Many, however, were determined to fight, such as the planter who announced to “vile slaves” and “rebels” who had killed many of his friends: “I will follow them cold bloodedly into the grave, and I swear that you will see all my blood flow before I consent to your freedom, because your slavery, my fortune, and my happiness are inseparable.” In November 1792 another stated clearly an opinion that would be reiterated by other planters in the next months: “We did not fetch half a million savage slaves off the coast of Africa to bring them to the colony as French citizens.”
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
Mir ist das All, ich bin mir selbst verloren, Der ich noch erst den Göttern Liebling war; Sie prüften mich, verliehen mir Pandoren, So reich an Gütern, reicher an Gefahr; Sie drängten mich zum gabeseligen Munde, Sie trennen mich, und richten mich zugrunde.
Ay Weih, poor me.
73-year old Goethe began composing it in the coach home to Weimar, on his way back from Marienbad, in the throes of a heart ache. The old fool had allowed himself to fall in love again, this time, idiotically, with a 17 year old. Incredibly, he went further: he proposed — and used the offices of a Grand Duke to buttress his proposal, to twist the family’s arms: fame, politics, etc. Poor Ullie, who must scarcely have realized what the old goat was all about, fought this off in a fit of panic, and, in consequence, had to for decades fight off gossip of having bedded him. Even her wikipedia entry notes, significantly, hint hint, that she died in old age unwed.
Poor thing.
Mann’s design which eventually bore fruit as Death in Venice, in its first sketches bore the title of Goethe in Marienbad. It was always going to be a story of an old fool who falls in love and dares to entertain false hopes, the hubris leading to the inevitable downfall. How interesting that Mann cast the story that way. His own story of Venice was far more rational: yes, in Hotel des Bains on Lido he did see a beautiful Polish boy. Yes, he was moved. No, he did not go gaga. At the first hint of cholera, he packed up bags and left.
The sadness of the wise, the lyrical regret with which we give up the impossible, does not make popular literature. Wisdom crieth in the street, and no one regards it.
Gilbert Adair, The Real Tadzio: Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and the Boy Who Inspired It
Berenice was queen to Ptolemy Euergetes, who came to the throne in 246 BC, and was still a young bride when, a year later, he went off to war in Syria. Sorrowing at his departure, she had promised to the goddess Aphrodite at her temple in Canopus, that, if the king returned safely, she would make an offering of her braid. Berenice was soon able to make good her promise — but then calamity: her hair went missing from the temple. The palace called upon the resources of science and art, and, happily, Conon, the court astronomer, quickly discovered the lock as a faint constellation of stars near the tail of Leo, between Arcturus and the Great Bear. Callimachus, the court poet, composed a lament in which the ravished lock of hair, though appreciative of its heavenly honor, says it would have preferred to remain on Berenice’s head to enjoy
the scent of myrrh of a married woman’s hair having enjoyed simpler perfumed used by her while still a maid
The debate about the nature and the quality of the Ptolemaic state has been charged with modern arguments over the issues of racism, imperialism and colonialism, which has over the years spawned something of a cultural war between Classicists and Egyptologists, and has led to untenable characterizations of the period which are based on 19th and 20th century concepts.
J.G. Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305–30 BC
I sat in bath, up to my neck in hot water, surfing the delicious faintness after a particularly satisfying bout of love making, and my gorgeous, enthusiastic and athletic lover sat by the side of the tub, reading out loud to me out of Rilke. She was reading with delight and interrupting herself every now and then with loud exclamations of joy at the poem’s beauty. I smiled encouragingly — I did not want to deflate her pleasure — while deep down, my mind puzzled. I am not a philistine, I am moved by some poetry, but this Rilke was rubbing me the wrong way. Rather untypical of Rilke (in my experience of him), the poem added up to legible sentences describing an emotional dynamic in a love relationship. And it made no sense to me. It seemed not so much illogical as… convoluted. Convoluted, troubled, and sick. It was clear to me that the relationship the poet was describing was headed for a crash. Anyone experiencing such states of mind in a relationship was going to make it fail.
