The Road to Nazism in Milton Meyer's "They Thought They Were Free"

Why did Nazism take root in Germany in 1933? What conditions do and do not move a society in the direction of a repressive fascist dictatorship?

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Meyer, explores the experience of ten "regular" Germans in the years during and leading up to World War II. The book grapples with questions of social responsibility and the moral culpability of the average German, but I read the book with an eye toward the question: what led Germany down its path toward ruin and fascism? How did the German people become so vociferously anti-Semitic and what led the them to support and adore Hitler?

There seems to be six political conditions or themes that weave their way through this book to shed light on these questions.

Theme 1: A Geopolitics of Siege

Milton Meyer repeatedly emphasizes the role that geopolitical pressure played in moving Germany toward Nazism. Specifically, the German people felt encircled by enemies and oppressed by Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles.

My ten friends had been told, not since 1939 but since 1933, that their nation was fighting for its life. They believed that self-preservation is the first law of nature, of the nature of nations as well as of herd brutes. Were they wrong in this principle? If they were, they saw nothing in the history of nations (their own or any other) that said so. And, once there was shooting war, their situation was like that of the secret opponents of the regime whom my colleague described: there was no further need for the nation, or anyone in it, to be justified. The nation was literally fighting for its literal life—“they or we.” Anything went, and what “anything” was, what enormities it embraced, depended entirely on the turn of the battle.

Elsewhere in the book, this observation is summarized:

Neither morality nor religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege. And the attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one.

Even the final solution was only tolerated as a perceived exigency of war:

“Once the war began,” my colleague continued, “resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’...“Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it.

Theme 2: A Polarized Political System

Inside Germany, politics was polarized between the parties of communism and anti-communism.

“Hitlerism had to answer Communism with something just as radical. Communism always used force; Hitlerism answered it with force. The really absolute enemy of Communism, always clear, always strong in the popular mind, was National Socialism, the only enemy that answered Communism in kind. If you wanted to save Germany from Communism—to be sure of doing it—you went to National Socialism. The Nazi slogan in 1932 was, If you want your country to go Bolshevik, vote Communist; if you want to remain free Germans, vote Nazi.’

“The middle parties, between the two millstones, played no role at all between the two radicalisms. Their adherents were basically the Bürger, the bourgeois, the ‘nice’ people who decide things by parliamentary procedure; and the politically indifferent; and the people who wanted to keep or, at worst, only modify the status quo. 

“I’d like to ask the American Burger, the middle-class man: What would you have done when your country stood so? A dictatorship, or destruction by Bolshevism? Bolshevism looked like slavery and the death of the soul. It didn’t matter if you were in agreement with Nazism. Nazism looked like the only defense. There was your choice.”

Whether or not German communism was a dangerous ideology, many Germans believed it to be so, and this starkly polarized climate offered the German people few and unpleasant choices:

Those Germans who would do anything, be anything, join anything to stop Bolshevism had, in the end, to be Nazis. And Nazism did stop Bolshevism. How it stopped Bolshevism, with what means and what consequences, did not matter—not enough, at least, to alienate them. None of its shortcomings, mild or hideous, none of its contradictions, small or calamitous, ever swayed them. To them, then and now, Nazism kept its promise.

Theme 3: Anti-Elitism

...Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own—that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line. 

As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, “blood,” “folk-ishness”) seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the “little man,” the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society....By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intellectuals” as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated.

Theme 4: Segregation

One of the most enduring and unsettling messages of the book is that most regular Germans didn't hate Jews. Instead, most regular Germans just didn't know Jews and therefore, they managed to stay ignorant or indifferent to their plight.

The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn’t know. They didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; but they didn’t know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly. Who wanted to?

Meyer repeatedly draws an analogy between the segregation of Jews in Germany to the segregation of blacks that was happening in America at the same time:

We whites—when the Negro moves away—do we want to find out why or where or with what he moved? 

American citizens also become acclimated to oppression when the oppressed population is segregated:

In the pleasant resort towns of New England Americans have seen signs reading “Selected Clientele” or “Restricted.” They have grown accustomed to seeing such signs, so accustomed that, unless they are non-Caucasian or, perhaps, non-“Aryan” Americans, they take no notice of them and, in taking no notice, accept them. In the much less pleasant cottonseed-oil towns of the Deep South Americans have grown accustomed to seeing signs reading anything from “White” and “Colored” to “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here,” and, unless they are non-Caucasian or, perhaps, northern Americans, they take no notice of them. There were enough such signs (literally and figuratively) in pre-Nazi Germany, and there was enough non-resistance to them, so that, when the countryside bloomed in 1933 with signs reading “Juden hier uneiwünscht, Jews Not Wanted Here,” the Germans took no notice of them. So, in the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.

In conclusion, it was it was separation, more so than prejudice, that made Nazism possible:

...it was separation, not prejudice as such, that made Nazism possible, the mere separation of Jews and non-Jews. None of my ten friends except Herr Hildebrandt, the teacher, had ever known a Jew at all intimately in a town.

Theme 5: Self-Identification with the Leader

The German citizens saw a savior and father figure in Adolf Hitler. Even when the war ended in disaster for Germany and the grotesque horrors of the regime were exposed for all to see, German citizens were unable to see fault in Adolf Hitler. For them, he was and will remain an aspirational embodiment of their best-selves:

Having fixed our faith in a father-figure—or in a father, or in a mother or a wife—we must keep it fixed until inexcusable fault (and what fault of a father, a mother, a wife, is inexcusable?) crushes it at once and completely. This figure represents our own best selves; it is what we ourselves want to be and, through identification, are. To abandon it for anything less than crushing evidence of inexcusable fault is self-incrimination, and of one’s best, unrealized self. Thus Hitler was betrayed by his subordinates, and the little Nazis with him. They may hate Bormann and Goebbels—Bormann because he rose to power at the end, and they are ashamed of the end; Goebbels because he was a runt with a “Jewish mind,” that is, a facile and cunning mind unlike theirs. They may hate Himmler, the Bluthund, above all, because he killed in cold blood, and they wouldn’t do that. But they may not hate Hitler or themselves. 

“You see,” said Tailor Schwenke, the littlest of my ten little men, “there was always a secret war against Hitler in the regime. They fought him with unfair means. Himmler I detested. Goebbels, too. If Hitler had been told the truth, things would have been different.” For “Hitler” read “I.” 

“The killing of the Jews?” said the “democratic” bill-collector, der alte Kämpfer, Simon. “Yes, that was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did. If I had been a Jew, I would have myself. Still, it was wrong, but some say it happened and some say it didn’t. You can show me pictures of skulls or shoes, but that doesn’t prove it. But I’ll tell you this—it was Himmler. Hitler had nothing to do with it.” 

“Do you think he knew about it?” 

“I don’t know. We’ll never know now.” 

Hitler died to save my friend’s best self. 

Theme 6: Lack of Political Engagement

Political engagement is hard and most people aren't up to the task:

It was this, I think—they had their own troubles—that in the end explained my friends’ failure to “do something” or even to know something. A man can carry only so much responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that exceeds his capacity. There are responsibilities he must carry, in any case, and these, heavy enough under normal conditions, are intensified, even multiplied, in times of great change, be they bad times or good. My friends carried their normal responsibilities well enough; every one of them was a good householder and, with the possible exception of Tailor Schwenke, a good jobholder. But they were unaccustomed to assume public responsibility.

