Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels

It is what is vulgarly known as bro lit.  If that drives you away from the action, if you are what Lucky Jack Aubrey would call shy, then so much the worse for you, the prize of a d-  good read will elude you and you will  fall on the ‘impermissible lee shore’ there to perish on the rocks of genre.  Not the slightest trace of what the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill called ‘rum, bum, and concertina’.  Maturin will admit to the rum ration, an astonishing half pint per diem along with grog which lead to falling from the rigging and gives another sense to ‘a tight ship’.   As a scientist cum philosophe he was appalled by this customary ration which in ‘Post Captain’ the second in the series caused Jack to dive overboard to rescue Bonden swimming 50 yards up to him and grasping him by the pig tail held him fast till a boat was launched.  He’s done that a few times in his career having the skill of natation unknown in the common tar who would not wish to prolong his agony if washed overboard in a storm.  Maturin does not know how to swim which is uncanny as he knows everything else in this sublunary domain.  However he is no dismal sciolist rather an amateur or lover of all branches of knowledge.  In short he is a polymath and a foil to Aubrey who is a perfect John Bull, sentimental and also violent, given to boozy venery and we are glad when he finds his Sophie a rich prize in herself with £10,000 towing.  He though is broke ‘caus the prize factor who was minding his money has indulged in major defalcation.  The comedic aspect of Jack skulking on land to avoid bum baliffs and finding sanctuary in a quarter of London where they cannot tap him with their cudgels.  Everything you will read in O’Brien’s books are founded on historical fact and the bold engagements of Jack Aubrey are founded on the real thing.

The writing is excellent and varies from the excogitations of Maturin on everything to the naming of parts of rigging,  naval lore, and the rectification of the trim of sailing ships by Jack, a highly skilled seaman who has been at sea from the age of 14.  But away from the sea to the land and the first sight of the divine Sophie perhaps not coincidentally the name of the first sloop under Jack’s command.  Sniggers in the focsle.

“Sophia, the eldest, was a tall girl with wide-set grey eyes, a broad, smooth forehead, and a wonderful sweetness of expression - soft fair hair, inclining to gold: an exquisite skin. She was a reserved creature, living much in an inward dream whose nature she did not communicate to anyone. Perhaps it was her mother's unprincipled rectitude that had given her this early disgust for adult life; but whether or no, she seemed very young for her twenty-seven years. There was nothing in the least degree affected or kittenish about this: rather a kind of ethereal quality - the quality of a sacrificial object. Iphigeneia before the letter. Her looks were very much admired; she was always elegant, and when she was in looks she was quite lovely.”

I read some of them years ago and although the adventures are free standing and good as that to read them in their order is the better course.

Most excellent.

 

 

Etienne Gilson on Thoughts and Things

 As realists we abide in things not thoughts.  The thing comes first not the thought about the thing.  What you have in Descartes is certainty but its a dead certainty.  Nothing living can come from it.  It cuts us off from things and leaves us the world as a true hallucination as Taine put it.  

Etienne Gilson in his brilliantly clear ‘Methodical Realism’ which would be an offence to summarise has an essay of 30 paragraphs on the superiority of Realism to Idealism.  Realism is the true because what we do would be impossible if Idealism were the case.  Section 5 in the series is an example of his wit:

The knowledge the realist is talking about is the lived and experienced unity of an intellect with an apprehended reality. This is why a realist philosophy has to do with the thing itself that is apprehended, and without which there would be no knowledge. Idealist philosophers, on the other hand, since they start from thought, quickly reach the point of choosing science or philosophy as their object. When an idealist genuinely thinks as an idealist, he perfectly embodies the essence of a “professor of philosophy”, whereas the realist, when he genuinely thinks as a realist, conforms himself to the authentic essence of a philosopher; for a philosopher talks about things, while a professor of philosophy talks about philosophy.

