Evanston: nothing
Evanston: nothing
I am going to save you some time.
THE NEW YORK TIMES recently came out with their list of 100 notable books of the year and I just finished reading two of them.
BRING UP THE BODIES--which I think I may have called in an earlier post, Bring Up the Bones. Sigh--is the second novel in Hilary Mantel’s proposed trilogy set during the reign of Henry VIII. It, as did its predecessor, WOLF HALL, won the annual Booker Prize for the best work of fiction written in the British Commonwealth and Ireland.
The main character in the novels is not the reprehensible Henry, but Thomas Cromwell, who rose from lowly beginnings as a blacksmith’s son to become Henry’s chief minister and, for a while, the second most powerful man in the kingdom.
Thomas Cromwell is an historical figure, an ancestor of Oliver. Thomas, as depicted by Hilary Mantel, is an intelligent, complicated man. From other reading, I know he came to a bad end; but in BRING UP THE BODIES, which was the phrase used to call for prisoners to be transported from The Tower to be tried, which deals with the fall from grace and life of Anne Boleyn, Thomas is at the height of his influence.
Hilary Mantel has an original style and perspective. I don’t read enough contemporary fiction to have any idea if her books were the best in their years; but if you enjoy historical fiction, they are very good. Start with WOLF HALL if you’ve read neither.
Some of you will recall that long ago and not actually that far away, I was a philosophy major. I concluded then that we could not answer the fundamental questions either because our brains are not constructed in such a manner that we can do so or because we have not yet gathered sufficient information. The age of science is only a few hundred years old. Come back in a thousand years. Or five thousand.
A half century later, according to Jim Holt’s WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?, subtitled: An Existential Detective Story, many of the world’s thinkers have caught up with me.
The actual question behind the title that Mr. Holt tried to answer by interviewing various authorities, mostly in England, France and the United States, is: Why is there something rather than nothing? In the end, I think he comes up with nothing, unless you are willing to make a leap of faith. Every book of philosophy says, explicitly or implicitly, at the beginning: assume this, and then I’ll prove that. But if you don’t make the assumption, nothing follows.
To his credit, Jim Holt ends the book with Ambrose Bierce’s definition of philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
You may recall that I’ve reduced philosophy to four words: Good questions; bad answers.
I worked my way through WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST--and despite Jim Holt’e engaging literary style, it was work--so you don’t have to.
You’re welcome.
Friday, November 30, 2012