This same phenomena can be observed in America, with respect to the program of Japanese internment that happened during World War II:

What is the proportion of revolutionary heroes, of saints and martyrs, or, if you will, of troublemakers, in Stockholm, Ankara, El Paso? We in America have not had the German experience, where even private protest was dangerous, where even secret knowledge might be extorted; but what did we expect the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte to do when, in the midst of war, he was told, openly and officially, that 112,000 of his fellow-Americans, those of Japanese ancestry on the American West Coast, had been seized without warrant and sent without due process of law to relocation centers? There was nichts dagegen zu machen [nothing to do about it]—not even by the United States Supreme Court, which found that the action was within the Army’s power—and, anyway, the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte had his own troubles.

Recurring throughout the book is the idea that the average German was horrified by crimes of the Nazi regime, but the average German lacked the energy or the will or the opportunity to ever do something about it. There is a sense throughout the book that the German people were always ready to oppose the "excesses" of the regime - the shocking incident of abuse that everyone could see was wrong, but that shocking moment never came. Instead, the excesses of the Nazism regime were so incremental and creeping that they were hardly noticeable to most people.

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“Yes, it was always the excesses that we wished to oppose, rather than the whole program, the whole spirit that produced the first steps, A, B, C, and D, out of which the excesses were bound to come. It is so much easier to ‘oppose the excesses,’ about which one can, of course, do nothing, than it is to oppose the whole spirit, about which one can do something every day.”

Conclusion

They Thought They Were Free suggests that hatred is not a prerequisite for oppression. Instead, a nation's politics and a person's individual morality can operate in orthogonal ways and good people can promote an evil political program. It is possible to be oppressed by people who don't hate you and it is possible to oppress other people that we don't hate. This book leaves the reader with the haunting impression that the democracy and freedom that we enjoy, our freedom from tyranny and the relative lack of oppression in our society, is a frighteningly precarious arrangement. Once a society starts along a path of racism and anti-democracy, it may already be too late to stop.

Many Americans assume that the evils of Germany could never be replicated in America, at least not any time soon. Perhaps that is true, but American history is veritable cornucopia of moral horrors and before 1933 the German people also believed that fascism could never happen in Germany:

German music and art, German belles-lettres and philosophy, German science and technology, German theology and education (especially at the highest levels) were part and parcel of Western achievement. German honesty, industry, family virtue, and civil government were the pride of other Western countries where Germans settled. “I think,” says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, “that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, and then in Italy, we said to one another, ‘That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.’ But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it all, I still say, with unbelief, ‘Germany—no, not Germany.’”

Visions of the Dead in "Dispatches" and "The Odyssey"

Michael Herr’s Dispatches contains vivid descriptions of the Vietnam War and the psychological effects of trauma endured by the people who were there. In his book, Herr describes a dream he had years after the war:

One night, like a piece of shrapnel that takes years to work its way out, I dreamed and saw a field that was crowded with dead. I was crossing it with a friend, more than a friend, a guide, and he was making me get down and look at them. They were powdered with dust, bloodied like it had been painted on with a wide brush, some were blown out of their pants, just like they looked that day being thrown onto the truck at Can Tho, and I said, “But I’ve already seen them.” My friend didn’t say anything, he just pointed, and I leaned down again and this time I looked into their faces. 

Herr’s image of “shrapnel that takes years to work its way out,” gives the impression that Herr’s dream is a kind of grappling with or a working through the effects of his traumatic experience.

Homer’s Odyssey tells of Odysseus’ ten year journey home to Ithaca after the ten year Trojan War. On his journey he visits and we are given a description of “The Kingdom of the Dead.” Odysseus’ experience in “The Kingdom of the Dead” seems to parallel Herr’s dream in both tone and imagery and I wonder if Odysseus experience is also a kind of working through his own war trauma.

Now the rest of the ghosts, the dead and gone
came swarming up around me — deep in sorrow there,
each asking about the grief that touched him most.

A cold encounter with the ghost of his dead friend Ajax:

Only the ghost of Great Ajax, son of Telamon,
kept his distance, blazing with anger at me still
for the victory I had won by the ships that time
I pressed my claim for the arms of Prince Achilles.

Odysseus calls out to him, but Ajax doesn't answer:

So I cried out but Ajax answered not a word.
He stalked off toward Erebus, into the dark
to join the other lost, departed dead.

On the ghost of Hercules, Odysseus sees a belt covered in grotesque battlefield images:

A terror too, that sword-belt sweeping across his chest,
a baldric of solid gold emblazoned with awesome work ...
bears and ramping boars and lions with wild, fiery eyes,
and wars, routs and battles, massacres, butchered men.
May the craftsman who forged that masterpiece —
whose skills could conjure up a belt like that —
never forge another!  

His conclusion "may the craftsman who forged that...never forge another" sounds like a kind of prayer to never have to see such horrors again.

Chapter 23 of Moby Dick - The Lee Shore

Introduction - Ishmael's Narration

Moby Dick's narrator Ishmael alternates between different styles of narration. Broadly speaking, Ishmael's styles of narration can be grouped into the following three categories:

1. Storyteller - this is a standard narrator voice. In this voice, Ishmael describes events that happened.
2. Philosopher - throughout Moby Dick, Ishmael will describe some event or characteristic of a whaling voyage and seize upon that characteristic as a metaphor for life and use it to go off on a tangent about metaphysics or his reflections on life and the human condition.
3. Metafictional - this is the most unique style of Ishmael’s narration and, in my opinion, is central to what makes Moby Dick so arresting. Writing in this voice, Ishmael’s character breaks the fourth wall and he addresses himself directly to the reader or to characters of his story like a living-god of his universe or its epic-poet, with the power to speak in real-time from some transcendent-narrator-realm. (The book's opening sentence evokes this metafictional style by addressing the reader directly: "Call me Ishmael." From these opening words, Ishmael makes clear that he is no ordinary narrator. Instead, he like is a tangible-presence who is comfortable speaking directly to us and to his characters with startling directness.)

Chapter 23 - The Lee Shore

This short chapter, only 13 sentences in length, manages to capture the range of narrative voices at play in Moby Dick and the book's unique energy and variety.The word "lee" means sheltered.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

We first read about Bulkington in chapter 3 of this book, wherein Ishmael observed Bulkington arriving in the town of New Bedford after a long whaling voyage. Now, in chapter 23, Ishmael is about to embark on his own whaling voyage and he observes that Bulkington is embarking with him. 

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington!

So far, all of this has been an example of Ishmael's storyteller voice.

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet.

Now Ishmael’s storytelling breaks off and he transitions into his philosopher voice.

Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.

Ishmael is telling us that this short, "six inch chapter" is the last we will read of Bulkington.

Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land.

Translation: Bulkington’s eventual fate is like that of a ship that crashes into land. Now Ishmael transitions back to his philosopher-voice again and uses an image of a ship as a metaphor for Bulkington's alarming bravery.

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

In what follows, we encounter Ishmael's metafictional voice. Here Ishmael's character seems to transcend the confines of his own story as he addresses Bulkington directly.

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

More philosophy.

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain?

The chapter ends with a kind of invocation. Here Ishmael addresses Bulkington like an epic-poet might imagine God addressing one of his mortal creations.

Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

And we never hear of Bulkington again in this book.