'The Prime Minister' by Anthony Trollope

A frequently repeated locution in ‘The Prime Minister’ is the instructive ‘taught’. It occurs thirty two times in various forms which in a writer of Trollope’s attainments must be significant and more than careless repetition. In some of the cases you are a moral autodidact, in the others society and the power of the family will ‘larn’ you.

much perverseness in the girl, who might have taught herself 

must have taught you that when a man is cut up about a woman, 

in which she had first learned to love him, and had then taught herself to understand by some confused and perplexed lesson 

We had taught ourselves to think that you would have bound yourself closer with us down here 

She must be taught the great importance of money 

and she must be taught to use this influence unscrupulously 

she must be taught how imperative it was 

And so the first lesson was taught 

and she had taught herself to fancy that she could not live without Mrs. Finn. 

I think he ought to be taught to forget her 

had declared that there were some men to whom such lessons could not be taught, 

He had taught himself really to think that Fletcher had insulted him 

and she knew that the lessons which it taught were vulgar and damnable. 

and I've taught myself to think that they are not very different from other men. 

he had taught himself to look upon the sum extracted 

the tricks of trade as taught by Ferdinand Lopez 

It is because he has been taught to think that I am in a small way.He'll find his mistake some day." 

And so he taught himself to regard the old man as a robber and himself as a victim 

. and she must be taught to endure his will, 

His sense of honour had taught him to think 

he had already taught himself to regard it as one of those bygones 

snd she had taught herself to think that absolute banishment 

I think I have taught myself to think nothing of myself 

He had trusted that the man whom he had taught himself some years since to regard as his wished-for son-in-law 

, and he had almost taught himself to think that it would be better for herself  

Mrs. Fletcher the elder at last almost taught herself to believe 

could be taught to seem to forget him

The universe of ‘The Prime Minister’ is a very moral one and if I labour this point its so you don’t have to teach yourself to notice this thread of self mastery, self injunction and proceeding by mottoes and affirmations. You will notice that the recalcitrant women are poorly self taught or wrongly other taught and generally bound to go astray. Lady Glencora doesn’t teach herself anything being a creature of impulse and intuition and spur of the moment plans. Emily Wharton lacks that inner instructress and falls under the rod of Lopez whose copy book heading is ‘What I will is the good’. The Whartons and the Fletchers have been taught by history and civilisation and homo hierachicus. Foreigners are not part of the lesson plan, a Jew is automatically a bounder and so forth. Decent whiggery from the right sort is acceptable but really the Tories are godly you know. Have you learned your lesson: Trollope is a stern invigilator and if you fail your exam you may not be allowed to re-sit. Its quite bracing. One trusts Trollope or so I have taught myself. The character of Lopez is precisely demonstrated, his inner emptiness bolstered by outer show. I’m inclined to think that in a quiet way ‘The Prime Minister’ may be the strongest of the Palliser series. Now on to ‘The Duke’s Children’.

Thucydides on Gaza

Reading the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides today I was struck by the speech of Diodotus against Cleon about the fate of Mytilene. His point was that when the innocent are punished just as much as the guilty then at the next revolt the former will join in knowing they have nothing to lose. The complete mobilisation of the people is inevitable. That is what Hamas wants and they will get it. The Israelis knowing this will try to push as many of the Gazans into exile as possible, creating a new Nakba. The openly fascistic Netenyahu has his counterpart in Cleon:

‘Personally I have had occasion often enough already to observe that a democracy is incapable of governing others, and I am all the more convinced of this when I see how you are now changing your minds about the Mytilenians. Because fear and conspiracy play no part in your daily relations with each other, you imagine that the same thing is true of your allies, and you fail to see that when you allow them to persuade you to make a mistaken decision and when you give way to your own feelings of compassion you are being guilty of a kind of weakness which is dangerous to you and which will not make them love you any more. What you do not realize is that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you; you will not make them obey you by injuring your own interests in order to do them a favour; your leadership depends on superior strength and not on any goodwill of theirs.

.... After a lapse of time the injured party will lose the edge of his anger when he comes to act against those who have wronged him; whereas the best punishment and the one most fitted to the crime is when reprisals follow immediately. Diodotus:

Consider this now: at the moment, if a city has revolted and realizes that the revolt cannot succeed, it will come to terms while it is still capable of paying an indemnity and continuing to pay tribute afterwards. But if Cleon’s method is adopted, can you not see that every city will not only make much more careful preparations for revolt, but will also hold out against siege to the very end, since to surrender early or late means just the same thing?