And suddenly I realized that our love was destined to fail. To be moved by this poem of Rilke, one must empathize with its message, must, if not share it, at the very least understand it, recognize it as thinkable by an admirable human being, presumably be capable of such thoughts and states of mind herself. Her admiration for this particular poem of Rilke was a warning sign. A diagnostic.
The first time I tried Justine was on the recommendation of a woman I desired. The desire was mutual, what lacked was opportunity. The novel went the way of the romance, it proved impenetrable. The second time was also in the wake of an unfulfilled lust: the woman in question had spent a holiday in Corfu, and in the wake of her report on it — it brought to mind all the vestiges of the Ionian and Agean empire scattered throughout Venezia — I read everything I could find on it, including This Rough Magic, and, of course, A Guide To The Landscape And Manners of The Island Of Corfu, which I liked enough to take up Justine again. And again I failed with bewilderment and incomprehension. And now, again I tried it, as a night time counterpoint to the daytime reading of City of Memory, in the beautiful Naxos audiobook. And again I had to give up. I don’t understand these people — what motivates them, what emotions they feel, or why; worse, I don’t understand the metaphors and similes, and therefore the descriptions. The whole thing is to my mind like a Brahms concerto: it confuses and exhausts me. It is as impenetrable as brick. Another kind of mind. Another kind of head. Another species.
“We use each other as axes, to cut down those we love”.
Like, dude, what does this mean? Why is this even a thinkable thought?
I once wrote an essay comparing Joyce’s Ulysses and Mann’s Lotte in Weimar, in the latter’s favor: while the former’s stream of consciousness was beautifully written, I found its subject — the internal life of middle class Dubliners — throughly uninteresting and ultimately — unbearable; by contrast, Lotte contained a chapter of Goethe’s stream of consciousness, which was both beautifully written and interesting. Somehow, the thoroughly dull Thomas Mann (“morning walk with dog, Adorno to dinner”) managed to channel a fascinating mind. A proof of Mann’s genius, and an illustration of the unfathomable ways in which genius works. If it is impossible to write a novel about a person more intelligent than oneself, how can it be possible to write a novel about a person more interesting than ourselves?
Enard’s novel sheds new light on the project. The consciousness of the hero — and Austrian musicologist with an interest in the Middle East — is filled with fascinating facts of history and scholarship; of books, authors, personalities, events; curious, obscure, delightful facts. Like the fact that Albania’s national poet, Naim Bey Frashëri — an author in four languages, incidentally — was probably Europe’s last author of Classical Persian poetry; that in 1974, at the (get this) Gargantuan Pianistic Extravaganza in London, Gina Bachauer, Jorge Bolet, Jeanne-Marie Darré, Alicia De Larrocha, John Lill, Radu Lupu, Garrick Ohlsson and Bálint Vázsonyi riffed on Beethoven’s Turkish march for 16 hands; that Hugo von Hofmannstahl wrote a dialogue in which Balzac and the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall discuss “Character in Novel and Drama”; that the Portuguese term “saudade” derives from Arabic sawdah, meaning “black mood” (or what in Greek would have been Melan Cholia), and that the same sawdah gives origin to sevdah. thus explaining why the music of Bosnia sounds so much like fado, only different.
All these wonderful facts, and more, and more, and more, are held together by a ho-hum love story of two perfectly ordinary people, who happen to be scholars, and who illustrate the problem with most scholars: that the amassing of vast reading and the command of a great body of encyclopedic information does not lead automatically to… interesting insights. That it is possible to know all these fascinating facts, and be perfectly boring and uninspired all the same.
You end up skipping the relationship bits and yawning through overarching theories of representation and alterity. Thankfully, the delightful obscure facts keep coming, so you don’t have to skip too much.