And the King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.’

From Milton Mayer, "They Thought They Were Free":

“You know, Herr Professor, we are told that not a sparrow falls without God’s care; I am not being light when I say this—that not a person ‘fell,’ fell ill or in need, lost his job or his house, without the Party’s caring. No organization had ever done this before in Germany, maybe nowhere else. Believe me, such an organization is irresistible to men. No one in Germany was alone in his troubles—”  

“Except,” I said, “‘inferior races’ and opponents of the regime.”  

“Of course,” he said, “that is understood, but they were few, they were outside society, ‘over the fence,’ and nobody thought about them.”  

“But these, too, were ‘sparrows.’”  

“Yes,” he said. “Could these,” I said, “have been ‘the least of them,’ of whom Jesus spoke?”  

“Herr Professor, we didn’t see it that way. We were wrong, sinful, but we didn’t see it that way. We saw ‘the least of them’ among our own people, everywhere, among ordinary people who obeyed the laws and were not Jews, or gypsies, and so on. Among ordinary people, ‘Aryans,’ there were ‘the least of them,’ too. Millions; six million unemployed at the beginning. These ‘least,’ not all who were ‘least’ but most of them, had somewhere to turn, at last.

Morality and politics "cut both ways." Agendas and ideologies that emerge from the most fervent and abiding love/care/concern for members of our own beleaguered community can have negative effects on people "over the fence" and it's extremely hard and extremely unnatural to ever think about those people or to meet them, or to see any of those secondary-effects.

As human beings, we're tasked with this awful responsibility of drawing a horizon for our moral universe—deciding who is and who isn't worthy of our love and concern and empathy. This decision, usually happening outside the purview of conscious thought, has a decisive and terrifying impact on who we are in this world—our politics and our morality and our legacy and the fate of our immortal souls.

Ishmael on the Human Condition

The Absurdity of Life

The process of catching a whale, extracting the valuable sperm, cleaning the whole ship from the penetrating fluids and then seeking out another whale to catch as a metaphor for the relentless labors and recurrences of life.

...many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.

The Fragility of Life

During the hunt, a ship's whale lines lie in wait, dangerously threatening to violently unspool after a harpooned-whale like a strike of lightening. "All men live enveloped in whale-lines." Life is fragile and precarious, yet we hardly notice.

...as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

Courage

As Ishmael prepares to set off on his whaling voyage, he notes a one Bulkington who spends only a few days on land between voyages. Ishmael uses the character of Bulkington to explore the human capacity for courage - the shunning of land-based comfort and a complete acclimation to the dangers of the voyage.

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! 

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? 

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Night Phantoms

Ishmael describes an experience of falling asleep while standing and manning the helm of the Pequod at night. This causes him to become disoriented and to turn the ship dangerously toward the wind. Afterward, he reflects on the hallucinatory visions that can appear night.

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!

Universal Love

While preparing the valuable whale-sperm with his shipmates, Ishmael is overcome by an overwhelming sentiment and emotion of universal love.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Fast-Fish and Loose Fish

Ishmael explains the property laws associated with whaling. A fast-fish is a captured fish, in the possession of a particular boat, and a loose-fish is an un-captured fish, not yet in anyone's possession. Ishmael uses this distinction to reflect on concept of possession and non-possession, dependence and freedom, volition and coercion in life and politics.

Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain’s marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul’s help) what is that globular £100,000 but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law? 

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable. 

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish. 

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

All the Metaphysics in Moby Dick [video]

All the Books in Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervates', The Ingenious Nobleman Sir Quixote of La Mancha, is a book in two parts - the first part, volume I, was published in 1605 and the second part, volume II was published in 1615, 10 years later. Written in Spanish, the book tells the story of Spanish nobleman Alonso Quixano or Don Quixote, who at the age of 50, decides that he is a knight-errant and sets out on harebrained knight-errant adventures with his gullible squire Sancho Panza.

These are all the ways the theme of books is explored in Don Quixote:

Excerpt 1 - The Author's Preface
Don Quixote opens with an "Author's Preface" in which Cervantes writes about his process of writing this book and in particular, his struggle to write the very preface we are currently reading. Cervantes tells us that the hardest part of writing Don Quixote, was writing this preface and his inability to write this preface almost caused him to abandon the project altogether.

My wish would be simply to present it to thee plain and unadorned, without any embellishment of preface or uncountable muster of customary sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies, such as are commonly put at the beginning of books. For I can tell thee, though composing it cost me some labour, I found none greater than the making of this Preface thou art now reading. Many times did I take up my pen to write it, and many did I lay it down again, not knowing what to write.

A friend of Cervantes advises him to make up fake epigrams and attribute them to random people and use those to start his book. This friend also suggests plagiarizing all the references cited in a totally unrelated book and putting those citations at the end of Cervantes' book, etc.

"Your first difficulty about the sonnets, epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning, and which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be removed if you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can afterwards baptise them, and put any name you like to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, who, to my knowledge, were said to have been famous poets: and even if they were not, and any pedants or bachelors should attack you and question the fact, never care two maravedis for that, for even if they prove a lie against you they cannot cut off the hand you wrote it with.

"As to references in the margin to the books and authors from whom you take the aphorisms and sayings you put into your story, it is only contriving to fit in nicely any sentences or scraps of Latin you may happen to have by heart, or at any rate that will not give you much trouble to look up;

Excerpt 2 - Books and Madness
Cervantes explains that Don Quixote's unique madness was caused by his reading too many books about knight-errantry and his love for these books made him unable to distinguish between fiction and his real world surroundings. In the madness is captured a deep affection for this genre of knight errantry fiction, but also a sharp sense of parody - the pleasure available in these books but also their impossibility and silliness.

...our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He had filled his imagination with everything that he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a, result had come to believe that all these fictitous happennings were true...

Excerpt 3 - The Destruction of Don Quixote's Library
When an injured Don Quixote returns home after his sally, his friends seek to cure him of his madness by destroying his "accursed books of chivalry" in a bonfire. What follows is a long and dramatic discourse of literary criticism - which of Don Quixote's books are worthwhile, which are senseless or worthless and why? Some excerpts from that:

The first that Master Nicholas put into his hand was "The four books of Amadis of Gaul." "This seems a mysterious thing," said the curate, "for, as I have heard say, this was the first book of chivalry printed in Spain, and from this all the others derive their birth and origin; so it seems to me that we ought inexorably to condemn it to the flames as the founder of so vile a sect."

"Nay, sir," said the barber, "I too, have heard say that this is the best of all the books of this kind that have been written, and so, as something singular in its line, it ought to be pardoned."

"True," said the curate; "and for that reason let its life be spared for the present. Let us see that other which is next to it."

"It is," said the barber, "the 'Sergas de Esplandian,' the lawful son of Amadis of Gaul."

"Then verily," said the curate, "the merit of the father must not be put down to the account of the son. Take it, mistress housekeeper; open the window and fling it into the yard and lay the foundation of the pile for the bonfire we are to make."

Taking down another book, the barber said, "This is 'The Mirror of Chivalry.'" "I know his worship," said the curate; "that is where Senor Reinaldos of Montalvan figures with his friends and comrades, greater thieves than Cacus, and the Twelve Peers of France with the veracious historian Turpin; however, I am not for condemning them to more than perpetual banishment, because, at any rate, they have some share in the invention of the famous Matteo Boiardo, whence too the Christian poet Ludovico Ariosto wove his web, to whom, if I find him here, and speaking any language but his own, I shall show no respect whatever; but if he speaks his own tongue I will put him upon my head."

