize the discussion of this month's reading around the sharing of themes. Here it goes.

Let's start with what appears on the surface to be the very strange pairing of Sapolsky's "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will" written in 2023 and "Oedipus, the King" written by Sophocles around 450 BCE. Sophocles' play, described by Aristotle as having the most brilliant theatrical plot, moves inexorably and swiftly towards its tragic end; however, in the midst of the action, the audience is repeatedly faced with the question of whether Oedipus was fated to murder his father and marry his mother because of the prophecy of the gods or whether he was a free agent, capable of determining his own actions and avoiding that prophetic fate. Sophocles appears to want it both ways since despite all of his life-long efforts to avoid the prophecy, Oedipus ends up murdering dad and bedding mom. On the other hand, he was free to carry on as King of Thebes and avoid learning of those outcomes, and despite the warnings of Cleon, Jocasta, the blind seer Tiresias, the messenger from Corinth, and the chorus, he chooses to plunge ahead and refuses to rest until he has solved the murder of Laius and assured his own destruction. Free or fated? Sophocles left that decision up to the Athenian audience and to us today.

Sapolsky, on the other hand, is crystal clear in his conclusions. Supported by MRI's and studies of individual human neurons, one-celled creatures, and the sea slug, Sapolsky concludes that we are all acting as we must, as determined by events beginning with the Big Bang right up to the genetic contributions from our parents, our intra-uterine environment, our early upbringing, and epigenetic influences throughout our life. He urges us to avoid conflating predictability which is not possible and inevitability which is the way of the world. He acknowledges that his view is that of a small minority of philosophers and scientists pointing out that humans feel a fundamental need to believe in free will. As a result, most of those exploring these areas prefer the soft landing of compatabilitists, i.e. the belief that while some actions are determined, we have at least limited free will. Not for Sapolsky. A firm incompatabilist, he calls for widespread reforms in our society's approach to both punishment and rewards, since neither is warranted because of their pre-determined outcomes. This is a terrific book, and Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford, is a funny, smart, skeptical, sarcastic, and delightful writer. Give it a try if you're at all inclined. But then again, whether you will ever read Sapolsky or not may be out of your control and perhaps has already been determined!

The second pairing is almost as strange. What could Diana Athill, an 89 year old British writer, editor, and memoirist have in common with Shakespeare, the most famous playwright in history who wrote his plays 400 years earlier? The answer is that both address an issue that faces every human being fortunate enough to live to old age----how to manage the fading physical and mental capacities that time continues to diminish.

Athill in her "Somewhere Towards the End" describes how she has adapted to her changing abilities. No longer interested in sex and ready to give up driving after several fender benders and a major accident, she takes pleasure in smaller things---her garden, her books, her orderly and familiar small London flat. Lear, on the other hand, took the opposite approach, destroying his realm and his family as he raged against time and its relentless erosion of body and mind. These two books provide a good spectrum for attitude and behavior in the upcoming years. Even if I don't have a kingdom to divide between my two daughters, both of whom closely resemble Cordeiia, I hope I have the wisdom and serenity to follow Athill's example. She died in 2019 at 102 after writing yet another memoir. Her books are pleasant and light reading, a good break from the day's news. I'd start with "Stet" if you choose to read her.

The pairing of Agatha Christie's "Peril at End House" and P.D. James' "The Lighthouse" was a no-brainer. I read these books by the queens of British detective, closed-room murder mysteries because both are situated in Cornwall, that southwestern corner of England that even today considers itself a somewhat independent country with its own flag and language. If you like this genre of mystery, these are two fine examples. My own preference is James' Commander Adam Dalgleish of New Scotland Yard rather than Christie's prissy, fussy, silly Hercule Poirot. Both books front the Cornish weather of blowing wind, driving rain, and raging seas and set the stage for our trip there this week. Fortunately, we didn't come across any dead bodies.

The next pairing puts together two books about great artists who worked in the 20th C.---Edvard Munch (b.1864-d.1944), Norway's greatest artist and Barbara Hepworth (b.1903-d.1975), Britains' great sculptor. The former was a pre-eminent Modernist painter working in oils on landscapes and portraits while the latter worked in wood, stone, and metal often on a monumental scale. Yet both, were innovators and creative influencers who changed their worlds. These two books, on the other hand, could not be more different. Norris, the curator of modern British art at the Tate, has written in "Barbara Hepworth", the classic art historian monograph---a straightforward, factual, linear text accompanied by excellent photographs of the work. Knausgaard, the Norwegian literary phenomenon whose 3500 word "My Struggle" burst upon the scene in 2009, has written a deeply introspective and literary exploration of art, time, loss, family, loneliness, and their translation onto the canvas as he explores Munch in "So Much Longing in So Little Space". It's a jewel of a book and while worth reading any time, it was especially so today since a new Munch show opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London this week. We had the pleasure of visiting Hepworth's studio, garden, and museum in St. Ives this week and loved seeing her Family of Man bronze sculptures last year at the Yorkshire Sculpture Garden. Her monumental sculpture 'Single Form' has been on display since 1964 outside the UN Building in NYC, a memorial to Dag Hammarskjold.

Like my painful memories of junior high dance class when the music was starting and I was left awkwardly paired with the other wallflower, the pairing of the remaining two books, Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf" and Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" seems to be what's left. Even I am pressed to find the commonality between the Gaet warrior who subdues Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon in this epic poem written around 1000 CE and the polite society of Regency Bath in 1803 described by Ms. Austen, but here's a possible link. We had tea last week in the house in Bath that now serves as the Jane Austen House, and Seamus Heaney who translated Beowulf was the Poet in Residence in the early 2000's just up the street from us at Harvard, but those connections seem strained at best. I think the best reason for the pairing may be that I don't believe that either of these books warrant reading. Unless you're a scholar of Old West Anglo Saxon, I'd stick with the Beowulf classic comic book,and Austen's seemingly endlessly boring social interactions between the sexes in Bath were similarly a bit of a plod. I've read Heaney's poetry and Austen's other novels, and would recommend both, but not this pairing.

And now onto the poetry. Whilst in England, it seemed appropriate to add several English poets to The Poetry Tree on the Charles. There are so many to choose from, but I took my cue from the detective/poet in P.D. James' series, Adam Dalgleish, who listed these four as his favorites in "The Lighthouse": Browning, Housman, Eliot, and Larkin. To those, I added one of my sons-in-law's favorites, W.H. Auden whose 'September 1, 1939' written about the start of WWII was oft quoted after 9/11 and seems appropriate once again for our times. If you read only one of these poets, choose Larkin, not well known in the U.S. but much read in the UK. I love his statement that "Deprivation for me is what daffodils were for Wordsworth". He's worth becoming acquainted with.

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