“Which proves ?” Prohaeresius was as curious as I to learn what Priscus was up to.
“That victories in argument are useless. They are showy. What is spoken always causes more anger than any silence. Debate of this sort convinces no one. Aside from the jealousies such a victory arouses, there is the problem of the vanquished. I speak now of philosophers. The one who is defeated, even if he realizes at last that he is fighting truth, suffers from having been publicly proved wrong. He then becomes savage and is apt to end by hating philosophy. I would prefer not to lose anyone for civilization.”
Shiba Shiro, aka Tokai Sanshi, wrote one of the most important books of the close of the nineteenth century, a political novel — the genre was all the rage in early Meiji Japan — recounting a Japanese student’s travels in Europe, Africa and Asia, where he meets beautiful women with whom, of course, he falls in love, but who in turn open his eyes to the evils of European Imperialism.
Fleeing China after his overthrow, Liang Qichang, Qing Empire’s last Chinese reformer — before the Chinenese turned anti-Qing, translated Kaijin no Kigu into Chinese, and this Chinese version found enthusiastic translators and readers across Asia.
Shiba was one of those early Meiji Japanese idealists who thought that as the only Asian country successfully to resist European colonialism, Japan owed a duty to help other Asians resist it, and sponsored Sun Yatsen and Philippine revolutionaries. In this spirit, Korean reformers at first welcomed the onset of the Japanese control of Korea: Japanese would reform and modernize Korea, drag it into the 20th century.
But then Japan changed its mind and decided that rather than be a champion of anti-colonialist Asia, it would prefer to be an honorary European colonialist instead. By the time it tried to change its spots again during WW2, championing its Greater Asia Co-prosperity, no one believed it anymore.
Cities in Asia became places of turbulent competition. For new arrivals in Singapore or Shanghai, finding work and housing meant dealing with waterfront overlords, labour contractors or brothel madams with connections to one of the city’s gangs. These were often run on ethnic lines, operated by networks across long distances. In Singapore, Chinese associations worked specialized niches, Indian and Chinese lightermen fought a long battle for control for the waterfront, and struggles between rival Chinese broke into riots in November 1906. Workers, pedlars and drifters were pushed together in close proximity, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in indifference. People’s sense of self was often fragile, and their lives often ended in isolation and alienation.
A rare record is provided by the case files of coroners. In Singapore, for example, they were a catalogue of everyday death and injury: of knifings in dormitories over debt or disturbed sleep; of a child’s body in the wreckage of a collapsed tenement; of the frightening attrition of labour on the waterfront. In a new-forged society where women were few in number, there were many casualties in the frustrated search for affection and family life. Many people died unnamed and unclaimed. There was a case on New Year’s Eve in 1913, when a Chinese man of about thirty-five years of age staggered into the police station at Telok Ayer at around 8.05 p.m. He was dressed in black trousers and jacket and a small hat, and was ‘in the last gasp’. He was asked who he was but he could not answer as he had a cut jugular. There he expired, and no one was found who could speak for him, to say who he was, or who had done this and why.
Of the 171 investigations by the Singapore coroner in the first three months of 1916, sixty-one of them were classified as relating to persons ‘unknown’. Their remains were most frequently discovered by the roadside or in storm drains, although they were often found in the midst of the European suburbs too. Sometimes they had lain ignored for weeks: stillborn, or struck down by the omnipresent scourges of dysentery, tuberculosis and malaria, or plain worn out by exhaustion and morbus cordis . In the Telok Ayer case, the man had perhaps used a knife on himself, but it was never found. The case was singular only for the man having died in plain sight. More often people took their own lives seeking even the most meagre privacy: to cast themselves into the sea, or to hang from a tree in the scrub, from the underside of a bridge, or from a pipe in a prison or asylum latrine in the dead of night. Such deaths were a sombre, almost silent counterpoint to the colony’s self-mythology of migrant opportunity, free enterprise and benevolent government.
Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire
Oltre Mare 