"Well, I have him in Italian," said the barber, "but I do not understand him."

"Nor would it be well that you should understand him," said the curate, "and on that score we might have excused the Captain if he had not brought him into Spain and turned him into Castilian. He robbed him of a great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn books written in verse into another language, for, with all the pains they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the level of the originals as they were first produced. In short, I say that this book, and all that may be found treating of those French affairs, should be thrown into or deposited in some dry well, until after more consideration it is settled what is to be done with them; excepting always one 'Bernardo del Carpio' that is going about, and another called 'Roncesvalles;' for these, if they come into my hands, shall pass at once into those of the housekeeper, and from hers into the fire without any reprieve."

Excerpt 4 - Battle with the Biscayan
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza happen upon a carriage with a woman inside. Don Quixote, in his madness, decides that the woman inside is in distress and needs to be saved. Don Quixote's attempted rescue results in a violent altercation with a Biscayan and the two face off to engage in mortal combat. Cervantes describes the dramatic moment of their deadly engagement as follows:

On, then, as aforesaid, came Don Quixote against the wary Biscayan, with uplifted sword and a firm intention of splitting him in half, while on his side the Biscayan waited for him sword in hand, and under the protection of his cushion; and all present stood trembling, waiting in suspense the result of blows such as threatened to fall, and the lady in the coach and the rest of her following were making a thousand vows and offerings to all the images and shrines of Spain, that God might deliver her squire and all of them from this great peril in which they found themselves. But it spoils all, that at this point and crisis the author of the history leaves this battle impending, giving as excuse that he could find nothing more written about these achievements of Don Quixote than what has been already set forth.

This dramatic battle scene getting cut off mid-stroke because "the author of this history leaves this battle impending," has to be one of the most startlingly comedic scenes in all of literature. In this scene we get jarringly ejected from the Don Quixote narrative into a mundane frame narrative in which Cervantes, our historian/author is trying to piece together manuscripts to construct an accurate history.

Excerpt 5 - The Benengeli Manuscript
Cervantes goes on to tell how he later happened across an Arabic manuscript, written by a historian banned Cide Hamete Benengeli, containing the continuation of this narrative.
Unfortunately, our author doesn't speak Arabic so he has to find a translator for the manuscript.

One day, as I was in the Alcana of Toledo, a boy came up to sell some pamphlets and old papers to a silk mercer, and, as I am fond of reading even the very scraps of paper in the streets, led by this natural bent of mine I took up one of the pamphlets the boy had for sale, and saw that it was in characters which I recognised as Arabic, and as I was unable to read them though I could recognise them, I looked about to see if there were any Spanish-speaking Morisco at hand to read them for me; nor was there any great difficulty in finding such an interpreter, for even had I sought one for an older and better language I should have found him. In short, chance provided me with one, who when I told him what I wanted and put the book into his hands, opened it in the middle and after reading a little in it began to laugh. I asked him what he was laughing at, and he replied that it was at something the book had written in the margin by way of a note. I bade him tell it to me; and he still laughing said, "In the margin, as I told you, this is written: 'This Dulcinea del Toboso so often mentioned in this history, had, they say, the best hand of any woman in all La Mancha for salting pigs.'"

Cervantes is critical of Benengeli for not heaping a sufficient amount of praise on Don Quixote and warns us that we should be skeptical about the accuracy of this translation because: "we all know that Arabs can't be trusted."

If against the present [history] any objection be raised on the score of its truth, it can only be that its author was an Arab, as lying is a very common propensity with those of that nation; though, as they are such enemies of ours, it is conceivable that there were omissions rather than additions made in the course of it. And this is my own opinion; for, where he could and should give freedom to his pen in praise of so worthy a knight, he seems to me deliberately to pass it over in silence; which is ill done and worse contrived, for it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future. In this I know will be found all that can be desired in the pleasantest, and if it be wanting in any good quality, I maintain it is the fault of its hound of an author and not the fault of the subject.

Elsewhere in the book, Cervantes expresses skepticism at the history presented in this Benengeli manuscript and interrupts the narrative to suggest that Benegeli's account may be wrong.

Excerpt 6 - Avellaneda's Don Quixote
Volume II of Don Quixote was published 10 years after the publication of Volume I, and in the interim, a different author named Avellaneda of Tordesillas, published his own and unauthorized sequel to Cervantes' Quixote. In this author's preface to Volume II, Cervantes excoriates Avellaneda while simultaneously pretending to ignore the offense:

God bless me, gentle (or it may be plebeian) reader, how eagerly must thou be looking forward to this preface, expecting to find there retaliation, scolding, and abuse against the author of the second Don Quixote—I mean him who was, they say, begotten at Tordesillas and born at Tarragona! Well then, the truth is, I am not going to give thee that satisfaction; for, though injuries stir up anger in humbler breasts, in mine the rule must admit of an exception. Thou wouldst have me call him ass, fool, and malapert, but I have no such intention; let his offence be his punishment, with his bread let him eat it, and there's an end of it.

Excerpt 7 - Volume I and Volume II
Volume I of the Quixote ends with a badly bruised and beaten Don Quixote being carried back to his town and to his house to recuperate from his misadventures.The narrative of Volume II begins with Sancho Panza visiting Don Quixote who is recuperating in his house, to tell him about the reputation that the two of them have acquired in their village:

"first of all, I have to tell you that the common people consider your worship a mighty great madman, and me no less a fool...As to your worship's valour, courtesy, accomplishments, and task, there is a variety of opinions. Some say, 'mad but droll;' others, 'valiant but unlucky;' others, 'courteous but meddling,' and then they go into such a number of things that they don't leave a whole bone either in your worship or in myself."

"Recollect, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that wherever virtue exists in an eminent degree it is persecuted. Few or none of the famous men that have lived escaped being calumniated by malice. Julius Caesar, the boldest, wisest, and bravest of captains, was charged with being ambitious, and not particularly cleanly in his dress, or pure in his morals. Of Alexander, whose deeds won him the name of Great, they say that he was somewhat of a drunkard. Of Hercules, him of the many labours, it is said that he was lewd and luxurious. Of Don Galaor, the brother of Amadis of Gaul, it was whispered that he was over-quarrelsome, and of his brother that he was lachrymose. So that, O Sancho, amongst all these calumnies against good men, mine may be let pass, since they are no more than thou hast said."

"That's just where it is, body of my father!"

"Is there more, then?" asked Don Quixote.

"There's the tail to be skinned yet," said Sancho; "all so far is cakes and fancy bread; but if your worship wants to know all about the calumnies they bring against you, I will fetch you one this instant who can tell you the whole of them without missing an atom; for last night the son of Bartholomew Carrasco, who has been studying at Salamanca, came home after having been made a bachelor, and when I went to welcome him, he told me that your worship's history is already abroad in books, with the title of THE INGENIOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA; and he says they mention me in it by my own name of Sancho Panza, and the lady Dulcinea del Toboso too, and divers things that happened to us when we were alone; so that I crossed myself in my wonder how the historian who wrote them down could have known them."

"I promise thee, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "the author of our history will be some sage enchanter; for to such nothing that they choose to write about is hidden."

"What!" said Sancho, "a sage and an enchanter! Why, the bachelor Samson Carrasco (that is the name of him I spoke of) says the author of the history is called Cide Hamete Berengena."

Cide Hamete Berengena being the name of the author of the Arabic manuscript that our author found and had translated in Volume I of this book. Hearing this news, Don Quixote has Sancho Panza fetch Samson Carrasco, who had told Sancho Panza about the existence of this book:

Don Quixote remained very deep in thought, waiting for the bachelor Carrasco, from whom he was to hear how he himself had been put into a book as Sancho said; and he could not persuade himself that any such history could be in existence, for the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on the blade of his sword, and now they wanted to make out that his mighty achievements were going about in print.

When Samson Carrasco arrives he tells Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that the Don Quixote's great deeds are indeed in print and are being widely read and he even lists some of the most popular and memorable scenes from Volume I:

the Moor in his own language, and the Christian in his, have taken care to set before us your gallantry, your high courage in encountering dangers, your fortitude in adversity, your patience under misfortunes as well as wounds, the purity and continence of the platonic loves of your worship and my lady Dona Dulcinea del Toboso-"

"I never heard my lady Dulcinea called Dona," observed Sancho here; "nothing more than the lady Dulcinea del Toboso; so here already the history is wrong."

"That is not an objection of any importance," replied Carrasco.

"Certainly not," said Don Quixote; "but tell me, senor bachelor, what deeds of mine are they that are made most of in this history?"

"On that point," replied the bachelor, "opinions differ, as tastes do; some swear by the adventure of the windmills that your worship took to be Briareuses and giants; others by that of the fulling mills; one cries up the description of the two armies that afterwards took the appearance of two droves of sheep; another that of the dead body on its way to be buried at Segovia; a third says the liberation of the galley slaves is the best of all, and a fourth that nothing comes up to the affair with the Benedictine giants, and the battle with the valiant Biscayan."

"Tell me, senor bachelor," said Sancho at this point, "does the adventure with the Yanguesans come in, when our good Rocinante went hankering after dainties?"

"The sage has left nothing in the ink-bottle," replied Samson; "he tells all and sets down everything, even to the capers that worthy Sancho cut in the blanket."

"I cut no capers in the blanket," returned Sancho; "in the air I did, and more of them than I liked."

"There is no human history in the world, I suppose," said Don Quixote, "that has not its ups and downs, but more than others such as deal with chivalry, for they can never be entirely made up of prosperous adventures."

Subsequently, Samson Carrasco goes on to express some of the criticisms of the Quixote that have been circulating:

"For all that," replied the bachelor, "there are those who have read the history who say they would have been glad if the author had left out some of the countless cudgellings that were inflicted on Senor Don Quixote in various encounters."

"That's where the truth of the history comes in," said Sancho.

"At the same time they might fairly have passed them over in silence," observed Don Quixote; "for there is no need of recording events which do not change or affect the truth of a history, if they tend to bring the hero of it into contempt. AEneas was not in truth and earnest so pious as Virgil represents him, nor Ulysses so wise as Homer describes him."

In Volume I of the book, Don Quixote and some other characters who are with him, are staying at an inn and they come across a book called "The Ill-Advised Curiosity." These characters agree that this book looks interesting and they decide to stay up late into the night to read and listen to this story. So volume I of the Quixote narrative is interrupted with an extremely long and very pointless interlude which is the entirety of this "Ill-Advised Curiosity" book - a book about a man set on testing the chastity of his wife. Carrasco brings up this strange interlude:

"One of the faults they find with this history," said the bachelor, "is that its author inserted in it a novel called 'The Ill-advised Curiosity;' not that it is bad or ill-told, but that it is out of place and has nothing to do with the history of his worship Senor Don Quixote."

"I will bet the son of a dog has mixed the cabbages and the baskets," said Sancho.

"Then, I say," said Don Quixote, "the author of my history was no sage, but some ignorant chatterer, who, in a haphazard and heedless way, set about writing it, let it turn out as it might, just as Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, used to do, who, when they asked him what he was painting, answered, 'What it may turn out.' Sometimes he would paint a cock in such a fashion, and so unlike, that he had to write alongside of it in Gothic letters, 'This is a cock; and so it will be with my history, which will require a commentary to make it intelligible."

Samson goes on to list some of the serious plot holes and oversights in Volume I:

...some have brought a charge against the author's memory, inasmuch as he forgot to say who the thief was who stole Sancho's Dapple; for it is not stated there, but only to be inferred from what is set down, that he was stolen, and a little farther on we see Sancho mounted on the same ass, without any reappearance of it. They say, too, that he forgot to state what Sancho did with those hundred crowns that he found in the valise in the Sierra Morena, as he never alludes to them again, and there are many who would be glad to know what he did with them, or what he spent them on, for it is one of the serious omissions of the work."

Don Quixote asks about whether or not the author intends to publish a second volume:

"Does the author promise a second part at all?" said Don Quixote.

"He does promise one," replied Samson; "but he says he has not found it, nor does he know who has got it; and we cannot say whether it will appear or not; and so, on that head, as some say that no second part has ever been good, and others that enough has been already written about Don Quixote, it is thought there will be no second part; though some, who are jovial rather than saturnine, say, 'Let us have more Quixotades, let Don Quixote charge and Sancho chatter, and no matter what it may turn out, we shall be satisfied with that.'"

"And what does the author mean to do?" said Don Quixote.

"What?" replied Samson; "why, as soon as he has found the history which he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at once give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to him from doing so than by any thought of praise."

Excerpt 8 - Avellaneda's Don Quixote (continued)
Late in Volume II a female character named Altisidora has a near-death experience and recounts to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza the vision of hell she perceived. Altisidora says she saw a tennis game being played between devils, where instead of tennis rackets they were using books, and one of the books in use was none other than Tordesillas' Don Quixote:

"I came to the gate [of hell], where some dozen or so of devils were playing tennis, all in breeches and doublets...in their hands they held rackets of fire; but what amazed me still more was that books, apparently full of wind and rubbish, served them for tennis balls, a strange and marvellous thing; this, however, did not astonish me so much as to observe that, although with players it is usual for the winners to be glad and the losers sorry, there in that game all were growling, all were snarling, and all were cursing one another." "That's no wonder," said Sancho; "for devils, whether playing or not, can never be content, win or lose."

"Very likely," said Altisidora; "but there is another thing that surprises me too, I mean surprised me then, and that was that no ball outlasted the first throw or was of any use a second time; and it was wonderful the constant succession there was of books, new and old. To one of them, a brand-new, well-bound one, they gave such a stroke that they knocked the guts out of it and scattered the leaves about. 'Look what book that is,' said one devil to another, and the other replied, 'It is the "Second Part of the History of Don Quixote of La Mancha," not by Cide Hamete, the original author, but by an Aragonese who by his own account is of Tordesillas.' 'Out of this with it,' said the first, 'and into the depths of hell with it out of my sight.' 'Is it so bad?' said the other. 'So bad is it,' said the first, 'that if I had set myself deliberately to make a worse, I could not have done it.' They then went on with their game, knocking other books about"

Excerpt 9 - Avellaneda's Don Quixote (continued)
In Volume II, Don Quixote meets a publisher who is publishing Avellanda's Don Quixote sequel and he uses the opportunity to leaf through the book. Later in Volume II, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter a character from the world of Avellaneda's Don Quixote:

Don Quixote said to Sancho, "Look here, Sancho; on turning over the leaves of that book of the Second Part of my history I think I came casually upon this name of Don Alvaro Tarfe." "Very likely," said Sancho; "we had better let him dismount, and by-and-by we can ask about it."

Don Quixote uses this opportunity to impress upon Alvaro that he is the real Don Quixote and the other Don Quixote that Alvaro thinks he knows is actually an imposter Don Quixote.

"...let me tell you, Senor Don Alvaro Tarfe, I have never in my life been in Saragossa; so far from that, when it was told me that this imaginary Don Quixote had been present at the jousts in that city, I declined to enter it, in order to drag his falsehood before the face of the world; and so I went on straight to Barcelona, the treasure-house of courtesy, haven of strangers, asylum of the poor, home of the valiant, champion of the wronged, pleasant exchange of firm friendships, and city unrivalled in site and beauty. And though the adventures that befell me there are not by any means matters of enjoyment, but rather of regret, I do not regret them, simply because I have seen it. In a word, Senor Don Alvaro Tarfe, I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, the one that fame speaks of, and not the unlucky one that has attempted to usurp my name and deck himself out in my ideas. I entreat your worship by your devoir as a gentleman to be so good as to make a declaration before the alcalde of this village that you never in all your life saw me until now, and that neither am I the Don Quixote in print in the Second Part, nor this Sancho Panza, my squire, the one your worship knew."

Excerpt 10 - Don Quixote's Death
At the end of Volume II Don Quixote is vanquished in battle and as a consequence is made to swear that he will give up the vocation of Knight errant. As a result, Don Quixote falls into a deep depression and becomes seriously ill. Laid up in bed and surrounded by his friends and family, Don Quixote is struck by a flash of sanity:

My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of chivalry cast over it. Now I see through their absurdities and deceptions, and it only grieves me that this destruction of my illusions has come so late that it leaves me no time to make some amends by reading other books that might be a light to my soul. Niece, I feel myself at the point of death, and I would fain meet it in such a way as to show that my life has not been so ill that I should leave behind me the name of a madman; for though I have been one, I would not that the fact should be made plainer at my death. Call in to me, my dear, my good friends the curate, the bachelor Samson Carrasco, and Master Nicholas the barber, for I wish to confess and make my will." But his niece was saved the trouble by the entrance of the three. The instant Don Quixote saw them he exclaimed, "Good news for you, good sirs, that I am no longer Don Quixote of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano, whose way of life won for him the name of Good. Now am I the enemy of Amadis of Gaul and of the whole countless troop of his descendants; odious to me now are all the profane stories of knight-errantry; now I perceive my folly, and the peril into which reading them brought me; now, by God's mercy schooled into my right senses, I loathe them."

In one of the most remarkable scenes in all of literature, Don Quixote address himself to the author of Don Quixote Volume II, this very book we are currently reading to make an apology:

"I entreat the aforesaid gentlemen my executors, that, if any happy chance should lead them to discover the author who is said to have written a history now going about under the title of 'Second Part of the Achievements of Don Quixote of La Mancha,' they beg of him on my behalf as earnestly as they can to forgive me for having been, without intending it, the cause of his writing so many and such monstrous absurdities as he has written in it"

Conclusion: The Modernism of Don Quixote
Don Quixote is a shockingly modern book. Don Quixote was written in the early 1600s, around the time that Shakespeare was writing in England, but the book's style and themes would have you think it was written in the last 150 years.

Starting in the late 20th century, a style called "literary modernism" became popular. Before literary modernism, the project of a reading and writing fiction was mostly a straightforward affair. Before modernism, fiction was a fictional story told by a real-world author. With the advent of literary modernism, we get books that lie to you - books pretending to be something they are not. For example, in addition to a real life author, your book may also contain a fictional author who presents himself in your book as though he were the real-world author, and we find quotations from books and texts that don't exist. Moreover, the book you read may describe the act and process of writing the very same book you are currently reading. With literary modernism, and this is true of the Don Quixote as well, we have books that are self-aware - books that explore the process of their own creation and we find fictional author characters and we get books within books and narratives within narratives - self-reflective, self-conscious and nested realities. By playing with this sense of embeddedness, literary modernism as well as Cervantes' Don Quixote, provokes big questions like: What is real and what is fake? What makes something authentic? Where does reality come from? What is an author? Who stands above you?

Fear and Trauma in Michael Herr's Dispatches

Michael Herr's Dispatches is a first-person account of the Vietnam War. The atmosphere of the book is brutal, anarchic and psychotropic.

Fear

Excerpt 1
Medics offer stimulants to soldiers going on night missions, but Herr had no use them. Fear is stimulant enough.

Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar. I never saw the need for them myself, a little contact or anything that even sounded like contact would give me more speed than I could bear. Whenever I heard something outside of our clenched little circle I'd practically flip, hoping to God that I wasn't the only one who'd noticed it. A couple of rounds fired off in the dark a kilometer away and the Elephant would be there kneeling on my chest, sending me down into my boots for a breath. Once I thought I saw a light moving in the jungle and I caught myself just under a whisper saying, "I'm not ready for this, I'm not ready for this."

Excerpt 2
Herr compares the conditions of moving and not moving in Vietnam. Both are terrifying and both are different from the experience of enemy-contact which "draws long raggedy strands of energy."

Fear and motion, fear and standstill, no preferred cut there, no way even to be clear about which was really worse, the wait or the delivery....bad going on foot, terrible in trucks and APC's, awful in helicopters, the worst, traveling so fast toward something so frightening. I can remember times when I was half dead with my fear of the motion, the speed and direction already fixed and pointed one way. It was painful enough just flying "safe" hops between firebases and lz's; if you were ever on a helicopter that had been hit by ground fire your deep, perpetual chopper anxiety was guaranteed. At least actual contact when it was happening would draw long raggedy strands of energy out of you, it was juicy, fast and refining, and traveling toward it was hallow, dry, cold and steady, it never let you alone.

Excerpt 3
A scream to carry "more terror than I'd ever known existed" - Herr gets hit.

One afternoon I mistook a bloody nose for a headwound, and I didn't have to wonder anymore how I'd behave if I ever got hit. We were walking out on a sweep north of the Tay Ninh City, toward the Cambodian border, and a mortar round came in about thirty yards away....When we fell down on the ground the kid in front of me put his boot into my face. I didn't feel the boot, it got lost in the tremendous concussion I made hitting the ground, but I felt a sharp pain in a line over my eyes. The kid turned around and started going into something insane right away, "Aw I'm sorry, shit I'm sorry, oh no man I'm sorry." Some hot stinking metal had been put into my mouth, I thought I tasted brains there sizzling on the end of my tongue, and the kid was fumbling for his canteen and looking really scared, pale, near tears, his voice shaking, "Shit I'm just a fucking oaf, I'm a fucking clod, you're okay, you're really okay," and somewhere in there I got the feeling that it was him, somehow he'd just killed me. I don't think I said anything, but I made a sound that I can remember now, a shrill blubbering pitched to carry more terror than I'd ever known existed, like the sounds they've recorded off of plants being burned, like an old woman going under for the last time.

Excerpt 4
The terrifying quietude of the jungle.

There were times during the night when all the jungle sounds would stop at once. There was no dwindling down or fading away, it was all gone in a single instant as though some signal had been transmitted out to the life: bats, birds, snakes, monkeys, insects, picking up on a frequency that a thousand years in the jungle might condition you to receive, but leaving you as it was to wonder what you weren’t hearing now, straining for any sound, one piece of information....The thought of that one could turn any sudden silence into a space that you’d fill with everything you thought was quiet in you, it could even put you on the approach to clairaudience. You thought you heard impossible things: damp roots breathing, fruit sweating, fervid bug action, the heartbeat of tiny animals.

Excerpt 5
A glimpse of beauty before fear brings back a terrible reality.

I remembered the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up toward his plane to kill him, and remembered myself how lovely .50-caliber tracers could be, coming at you as you flew at night in a helicopter, how slow and graceful, arching up easily, a dream, so remote from anything that could harm you. It could make you feel a total serenity, an elevation that put you above death, but that never lasted very long. One hit anywhere in the chopper would bring you back, bitten lips, white knuckles and all, and then you knew where you were.

Excerpt 6
"Senses working like strobes" - the exhausting and hallucinatory terror of enemy contact.

But once it was actually going on, things were different. You were just like everyone else, you could no more blink than spit. It came back the same way every time, dreaded and welcome, balls and bowels turning over together, your senses working like strobes, free-falling gall the way down to the essences and then flying out again in a rust of focus, like the first strong twinge of tripping after an infusion of psilocybin, reaching in at the point of calm and springing all joy and all the dread ever know, ever known by everyone who ever lived, unutterable in its speeding brilliance, touching all the edges and then passing, as though it had all been controlled from outside, by a god or by the moon. And every time, you were so weary afterward, so empty of everything but being alive that you couldn't recall any of it, except to know that it was like something else you had felt once before.

Trauma

Excerpt 1
Describing the faces of soldiers.

...I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn't wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he'd live it out old....These were the faces of boys whose whole lives seemed to have backed up on them, they'd be a few feet away but they'd look back at you over a distance you'd never really cross.

Excerpt 2
Herr describes the long-term psychological impact of this prolonged state of fear and high-alert and the trauma of war.

After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories, you'd hear them out of a remote but accessible space where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information. However many times it happened, whether I'd know them or not, no matter what I'd felt about them or the way they'd died, their story was always there and it was always the same: it went, "Put yourself in my place."

Excerpt 3
Dreams.

One night, like a piece of shrapnel that takes years to work its way out, I dreamed and saw a field that was crowded with dead. I was crossing it with a friend, more than a friend, a guide, and he was making me get down and look at them. They were powdered with dust, bloodied like it had been painted on with a wide brush, some were blown out of their pants, just like they looked that day being thrown onto the truck at Can Tho, and I said, “But I’ve already seen them.” My friend didn’t say anything, he just pointed, and I leaned down again and this time I looked into their faces.

Excerpt 4
A haunting story about a young Marine who is unable to leave the war at the end of his service.

On this last morning, the young Marine caught a ride from his company position that dropped him off fifty meters from the strip. As he moved on foot he heard the distant sound of the C-123 coming in, and that was all he heard. There was hardly more than a hundred-foot ceiling, scary, bearing down on him. Except for the approaching engines, everything was still. If there had been something more, just one incoming round, he might have been all right, but in that silence the sound of his own feet moving over the dirt was terrifying to him. He later said that this was what made him stop. He dropped his duffel and looked around. He watched the plane, his plane, as it touched down, and then he ran leaping over some discarded sandbags by the road. He lay out flat and listened as the plane switched loads and took off, listened until there was nothing left to listen to. Not a single round had come in.
Back at the bunker there was some surprise at his return, but no one said anything. Anyone can miss a plane. Gunny slapped him on the back and wished him a better trip the next time out. That afternoon he rode in a jeep that took him all the way to Charlie Med, the medical detachment for Khe Sanh that had been set up insanely close to the strip, but he never got passed the sandbagging outside the triage room.
"Oh no, you raggedy-assed bastard," Gunny said when he got back to the outfit. But he looked at him for a long while this time.
"Well," the kid said. "Well..."
The next morning two of his friends went with him to the edge of the strip and saw him into the trench. ("Goodbye," Gunny said. "And that's an order.") They came back to say that he'd gotten out for sure this time. An hour later he came back up the road again, smiling. He was still there the first time I left Khe Sanh, and while he probably made it out eventually, you can't be sure.

Collective Punishment

A few weeks ago, a shul-friend of mine casually suggested the following "solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict: "for every one they kill of us, the IDF should kill five of them." I think the left is quick (and correct!) to jump on the moral reprehensibility of this kind of collective punishment - of wanting to bomb all Palestinians into submission, or a Kahanist ethnic cleansing, but could benefit by responding to the efficacy of these proposals as well.

Telling acquaintances that their politics are abhorrent to me won't change their minds, but a conversation about the efficacy of their politics could be productive. Here are three sources on the (in)effectiveness of bombing an enemy into submission that I came across in recent readings:

1 -
In his book "On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman discusses the military theory that inspired the extensive strategic bombing campaigns that were waged during WWII, and the consequences of those campaigns.

Prior to World War II, psychologists and military theoreticians...predicted that mass bombing of cities would create the same degree of psychological trauma seen on the battlefield in World War I....authorities envisioned vast numbers of "gibbering lunatics" being driven from their cities by a rain of bombs....

This body of theory...played a key role in establishing the theoretical foundation for the German attempt to bomb Britain into submission at the beginning of World War II and the subsequent Allied attempt to do the same to Germany. This strategic bombing of population centers was motivated by quite reasonable expectations of mass psychiatric casualties resulting from the strategic bombing of civilian populations.

But they were wrong.

The carnage and destruction, and the fear of death and injury caused by the months of continuous blitz in England during World War II were as bad as anything faced by any frontline soldier...For the Germans it was worse. The might of the vast British Empire was brought to bear on the German population via Britain's nighttime area bombing. At the same time, the United States devoted its efforts to "precision" day light bombing. Day and night for months, even years, the German people suffered horribly.

And yet, incredibly, the incidence of psychiatric casualties among these individuals was very similar to that of peacetime...Indeed, bombing seemed to have served primarily to harden the hearts and empower the killing ability of those who endured it.

2 -
In his book "The Best and the Brightest," on how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations led America into the disastrous Vietnam War, David Halberstam's gives a detailed account of how Lyndon Johnson was led to believe that the North Vietnamese could be bombed into submission. Johnson's bombing campaigns did not have their intended effect, and instead dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam. Collective punishment in Vietnam is a big part of how a small and poor country, Vietnam, was able to claim a resounding military victory over the world's richest and most powerful country, the United States.

There was an unofficial decision on the part of the principals not to look at the real darkness, to protect the President from what might be considered unpleasant realities, not to ask the hard questions. If anything there was almost a deliberate attempt to avoid thinking and looking at the larger consequences, and above all of the likelihood of the North Vietnamese reaction, which was quite predictable. In Saigon in early 1965 the CIA completed two massive intelligence estimates on the situation in Vietnam and the possibilities for the future. The man in charge of them for the Agency was an experienced analyst who had spent more than ten years working on the country and who had been consistently prophetic about events. Now in his estimates he predicted that the Vietcong, and in particular the North Vietnamese, had an enormous capacity to escalate if the United States bombed.

3 -
Gordon Goldstein's "Lessons in Disaster: McGeogre Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam," describes the experience of America's bombing on Vietnam from the perspective of the North Vietnamese:

...Bundy's bombing strategy...would accomplish nothing with respect to its objective of extracting negotiated concessions from North Vietnam. To the contrary, as multiple intelligence analyses had predicted, bombing had the opposite effect. Nguyen Khac Huynh, a foreign Ministry official focusing on U.S. affairs who later served on his country's delegation at the Paris peace talks, emphasized the role bombing played in solidifying North Vietnam's determination to continue and escalate its guerrilla war effort. "The bombing was the key factor," he said, "and the cessation of bombing was our key demand....every Vietnamese citizen would have felt ashamed if we sat down and talked with you under the pressure of bombing. This is the reason why so long as you continued to bomb the North, there could be no negotiations."

Tran Quang Co, who served as first deputy foreign minister, would make the case that the American bombing campaign was critical to national morale in North Vietnam. "Never before did the people of Vietnam, from top to bottom, unite as they did during the years the U.S. was bombing us."

On Nabokov's Pale Fire

I Made a Video On The "Dictator's Handbook" and Democratic Backsliding

"The Cradle Rocks Above an Abyss"

The opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

From Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco's The Age of Perversion:

Our own existence as conscious animals seems a mere chance occurrence in a vast, overwhelming, mysterious, and impenetrable universe. Yet we hunger for being and life even as we know certain annihilation awaits us. As a spider weaves its web from its own body, we weave our world from the body of our experience, never fully knowing who or what we are or who or what anyone else is. We play our roles, trying to get what we want and perhaps giving others what they want, dealing as best as we can with the conflict that arises when individual desires cross swords. We unfold into life and eventually enfold back into ourselves and die. Like a spider suspended on the slenderest of silken filaments, we hover throughout our existence above the abyss, tethered to life by the thread of our breath, repressing the terror of that certain knowledge. Existence itself as such is already an excessive trauma, and the limit that is one’s death – a complete and final castration – is symbolized in every limit, every loss and every heartbreak. A profound hunger, in every sense of the word, haunts the human creature, who must seek satisfaction in its war with limitation and loss.

On Parenthood

From Hanya Yanagihara's, A Little Life:

I have never been one of those people—I know you aren't either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant and grander than any other....But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not "I love him" but "How is he?" The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and I would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life.

... 

And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn't matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It's not biological; it's something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one's genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe's feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what's yours. 

The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason—because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

But here's what no one says—when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is. 

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

On the Psychology of "Empire" in Literature

Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor

"The Grand Inquisitor," a chapter from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, is one of the most famous chapters in all of literature. In it, Ivan presents a shocking and incendiary vision of organized religion to his devout brother Alyosha. 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Contains minor spoilers.

For me, Philp K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep speaks directly to this political moment. The book deals extensively with themes of empathy, compassion, law enforcement, our thinking about illegal immigrants and criminals, and what it means to be human. Even though it was published in 1968, the book anticipates virtual reality, and the desire to broadcast our experiences and emotions and tap into the experiences and emotions of other strangers in a way that evokes how Facebook and Twitter are used today.

Like other Philip K. Dick novels, Do Androids Dream depicts Earth as a bleak post-apocalyptic dystopia. The plot follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard working for the San Francisco Police Department to hunt and kill androids living on planet Earth illegally. Deckard's work is complicated by the fact that androids are basically indistinguishable from human beings with only the following differentiators:

1. Androids are manufactured in factories (not born) and female androids cannot get pregnant
2. Androids can have memories implanted in their brains (humans cannot)
3. The lifespan of an android is about four years
4. Androids seem to lack an instinctive empathy-reflex that human beings exhibit

In the book, Deckard uses a “Voigt-Kampff” test to measure the empathy-reflex of a subject. To what extent this test measures something meaningful about the “inner-world” of the android and whether androids truly are deficient in their capacity for empathy is an ambiguity that I don’t think gets fully resolved.

Around the middle of the book, Deckard is sitting across from an acclaimed Opera singer named Luba Luft in her dressing room and preparing to administer a “Voigt-Kampff” test to determine if she is an android. Luft carefully evades the questions Deckard needs to administer the test, she suggests that Deckard might be an android himself and suddenly pulls a laser-gun on him:

"You're not from the police department; you're a sexual deviant."
"You can look at my identification." He reached toward his coat pocket. His hand, he saw, had again begun to shake, as it had with Polokov.
"If you reach in there," Luba Luft said, "I'll kill you."

 After more dialog:

Still holding the laser tube in his direction she crossed the room, picked up the vidphone, dialed the operator. "Connect me with the San Francisco Police Department," she said. "I need a policeman."
"What you're doing," Rick said, with relief, "is the best idea possible." Yet it seemed strange to him that Luba had decided to do this; why didn't she simply kill him? Once the patrolman arrived her chance would disappear and it all would go his way. She must think she's human, he decided. Obviously she doesn't know.

Soon a uniformed police officer named Officer Crams shows up at the dressing room and starts interrogating Luba Luft and Deckard. The officer is amazed to see Deckard’s police badge, but when they try to exchange names of bounty hunters and officers that they work with, they are surprised to find out that neither recognizes any of the names cited by the other. Deckard is cuffed and put into Crams police car to be taken to the “Hall of Justice,” but Deckard notices that they are traveling in the wrong direction:

"The Hall of justice," Rick said, "is north, on Lombard."
"That's the old Hall of Justice," Officer Crams said. "The new one is on Mission. That old building, it's disintegrating; it's a ruin. Nobody's used that for years. Has it been that long since you last got booked?"

 After more tense dialog:

Rick said, "Admit to me that you're an android."
"Why? I'm not an android. What do you do, roam around killing people and telling yourself they're androids? I can see why Miss Luft was scared. It's a good thing for her that she called us."
"Then take me to the Hall of Justice, on Lombard."
"Like I—"
"It'll take about three minutes," Rick said. "I want to see it. Every morning I check in for work, there; I want to see that it's been abandoned for years, as you say."
"Maybe you're an android," Officer Crams said. "With a false memory, like they give them. Had you thought of that?" He grinned frigidly as he continued to drive south.

To his astonishment and horror, Deckard is taken as a suspected criminal to a busy Hall of Justice that he has never seen, but not too dissimilar from the one he works at on the other side of town. The plot heightens when Deckard is interrogated by a police inspector named Garland who finds his own name on Deckard's list of androids to hunt. Garland to one of his bounty hunters:

"I don't think you understand the situation," Garland said. "This man—or android—Rick Deckard, comes to us from a phantom, hallucinatory, nonexistent police agency allegedly operating out of the old departmental headquarters on Lombard. He's never heard of us and we've never heard of him—yet ostensibly we're both working the same side of the street. He employs a test we've never heard of. The list he carries around isn't of androids; it's a list of human beings. He's already killed once—at least once. And if Miss Luft hand't gotten to a phone, he probably would have killed her and then eventually he would have come sniffing around after me."

The image of Deckard walking through the Hall of Justice thrown into the surreal and uncanny confrontation with an alternative, but parallel vision of reality has stuck with me for many years and feels particularly relevant in this political climate of "fake news" and alternative facts.